Parashat Tolədot: הַלְעִיטֵֽנִי | hal’itéini

Ihr Herrn, die ihr uns lehrt, wie man brav leben
und Sünd und Missetat vermeiden kann.
Zuerst müßt ihr uns was zu fressen geben,
dann könnt ihr reden: Damit fängt esan.
erst kommt das Fressen, dann kommt die Moral.

You gents who want to lead where we should follow
and teach us to stay out of crime and sin:
Our stomachs, like your platitudes, are hollow.
Give us some grub first, then you can begin.
first comes the feeding — then the moral code.

— Bertolt Brecht and Kurt Weill (trans Michael Feingold), “Second Threepenny Finale” from The Threepenny Opera

I wrote my first ever dəvar Torah on parashat Tolədot. I talked about hunger, and privation, and the necessity of addressing people’s basic physical needs before preaching ethics at them. It was a defense of Eisav in the scene where he sells his birthright for stew, and I quoted the second Threepenny finale in it — I may have even sung it.

I’m going to be looking at that scene again here, zooming in on one word of his request. “הַלְעִיטֵֽנִי נָא מִן־הָאָדֹם הָאָדֹם הַזֶּה | Hal’itéini na min ha’adom ha’adom hazeh”, he says. “Feed me, c’mon, from that red red” (Bəreishit 25:30).

Hal’itéini is the word he uses for “feed me”, but it’s not the standard Biblical Hebrew word for that. Normally, the words for feeding and eating in the Bible are derived from the root אכל | ’KhL; the standard way of saying “feed me” would be הַאֲכִילֵֽנִי | ha’akhiléini. So why hal’itéini here instead?

The root לעט | L‘T shows up nowhere else in the Bible; this is a one-off. By the time we get to the Hebrew of the Mishnah, however, L‘T is being used to refer to feeding animals, as opposed to feeding humans. It’s worth being cautious here — Mishnaic Hebrew is considerably later than Biblical Hebrew, and the meanings of words can change considerably over time — but Rashi, writing in the 1000s, takes this verb in just this sense when commenting on this verse, and the Rambam, writing in the 1200s, links it to Mishlei 23:21, which remarks on the fate of drunkards and gluttons. So the traditional answer is that Eisav says hal’itéini instead of ha’akhiléini because he wants to eat wantonly, sloppily; he wants to stuff his face like an animal at a feed trough instead of like a refined man of culture and civilization.

So here we are, back in the territory of analytical character assassination. Unlike with Lot’s wife, the Torah itself gets in on the act, commenting in 25:34 that וַיִּֽבֶז עֵשָׂו אֶת־הַבְּכֹרָה | vayívez Eisav et habəkhorah | “Eisav despised his birthright” because he placed the vulgarity of feeding above the civilizational achievement of inheritance.

Vulgarity is an interesting offense. It’s not dishonesty, bigotry, or cruelty, altho in some cases it may be concatenated with any of those and more. In and of itself, it doesn't hurt anyone; it doesn’t inflict bodily harm or deprivation of rights or property; it doesn’t shore up the tyranny of the powerful over the powerless. It’s a trespass against decorum, politesse, against the staid veneer of the socially acceptable [a].

[a] Or, etymologically, the trespass of the many against the few. “Vulgar” comes from the Latin vulgaris, which is an adjective referring to anything that comes from the multitude, the masses, the common people. To be vulgar in the most literal sense is to behave like a peasant instead of an aristocrat, with all the baggage that entails.

I have seen Jews at the bagel buffet at the end of Yom Kipur, and it is seldom a dignified scene. After twenty five hours of fasting, praying, and intense spiritual introspection, even the most placidly finessed are often rendered little more than bodies sating their needs, minds emptying of any thought beyond the joy of satiety, the satisfaction of taste and nourishment. We get cream cheese indiscriminately on our lips and noses and fingertips, and so what? It washes off easily enough.

And indeed, so what if Eisav wants to guzzle down stew like an animal? I know little of hunting, but can readily imagine a teenager [b] miscalculating how long he can stay on a hunt based on his current food and water supplies (especially if he assumed the hunt would be successful). It may well have been days since he’d last eaten, and days not of sitting in a climate-controlled shul but of walking over an unpaved landscape full of ridges and gulches across his path. “הִנֵּה אָנֹכִי הוֹלֵךְ לָמוּת | Hineih anokhi holeikh lamut”, he says, “Look, I’m about to die” (25:32). Is there any reason to doubt him? His great crime is tearing away the illusion that we are anything but animals too, and so what? You are also meat; you must also guzzle and slorp and snarf down nutrients to keep, for a while, from dying and rotting. It’s not morally superior to only do so with starched linens and salad forks [c].

