The Genesis of Gender Transgression

Inasmuch as Creation, the work of developing ever more refined distinctions, is necessarily a matter of drawing boundaries, sculpting the mess of the pre-formed world, the chaos, the "tohu va-vohu," the primal, planetary mud into units of meaning, Adam and Eve acquire self-definition by losing their unity with God, planet, and one another. The unstated explanation for our need to create identity categories is about our mortality, and that is: Our first stories reveal a quiet desperation to defy the law of entropy that would pull people back to our earthly beginning (and end), the place-the earth from which we came and to which we return-where all cultural distinctions had been, and will again be, effaced. © 2011 Herbert D. Katz Center for Advanced Judaic Studies.