For many years in the closet, I confused the erotic and noetic faces of daat.  I sexualized my desires for intimacy, imagining that the culmination of the friendships I lacked as a teenager would be related, in some way, to sexual consummation.  It wasn’t that I had wanted to have sex with my friends; it was that I wanted to know them so well that sex wouldn’t have added anything to our intimacy.  I wanted total knowledge, total closeness.  There’s a phrase used in the meditation world called “naked awareness.”  That’s what I wanted of my friends.

 Conversely, sex was, to me, primarily about self-revelation and coming-to-know the other.  Seeing my friends naked, in changing rooms or camp cabins, was erotic, but erotic knowledge.  Being seen, I would think: now that I am naked, he knows all about me.  Actual, physical sex was never desired and always desired.  I was so closeted that I couldn’t imagine actually touching my friends in a sexual way, and no one initiated that contact with me.  Yet I was filled with an erotically-tinged desire to have an intimate conversation, or to “hold” my friend in my arms.  I would comfort them, listen to them, cradle them.  I yearned for the closeness of an intimate talk, wanted only to put my arms around a boy and tell him, it’s all right, I understand, I’m here.

 Any intimacy that I was able to achieve with my friends was precious – in the sense of a treasure to be hoarded.  I opened up to very few people, because I viewed ‘opening up’ as something that should only be done sparingly, in order for it to count.  Common friendship was cheap, but mine was dear.  I was shy about my body, and shy about my heart, because I felt the power of both.  My adolescence was a time of great isolation precisely because of my desire for communion.

 My closest friends, if that’s the right word for the acquaintances whose company I kept, were at Jewish summer camp, with all its typical, absurd rituals; rigorous social cliques; and intense (and intensely repressed) homoerotic content.  I probably had my first crush on a boy at camp who’s now married with two kids, back when he was still a spindly, runty little kid who liked climbing on the bunk rafters.  I never understood these feelings as a crush – only as a desire to get to know him better, to be friends with him, to be the person he told his secrets.  He was not the coolest kid in the bunk, but I idolized him and pined for him.  Any time I wasn’t with him, I wondered what he was doing, and assumed that where he was – that was where fun was happening.  Not only fun: reality.  My time was only well-spent when I was with him.  I wanted to sit next to him at meals, to play sports with him at free time.  And I wanted to see him naked – but only to see him naked, not to touch him.  I wanted the information, the knowledge, the state of direct intimacy with him that comes from knowing “everything.” 

 Obvious, the desire to see another boy naked is homoerotic.  But I never saw it that way.  I saw it as wanting to be his best friend.  Best friends knew everything about each other – their likes and dislikes, their secrets, and what they looked like naked.  It was as if under his shorts were the secrets that, if shared with me, meant love.

 It wasn’t just the one boy.  There were other crushes, and sexual innuendoes at every turn. Camp was the center of my teenage emotional life, full of intensity, community, and hormones.  I hated school, where I did well but had hardly any friends.  At home, despite my mother’s overbearing efforts to get me to socialize, I began more and more to resemble my father, who was emotionally distant, and who had no friends other than those he shared with (and, I came to understand, gained through) my mother.  I was a geeky kid who was too smart for my own good, yet ignorant of the real knowledge I needed to get by: how to dress, act, walk, and talk.  I couldn’t figure it out – how I could understand Nathaniel Hawthorne but not how to get invited to parties.  Summer was the only time out of the year when I felt I belonged.  I knew the rules, and knew other boys in a way other than from behind school desks and within the school-created boundaries of what can and cannot be expressed.  At camp, the barriers were lower, and fuller selves were present.

 Camp was also where my first real heartbreaks were – that same boy, the same rafter-climbing, oddly-shaped kid, I found out one year, had requested not to be in my bunk.  He hated me that much, even though he pretended friendship.  I never went back to camp after that.