[b] The Torah is vague about the boys’ ages when the scene with the stew takes place. Rashi imagines that Ya’aqov here is making the stew as a meal to mourn the death of Avraham, which would make the twins 15, since Avraham is 100 when Yitzḥaq is born, Yitzḥaq is 60 when the twins are born, and Avraham dies at 175. One could make other arguments, but this seems good enough to go on for present purposes.
[c] Should we mention here that when Eisav actually eats the stew, the verb is the expected וַיֹּֽאכַל | vayókhal and not the וַיִּֽלְעַט | vayíl’at that hal’itéini would imply?

Hal’itéini, he says. Many translations render this as something like “give me [some of that] to eat”, but there really is only one verb here in Hebrew. It’s cast in the hif’il form, which generally has a causitive sense: If the basic form לָעַט | la’at means “he snarfed”, then the hif’il/causitive form הִלְעִיט | hil’it means “he made [someone/something] snarf”. It’s the difference between eating and feeding, essentially.

Hal’itéini is also an imperative, and it’s an imperative with the direct object, “me” baked in [d]. So it’s literally a command: Make me snarf.

[d] That’s what the -ni at the end of hal’itéini is doing. In Biblical Hebrew, there are endings like this for every personal pronoun — you can express “do X to [me/you/him/her/it/us/y’all/them]” by sticking an ending on the pertinent verb. It’s a wonderful compactness that’s difficult to render transparently in English.

As mentioned above, this verb shows up in the Mishnah a few times. The most salient passage for our purposes is discussed in the Babylonian Talmud in Shabbat 155b. The Mishnah says that one may not force-feed or over-feed an animal on Shabbat, but you may simply feed it, with that last verb coming from the same לעט | L‘T stem as Eisav’s request. The Gəmara asks about this last kind of feeding. What is הַלְעָטָה | hal’atah? Rav Ḥisda suggests that hal’atah means feeding an animal not with a vessel, but by hand.

Reading this definition back into Bəreishit — and as ever, I think it can be illuminating to do this even while acknowledging the anachronism on an intellectual level — makes Eisav’s request a strikingly intimate one. Don’t just slop some stew in a bowl with a spoon for me, brother; use your hands and set it in my mouth for me to chew and swallow, because I am too famished to have the strength to do so myself.

We all depend on others to survive, of course, but this level of dependency, needing someone else’s help to get food from the stovetop to your mouth, can often feel demeaning. It can feel like a failure to live up to society’s expectations of what a person should be and should be able to do, and those charged with providing this care sometimes reflect and enact that stigma. It is not hard to find stories of caretakers — even professional, supposedly highly trained caretakers — treating the disabled people in their charge with indifference, disdain, and contempt. In the worst cases, these relationships can be the sites of horrific abuse, abetted by a lack of effective oversight and a general indifference to disabled lives. All the worst things that people do to one another can and do happen here, and there are seldom meaningful consequences for the guilty party.

And yet the worst-case scenario is not the only possibility. It’s not even the only one that ever actually happens. Relationships of need and care can be tender, loving, profound. There is an intimacy to revealing that you need help, to opening up and displaying your incapacity, your need. To ask for help is to be vulnerable in the most literal sense — able to be wounded — but also in its more positive contemporary valences of sincerity, trust, and closeness. And on the flip side, to offer aid can be a deep gift. “You don’t have to go thru the world alone; let me help carry some of the weight of living with you.” Is sharing this weight not the whole point of society, in its noblest sense? Do we not live in close relation with others because together, supporting one another and building interwoven lives, we are able to live better than as atoms bouncing off one another in hermetic isolation?

Eisav, starving, comes home and asks his brother for help. He asks for the help a body can provide another body, help with attaining the basic needs of life. And his brother says no. Sell me something first. I’m not helping you unless you get something out of it.

I quoted the first verse of the second Threepenny finale at the outset of this dəvar. The chorus feels like it could have been written about Ya’aqov here. A voice offstage cries “Denn wovon lebt der Mensch? | How do all humans live?”, and the characters answer: Indem er stündlich/den Menschen peinigt, auszieht, anfällt, abwürgt, und frißt./Nur dadurch lebt der Mensch, daß er so gründlich/ vergessen kann, daß er ein Mensch doch ist. | By being rotten/by beating, cheating, stealing, smashing friends in the face./Then they can live because they have forgotten/ that they belong to any human race.

It is easy to forget this. Many of us, indeed, have forgotten it, or live as if we have. I hope, for all our sakes, that we remember. The world is full of vulgar needs; let us not be ashamed in asking for ours, nor shame others who ask for theirs. We’re all worm food in the end.

The Tonys Nominate: Transmisogyny

As a trans theatre-maker and critic, many people have asked me my thoughts on Tootsie, and most of them are surprised when I say I think it’s unsalvageably transphobic. After all, the show doesn’t have any trans characters, nor does it contain any explicit messages of hate directed at trans people. But just as a celebration of German culture can still be antisemitic even if it never mentions Jews and a boss who calls his secretary “sweetie” can still be sexist even if he never explicitly tells women to die, the core conceit of Tootsie’s plot strengthens tropes that harm trans women in pervasive, implicit ways.

