A note of caution, this week's broadcast of the Tikva podcast contains themes that are not suitable

for children.

Let's begin with the book of Genesis, where we read, and the Lord God cast a deep slumber

on the human, and he slept, and he took one of his

ribs and closed over the flesh where it had been, and the Lord God built the rib he had taken from the

human into a woman, and he brought her to the human, and the human said, this one at last,

bone of my bones and flesh of my flesh, this one shall be called woman, for from man was this

one taken. Therefore, does a man leave his father and his mother and cling to his wife, and they

become one flesh. That is from the second chapter of Genesis, and it is a Jewish description of the

origins of human sexuality that has revolutionized the world. The primordial human,

not yet Adam, is either not sexual or is androgynous, having within him both male and female.

It's the separation of woman from the primordial man that kindles the first sparks of sexual

longing. You can really only understand our sexual nature as it emerges

in relationship. And this portrayal of the newly formed woman from the newly differentiated man

is a picture of the human condition in which all sexually alive beings feel something of loneliness,

of being incomplete, of lacking, being somehow less than

whole. And that lack leads to longing for what in English we call our better half, and we

experience this kind of desire as a yearning for completion, for a restoration of wholeness.

That feeling is basic to sexual desire, as Genesis describes it, and it is the starting

point for the Jewish tradition's dealings with matters male and female. Welcome to the

Tikva podcast and great Jewish essays and ideas. I'm your host, Jonathan Silver. On today's

podcast, we explore the fraught questions posed to the Jewish sexual ethic by the transgender movement.

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