 In my twenties, I thought that what I had lacked in my adolescence was a matter of  information: there had been no one to “show me the ropes” when I was a teenager.  I knew how to say the prayers in Hebrew and work the controls of the camp radio station, but no one told me what clothes, slang, music was cool.  I look at pictures of myself now and wonder how I could have been so oblivious.  I wore collared shirts, tucked into my shorts, when everyone else was wearing loose t-shirts.  I never knew the right thing to say, but also never knew that sometimes it’s best to say nothing.  I was a loud, often obnoxious kid – and because, a part of me still persists in believing, I just didn’t know any better.  It’s a miracle, I think, that I had any friends at all.

 No one helped me grow up in more serious ways either.  I learned wisdom from philosophy books, not older brothers.  No one taught me “the facts of life,” or how to masturbate, or what it was like to get a blow job.  Throughout my entire adolescence, I didn’t know what it was like to be sexually fulfilled, and assumed there was something wrong with my body.  (I some times wonder: had the Internet been in existence during my adolescence, maybe I wouldn’t have waited until my late twenties to come out.)   In short, no one took me by the hand and taught me how to become a man – physically, emotionally, sexually, psychologically.  My father was too awkward and distant – we never had a ‘man to man’ talk in any way that allowed for real intimacy.  And I didn’t have an older role model or friend to convey the precious knowledge that I so desperately lacked.  And all of this lack of information kept me from love, because I didn’t know how to act, said stupid things, was obnoxious and easy to despise.  By the time I found out all of this stuff on my own, I was too old to be a kid anymore.

 In my antiquated, pre-Internet age, I pieced together how people had sex, what the terms meant, what the techniques were, from the jokes and innuendos of my peers.  My lack of sexual desire made it worse – since I didn’t understand gay desire, I assumed that everybody had to do what I did: master a set of complicated, confused, and non-instinctual tricks in order to hook up with a girl.  It was, I thought for many years, the hardest code of all to crack, and yet, everybody but me had somehow had figured it out.  They were just smarter, I guess.  Or had been taught.  It wasn’t until years later that I realized that they were just following their instincts, like I was when I finally had sex myself, blindly, not expecting it to work, and everything went great.  Now I understand!  No one has any knowledge – they’re just following their dicks!

 I felt this: If only someone had sat me down, gotten me off, explained to me how it was supposed to work, everything would have been different.  I would have known how to behave, I would have been cool, I would have ‘gotten it,’ and people would have loved me.

 I decided that I would be this person.  I would become the guide that I had lacked as a camper.  Of course, I couldn’t be the sexual mentor, but I could still be ninety percent of the person who I needed when I was a kid – a guide to thinking, feeling, being ‘cool,’ surviving.  So, after a few years, I went back to the same summer camp, this time as a counselor and teacher.

 For a while, it was perfect.  By helping a new generation of kids avoid the pain that I had felt, I soothed the pain itself.  I helped the kids who seemed like the kid I had been, and what’s more, now that I knew the codes, know just the right way to win my way into the hearts of teenage boys, I was loved.  Finally – because now I had the knowledge, and they wanted it – I gained the level of intimacy with some of my campers that I had never fully achieved with my friends.

 This emotional fulfilment was enabled by total physical denial.  I fantasized about sex, but never about sex with campers.  Once in a while, I’d be physically attracted to one of the older boys, but never to the ones I knew on a personal level.  Though I appreciated the beauty of some of my students and campers, the beauty served only to make the non-physical intimacy all the more delicious: such a beautiful boy is friends with me.  To denigrate the ‘pure’ relationship by ‘polluting’ it with sexuality seemed a desecration, even apart from the total devastation such contact could wreak in my professional life.  Sometimes the image of a camper or student would creep into my fantasies, and I would recoil, as if from the image of a parent or sibling.

 Because I wanted to connect with the kids, I quickly gained a level of love and admiration from them that other counselors struggled to attain.  I treated the kids as people, not as “teenagers,” and it was genuine, not an act.  So of course I became a beloved teacher, and attracted some followers.  We created our own community at camp, a sort of miniature counterculture in the midst of Jewish suburbs-in-training.  Others grew suspicious, and there were occasions on which their suspicion was actualized or verbalized.  They joked that we were like a cult.  But we did nothing wrong, broke no rules, crossed no boundaries.  Suspect as they might, the armies of mediocre educators who wanted to treat their students only as distant and barely-human objects could not find anything to pin on me.

