אַנדרוֹגִינִי
At the end of 2020 I was finally getting the last shots I needed to finish my photobook “Happiness is a Service to G-d: A Black Homeless Bum’s Photographs of an Orthodox Jewish Community”,when the city offered me a apartment to live in. I didn’t want it, I liked living on the streets, it’s where I drew all my creativity from. When I needed to edit my photographs, videos or writing, I could just go to Starbucks or Coffee Bean, and work while charging up all my electronic gadgets. I had been on a housing list for years, but every time I was offered a apartment I always declined. Give it to someone else who needed it, I said. However when the COVID-19 pandemic began, California ordered a complete lockdown of businesses. What that meant to me was that all the coffee houses and restaurants where I worked out of no longer allowed people inside. Now when I wanted to work on something, or just get out of the heat or rain, I had to rent a hotel for a couple of days. It was expensive but I managed. Towards the end of the year my worker told me if I didn’t take an apartment in the next few months I was going to be off the list permanently. I didn’t really care, it was believed at the time that the lockdown would soon be lifted, and I would be able to use the coffee houses again. But towards the end of the year California announced the lockdown was going to last throughout the winter. Which meant I was gonna be locked OUT all winter. I decided to take city’s offer for a apartment. The place they got me was in Hollywood just north of Fairfax district. I kept my shopping cart because I needed it to walk, and in the beginning I walked almost everyday to the Fairfax, doing errands, seeing friends etc.
North East of the Fairfax district was south Hollywood. On Santa Monica Blvd just east of West Hollywood resided the largest homeless black trans community in the city. Sean Baker made a movie called “Tangerine” in the area about a day in the life of two trans sex workers. After I saw it whenever I was walking through the area I said to myself “Im in Tangerine Land”.
As I was going back and forth from the Fairfax District, I was going through “Tangerine Land” everyday. Naturally as I passed through I started taking photographs of them. At first most of these street divas were all too stuck up and brushed me off when I was walking through with my shopping cart, asking if I could photograph them. But some of them were cool and let me shoot them. After I took a few of their photographs, I printed them out and showed it them. When they saw what I was doing they were more willing to let me photograph them….for $5.
Although most of the people I associate with are homeless, I have a wide spectrum of friends. I could be talking to a crack smoking parol jumper in his tent one moment, and the next hour chatting over coffee with a millionaire entrepreneur. As such the juxtaposition of taking photos of these Orthodox Jews and then just a few blocks away taking photos of trans black homeless sex workers didn’t occur to me at the time.
However I began to sense something off when I was encountering my orthodox Jewish friends, but in the beginning I couldn’t place what it was about. Eventually it got communicated to me that Orthodox Jews were talking about how they trusted me to take photos of them and their children and now I was posting photos of them on Instagram alongside photos of these transsexual prostitutes. Not that I was ashamed of the latter, but I did understand their reaction, and certainly didn’t want them to feel disrespected.
This is when I began see the jarringness of the two communities being so close together. One community wasn’t just Jewish, they were ORTHODOX Jewish. Couple of blocks north was not just a gay community, but a community of TRANsexuals. The orthodox lived in the strong structured tight knit Fairfax/Hancock Park area, one of the wealthiest neighborhoods in the city. The other community lived in the chaos of a constantly shifting transient life style driven by sexuality, sex, drugs and homelessness.
Both didn’t just belong to marginalized cultures, they were even marginalized within those marginalized cultures. The Orthodox Jewish community were ridiculed most by the overall world Jewish population.
And as for the black homeless trans….well. They were pariahs among the black community for their sexuality. They were a persecuted problem by the city for being homeless. And despite the great clarion call for inclusion, as trans woman they were even marginalized within the LGBT culture in the most passive aggressive, but unmistakable ways.
So how do I reconcile the two? I talked to Yisrael (who I have dedicated this book to) about it. He said to me.
“In Judaism there is no mistakes. There are no coincidences. In modern secular ‘spiritual’ teachings they talk about ‘the universe has a plan for all of us. We need to have faith.’ But if they don’t see the results of this ‘universe’s plan’ within a few days they begin to doubt. Something you also observed in your book.
‘In Judaism we have a 6,000 years of tradition that we study, but unlike what people like to believe of us we don’t live in the past. Our traditions are now. Our studies of these thousands of years in the past, gives us faith in the thousands of years ahead of us. It’s not that the universe has a plan for us, it’s that god has a a plan for the universe. We don’t need to see the results of these plans in the next couple of hours in order to have faith. Our faith comes from knowing our history that includes housands of years of miracles.
“The Mishnah is a commentary on the Torah. It was originally a oral commentary passed down through generations. Various different rabbis contributed to it. One passage was from a rabbi who had traveled through Turkey and encountered a community of people that were called Androgynous. He said they weren’t men, but they weren’t women. They weren’t women but they weren’t men. Considering this how do you classify them? Because in the torah there are very strict laws in terms of sexual relations between men and women. But how do these laws apply to this group of people? He never really answered it, he just asked the question.
“There are many people who complain about this brief passage. They say why are is he talking about these people at all? When commenting on the Torah, why even mention these type of people? Why acknowledge their existence?
“But the men who create the Mishnah were guided by Hashem. Many of them were guided to travel to distant countries like Babylon, Egypt and Rome, to vastly different people and cultures, in order to acquire the experiences and wisdom to speak the Mishnah into existence. Hashem called on this one rabbi and guided him through Turkey to this group of people were “weren’t men, but weren’t women. Weren’t women but weren’t men”, so he would include his observation of them into the Mishnah. For what reason? We don’t know. Only God knows. It may be for a reason not known to us for thousands of years. But it is without question that it was Hashem’s will, he listened to god’s call and allowed God to guide him.
“I believe your book is an important work. Hashem called you, you trusted that call and allowed him to guide you here, the largest orthodox Jewish community in the country. It’s no coincidence that you are a African American homeless man pushing a shopping cart, not just with your skills as a writer and a photographer, but your natural wisdom and ability to create relationships with people that culminated in your book.
“And every single person who you photographed was also called by god, and said yes. Others were by god called to be photographed by you and they said ‘no’. They refuse to trust Hashem’s guidance, and instead relied on their own understanding. An understanding that saw only a black homeless man pushing a shopping cart who wanted to take photos of them. They didn’t hear the call. While other trusted God’s wisdom immediately . The best example was the Rebbe Frank Mota, who even broke the sabbath for you, after only seconds of meeting you! He is a man of such high level of righteousness and trust, he hears Hashem’s call continuously.
“You trusted God to guide you here and when you completed your purpose here, Hashem guided you to Hollywood and to that… very different…community. To do his will there. A community completely opposite from our Orthodox community, yet right next to this one. For what reason? A reason that we may not know in this life time. Or even a hundred lifetimes from now.
“I understand your struggle with reconciling the contradictions, and your concerns in wanting not to disrespect the orthodox community is admirable. But never doubt God’s calling, and always trust your intuition that Hashem is leading you where he needs you to go.”
סלאח
