In The Soul of the Stranger: Reading God and Torah from a Transgender Perspective, Joy Ladin opens a profound and deeply intimate conversation between her life as a transgender woman and the sacred texts of the Jewish tradition. The result is not only a book of theology or literary criticism, but a spiritual memoir braided through scripture, a tapestry woven from alienation, yearning, and the radical empathy of seeing God as a fellow stranger.
Published in 2018 by Brandeis University Press, The Soul of the Stranger is the first book-length scholarly work that dares to ask how transgender experience might expand, not threaten, the understanding of God and sacred text. Ladin's approach is both radical and traditional: radical in its refusal to separate identity from interpretation, and traditional in its reverent commitment to close reading, commentary, and dialogue with the Torah.
Ladin, a poet and professor, is no stranger to margins. As the first openly transgender professor at Yeshiva University, an Orthodox Jewish institution, her career is marked by both resistance and trailblazing. She was placed on paid leave following her transition and only reinstated with the help of Lambda Legal. In her 2012 memoir, Through the Door of Life: A Jewish Journey Between Genders, she chronicles the rupture and renewal of living in truth. Yet The Soul of the Stranger is not merely a continuation of her personal story. It is a work of theological imagination that dares to read God as a trans figure, not by projecting transness onto the divine, but by noticing how profoundly uncontainable and category-defying God already is in the Torah.
“I began writing this book because I realized I was always talking to God as a stranger,” Ladin said in a 2014 interview on The Heroines blog. “Not a stranger to God, perhaps, but a stranger to the world, to the people I loved, and to myself.”
This estrangement becomes her key hermeneutic. In the Torah, strangers are not just incidental characters, they are central figures in God’s commandments. God repeatedly demands care for the stranger because “you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” For Ladin, this refrain is not historical; it is visceral. The experience of being unintelligible to others, of walking through a world that insists on categories you cannot fit, becomes a theological bridge. God, too, is not easily defined. God defies gender, avoids the human gaze, and remains elusive even to prophets. “God is the original stranger,” Ladin writes.
What makes The Soul of the Stranger so compelling is its method: it reads Torah stories we thought we knew, Abraham’s silence on the road to sacrifice Isaac, Jacob’s wrestling with the angel, God’s concealment from Moses, with eyes sharpened by trans experience. Not because Ladin claims these texts are secretly about being trans, but because her life, like all lives, brings a lens that illumines new meaning. She does not ask the Torah to validate her identity. She shows how the Torah already speaks to lives that don’t fit.
Consider Jacob, whose identity is shaped through deception, performance, and blessing, an individual who becomes Israel by wrestling with God. Or Abraham, who is called to leave everything familiar behind, journeying into unknown territory at God’s command. These stories, Ladin argues, are not just ancient myths or moral lessons. They are intimate encounters with uncertainty, estrangement, and divine relationship. “To be trans is to wrestle with visibility, with naming, with truth and terror,” Ladin reflects, and so was Jacob’s path.
In the Heroines interview, Ladin speaks of God as “a being who doesn’t belong in the human world and isn’t bound by the human categories people use to make sense of themselves and one another.” It’s a theological insight born not from abstraction but from decades of inhabiting a gender that others refused to see. Her readings are not designed to convert skeptics but to open windows, for readers to look again at stories they may have skimmed, and to consider whose perspectives have never been part of the commentary.
What makes her work especially daring is the way it blends personal narrative and scriptural analysis. She acknowledges that traditional scholarship might frown on bringing autobiography into exegesis. Yet she insists that her lived reality, her fears, her family’s rejection, her students’ curiosity and cruelty, her longing for divine recognition, is not a distraction from interpretation, but its most honest source. “We read through our lives,” she writes, “and God speaks through the voices we cannot separate from our own.”
Ladin’s transgender readings of the Torah do not flatten complexity into allegory. They do not sanitize. She wrestles openly with texts that are violent, gendered, exclusionary. She does not shy away from the pain of seeing herself reflected in Hagar’s exile or in God’s thunderous silence. But in doing so, she offers more than critique, she offers repair. Her exegesis is a gesture of inclusion, not erasure. She is not rewriting the Torah. She is reading it back to itself, through the lens of one of its most central themes: the dignity and divinity of the stranger.
To call The Soul of the Stranger revolutionary might seem grandiose, until you sit with it. Until you realize how rarely transgender people are invited to be theological thinkers, not just subjects of theological debate. Until you realize how powerful it is to hear a voice that has been both inside and outside of religious tradition, speak with both pain and devotion.
Ladin’s work does not demand agreement. It invites presence. It asks: what if God is waiting to be recognized in the places we refuse to look?
In a world increasingly fractured by identity and ideology, The Soul of the Stranger dares to ask if the most sacred texts might be made whole not by erasing difference, but by embracing it. Ladin’s reading of Torah is not a sidebar to Jewish thought, it is a vital, generous, and faithful contribution. It is an argument for why theology needs transgender voices, not to make religion trendy or palatable, but because without them, we are only telling half the story.
After all, as Ladin reminds us, the Torah itself was given to a people on the move, in the wilderness, led by a God who could not be seen.
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Photo via Heroines of My Life
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