Even a one-sentence description of the show raises red flags. Tootsie is a musical comedy (adapted from the 1982 movie of the same name) about a hard-pressed male actor who disguises himself as a woman in order to get a job. Any time male-to-female cross-dressing like this is played for laughs in contemporary US culture, the man-in-a-dress joke is inevitably in the air. The core premise of the man-in-a-dress joke is that it’s ridiculous and unnatural for a man to wear a dress. Because mainstream society, by and large, thinks of trans women as “men in dresses” instead of women, the man-in-a-dress joke perpetuates the idea that trans women are “unnatural” and fit for ridicule and scorn. For a recent example of how this man-in-a-dress joke framing hurts actual trans people out here in the world, see this recent post from trans actor Maybe Burke, who was explicitly misgendered as a man in a dress in one review of a play they are currently in.

This would be bad enough, but pushing further into the plot reveals more problems. Once Michael, the main character, lands a job as a woman, he’s wildly successful, to the point of getting a Broadway team to rewrite their entire show to revolve around him. Even before we get to the transmisogyny here, this is already a slap in the face to cis women acting in musical theatre. (Cis is an adjective that means not trans.) Cis women have to compete for fewer available roles than their cis male counterparts — in the 2017–18 Broadway season, only 37% of the leading roles were for women — and, once cast, they face ongoing sexism in the rehearsal room. And this is exactly where the transmisogyny comes in.

One talking point among those intent on driving trans people out of public life is that treating trans women as women instead of men will be unfair to cis women. This argument is usually a muddled mixture of two claims: 1) That trans women will be “naturally superior” to the cis women in the same space and 2) That cis men will pretend to be women to score an easy win. You see this argument most clearly when it comes to gender-segregated sports leagues — an issue there isn’t space in this article to address — but Tootsie is a clear example of it in musical theatre. The show is a transphobic talking point come to life: A man pretends to be a woman to get a job that was meant for a woman, outclasses everyone around him and finds success that he never had when he was living as a man, and is richly rewarded for as long as he keeps up the act.

This does not happen in real life. In the real world, coming out as trans tends to torpedo an acting career, not boost it, and being a cis woman is a decided disadvantage compared to being a cis man. It’s hard to say which of these is more pertinent for Tootsie — Michael is either being read as a trans woman by the characters around him or he’s passing as a cis woman (and it could, admittedly, be different for different characters, just as passing in real life is highly contextual and can vary from person to person and day to day) — but insofar as Michael is read as a cis woman, the show denies the reality of misogyny, and insofar as he’s read as a trans woman, the show both denies the reality of transmisogyny and strengthens the literal transphobic talking point that trans women are a threat to cis women’s livelihoods.

Note that none of this analysis hinges on a close, line-by-line reading of the script. These issues are baked into the core of the show; they cannot be fixed with a line tweak here or a few re-writes there — addressing them requires completely reconceptualizing the show from the ground up. Note also that I’m not saying anything about the creative team’s personal beliefs. Yazbek, Horn, and everyone else involved in the show may have only the most positive and affirming thoughts when it comes to trans people, but the show they have created, intentionally or not, is a show that strengthens ideas that directly harm trans women.

I also want to emphasize that these complaints are not new. Trans people have been raising concerns with this show since it was announced, some of us publicly and some of us only privately, out of concerns that voicing public criticism could have repercussions for our careers down the line. So far, this has felt like screaming at an automated steamroller — utterly ineffectual. Even when the show pulled a line of breathtakingly transphobic merchandise, they offered no public explanation or apology, seemingly assuming that they can get away with quietly brushing trans complaints under the rug or ignoring us outright. With eleven Tony nominations to show for it, that assumption seems to be correct.

The mood in the trans theatre circles I’m a part of on Tuesday morning was bleak. People were bitter, exhausted, furious, and demoralized as we once again saw a show that harms us and our communities being blithely celebrated by an industry that likes to paint itself as a safe, inclusive, and progressive scene. Each one of Tootsie’s nominations is an embarrassment to the entire field of musical theatre; each award that it wins will be a damning indictment of this industry’s ignorance of trans existence. Broadway must do better. The time is long overdue.

New Recording!

Hey all! As my first year in grad school winds to a close, I’m super pumped to share a recording from one of the big projects I’ll be working on in my second year. Defiant, Majestic, and Beautiful is a theatrical song cycle about people who face transmisogyny, ranging from advice on dissociation to an ode to salt. I performed the finale — a prophetic vision of a possible future — at a cabaret last week, and there’s a video recording of it! Watch it below, or click on over to YouTube for performer information and the complete lyrics.