CrossCurrents: God, The God of Unmet Desire: Volume 72, Number 1, March 2022

By Zisl

Equal parts pandemic testimony and "autotheology," God, The God of Unmet Desire is a record of the author's quest to find God during the lonely peak of the first COVID-19 pandemic winter. At the heart of this special issue of CrossCurrents, lies a set of meditations on the daily, traditional Jewish weekday morning liturgy. They fiercely and feelingly explore that pandemic winter's themes of grief, sensuality, and surrender, and our dire need for old and new wisdoms to help us move into collective responsibility for our broken world. To do so, the work weaves together sources as various as the Babylonian Talmud, 20th century feminist science fiction, and 21st century African diasporic poetry. The writings range in length and style from a few lines of prose to a half-dozen lines of poetry to a full-length essay.

This work is explicitly feminist, leftist, and non-Zionist. It playfully but sincerely demonstrates Jewish liturgical traditions' possibilities and limitations as resources for personal and political liberation and accountability. God, The God of Unmet Desire also explores the author's own gender and sexuality. It takes a tone that oscillates from sincerely pious to playfully kinky.

The work is designed to be accessible to a wider audience while drawing from deep, Jewish roots. Religious-curious and religious-affiliated progressive-minded people of all backgrounds will be drawn to Zisl's creative and critical writing. God, The God of Unmet Desire will appeal to anyone who wishes to integrate liberatory models of collective social change with traditional insights about God and spiritual belonging—mediated by the wisdom of an imperfectly human sacred liturgy developed over the last two millennia.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Association Public Religion and Intellectual Life
• Release date: Aug 1, 2022
• ISBN: 9781469672892

Zisl

"Zisl" is the nom-de-plume of a writer, educator and organizer living in a major American city. They are an active leader in feminist, anti-racist, pro-Jewish work, and a somewhat traditionally observant and just-a-little-bit learned Jew. Zisl likes diaspora.

Book preview

God, The God of Unmet Desire

By Zisl

Ikh Bin De Sitra Akhra by Shterna Goldbloom. Used courtesy of the artist.

Open wide your mouth,

& I will

fill it.

. . . With honey from the rock,

I will sate you.

(Psalm 81—Song of the Day, Thursday)

crosscurrents

VOLUME 72 : NUMBER 1 : MARCH 2022

Foreword, S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate

God, The God of Unmet Desire, Zisl

Preface

Introduction

Glossary

Part I: Winter

Part II: Davening

Part III: Being Jewish, Jewish Being

Acknowledgements

References

Notes

© 2022 Association for Public Religion and Intellectual Life.

All rights reserved.

For more information about APRIL and CrossCurrents, visit

https://www.aprilonline.org/

ISBN 978-1-4696-7222-9 (paperback)

ISBN 978-1-4696-7289-2 (ebook)

God, The God of Unmet Desire is a special issue of the quarterly journal CrossCurrents. This book represents volume 72, number 1 of the journal, cover dated March 2022.

FOREWORD TO ZISL’S

GOD, THE GOD OF UNMET DESIRE

Toward the end of these pages, Zisl discloses the functions of tefillah, saying such prayer teaches us to mourn our brokenness and beg for the divine. Provocatively, Zisl compares prayer to eroticism, as both are practices of yearning and desiring, spurred by awareness of our own incompleteness. These are not activities that stay within designated times and places. Rather, their practice infiltrates all our lives and opens the way for creative possibilities.

I might add to this a third parallel, already implicit throughout Zisl’s text, and that is the work of writing. Writing remembers what was, and reveals what might be. Writing gives accounts that bring forth justice. Writing strives for redemption. It weeps and it laughs. Its imperfections abound, and yet within the words we catch fleeting encounters with others that intimate wholeness, holiness.

Zisl’s text that follows here is tefillah, and we the readers participate (erotically and prayerfully) in mourning and begging, the work of repair and rediscovery, as we assemble our own pasts and futures. It is a creative work of nonfiction, emerging at the interstices of queer theology, Talmudic learning, social justice, and personal memoir. It brings the past to bear on the future, and the future on the past.

When Zisl first approached me with their essay, I realized this would be ideal for our journal CrossCurrents, since it checks so many of the boxes that define our publishing output: creative work, engaged with issues of social justice, and rooted in religious tradition.

The only problem was that the text was too lengthy to be just another article in our pages, while breaking it up felt like missing the integrity of the whole work. So, we created a special, special issue, something we’ve never done here at CrossCurrents. We’re devoting this entire issue to a single work of a single author. The fact that we can print each journal issue as a stand-alone book made this an opportunity we wanted to take advantage of and we were thrilled when Zisl agreed to work with us on the venture.

God, The God of Unmet Desire reflects the deep learning and yearning of its author, interpreting ancient Hebrew liturgy through Black diasporic poetry or feminist science fiction to wrestle with individual and social quests for racial, economic, and gender liberation. Thus, it translates ancient meanings via modern social life. Even so, it remains resolutely traditional. There’s an apology in here, an argument for a God, and a relationship with that God who is expansive, who revels in words and wonders, who delights in sex and sensuality, who cares for the oppressed and desires liberation.

As I read and re-read Zisl’s text during the process of editing, I kept thinking about width, wideness. The text opens and closes with a passage from Psalm 81, Open wide your mouth . . . If you close your mouth, you’ll miss the honey. So, open wide.

I worked through the text, opening myself to something new, attempting to make clear the varieties of voices that emerge and ink-bleed through the white pages. In the process, I had to think about width in a very physical way. How wide are the margins? How much indentation to give a passage? Is a block of text centered? Flush right? Flush left? Do the quotes from others have the same indentation as the author’s own voice? How much width should there be in the text and in the margins?

Voices vary and, in print, width makes those distinctions clearer. I was reminded of pages of the Talmud in which the mishnah is placed at the center, gemara extending that below, and then Rashi and other commentaries circling and swirling around the center. What a feat of production it must be to produce such a work! So much of it comes down to width: to the ratio of text to other text, as well as the white space surrounding the text.

Margins in any book are key because that’s where the reader engages, jots notes, queries, or just checks a particularly striking passage. The text is what’s there. The white space is what is to come: the expectant, erotic engagement with the reader.

Combined, that is what tradition itself is. Tradition is not only the black characters of the text, the records of what has been, but the white space as well, what is to come. Tradition is another name for a collective series of additions and changes that occur over time. Changes in our attitudes and liturgies, our texts and our bodies, with ample room for supplements, checks and balances, moving sensually between writer and reader, past and future, self and other, somewhere in the here and now.

How wide is our mouth to be filled with honey? How wide are our margins? How far can we extend the text?

Here, Zisl opens our mouths a little further. Enjoy the honey.

S. Brent Rodríguez-Plate

Editor, CrossCurrents

PREFACE

This project began in the depths of the pandemic winter, when I reunited indoors with my parents for the first time in ten months. We had not been sure we would live to see that day, and when it came, it moved me to deep mourning and praise. I found an outlet for them in davening and writing.

The other catalyst was getting dumped. I had been dating someone I liked very much. We clicked well and felt easily compatible: queer, radical Jews who were looking for partnership. They were curious and excited that I was questioning my gender. Very quickly, the possibility of a future together started to coalesce between us, except for one stubborn obstacle: I was too frum, too religious. I talked too much about God. I wore tsitsis. I davened every day. I considered myself bound by obligation to God, Toyre, and our people. They gently interrogated me about these parts of my character, trying to understand them. In retrospect, they were straining to hear an answer they wanted