http://bit.ly/9oNZTH

“The Torah reminds us 36 times that we must welcome and be kind to the stranger because we were strangers in the land of Egypt,” he said. “We have a cultural memory, a cultural and religious understanding of what it means to be marginal.”

Moving toward acceptance of different manifestations of gender, he said, isn’t limited to transgender people. “One of the myths that we’re taught is that gender is a fixed thing, and I don’t think it works that way. … It’s much more complicated than that.”

He cites men who want to stay home with their children, or women who want to take the position of breadwinner in the family as examples of people who don’t fit into traditional gender roles — and of whom he believes the Jewish community could be more accepting and supportive.

“Judaism teaches me to look at every single person as made in the image of God, even if that person’s experience is new or unfamiliar to me,” he said. “That’s a large part of what should teach us to be more welcoming to transgender people and many other people as well.”

I can’t tell you how much I love this. I am still at odds with my local group of Jews – I have a fundamental disagreements with the fundamentals – but overall, of all the religions I’ve studied, Judaism is one of my favourites. This just underlines that for me. I mean, his gender shouldn’t matter anyway, but with all the hate-mongering in the world, especially the hate-mongering in the religious communities, this makes me happy to read.