 Knowledge was always the currency of exchange.  I had a certain kind of knowledge – of Jewish arcana, of the best books to reads and bands to check out, of how misfits like my younger self could find their hidden communities through cultural signposts and gathering-spots – and I gave that knowledge to them.  They, in turn, had a level of understanding of adolescence that I never had, and they passed it back to me.  I doubt they even knew how much they were giving me.  Each dirty joke they would tell, or moment of intimacy they would allow, would be a glimpse into a secret and unknown world.

 As the Greeks realized, education is an erotic communication.  The relationship of teacher and student, which the Greeks sexualized and turned into the foundation for an entire culture, is one of power and transmission and submission, expression and reception.  The Greek teacher sowed the seeds of knowledge in the youth just as he inseminated the youth physically.  As I have said, I never consummated any physical relationship with any of my students.  But as time went by, I began to see the links that the Greeks had spoken of – and began to judge my actions harshly.  Particularly as the age gap between myself and my students grew, I began to question my motives for wanting to remain engaged with young people – and usually, though not always, boys.  Maybe this was about sex after all.   I thought: you’re only doing this because you want to fuck them.  From one extreme view (it’s anything but lust) I swung entirely to another one (it’s just lust).  I interrogated every sentence I said to every camper or student, wondering what my motives really were.  Come on, I said to myself, you’re only trying to be so cool because you want them.  All this talk of knowledge and mentorship and the life well lived is just a cover. 

 For a short time, my Judaism almost offered a satisfactory response.  Halacha, as I reassured myself, focuses on deeds much more than intents.  And so even if teaching was an act of sublimation, my sublimation was holy.  I was a damned good teacher, and not once did I teach anything I didn’t think was connected to real Torah.  Even if I did possess a core of physical lust, my acts in the world were irreproachable.  I was creating good, not evil.

 This defense held out only so long.  Eventually, the psychoanalytic part of me won out over the Jewish part.  I couldn’t shake the doubting of my motives, no matter how many times I checked and double-checked my actions.  Was I really teaching Jewish philosophy, or was I trying to impress the smart kids so that they would sleep with me?  And if it was the latter, was I not being utterly dishonest?  And who could say that I wouldn’t slip up some time in the future?  What if a student tried to initiate a relationship – would I be able to resist?  And how could I look parents in the eye knowing that the teaching they praised came from a desire they imagined only in their worst nightmares?

 So, as I finally came out -- it took years -- I quit.  No more camp, no more school.  I wasn’t willing to risk that one time when my boundaries would be crossed, and I wasn’t willing to live what increasingly looked like a lie.  I was becoming an awful cliche; the repressed homosexual teacher, leering at his pretty boys while wooing them with words of poetry.  Whitman, Heschel, Shakespeare, Solomon – what was the difference.  I was whoring out the geniuses of the Jewish religious tradition to satisfy a chaste and ridiculous lust.

 Coming out is itself a form of daat.  Other people finally can know the “real you” – I remember one time a man I met in Jerusalem’s Independence Park said of his roommate “he doesn’t know anything.”  Meaning, of course, he doesn’t know I’m gay and bring home tricks from the park.  But saying: he doesn’t know anything.  And coming out is a form of self-knowledge as well.  In the case of my teaching, it showed that my self-psychoanalysis and self-doubt – these were part of the problem.  I was attracted to my male students because I created bonds of intimacy with them.  Now that I can create those bonds in normal relationships, I don’t depend on the ones I build with kids.  And so, after a while, I went back to teaching.

 I feel a lot of the time like the last queer of my generation, the last one to go through the pains of rejection and repression.  Some of the kids I teach, they’re gay or have gay friends, and they couldn’t care less.  I’m also sensitive to the fact that coming out can be a form of delusion as well as knowledge.  The wounds that I was trying to heal with my studnets do not reduce to sexuality.  They are more complex, involving loneliness, betrayal, a sense of displacement that colored my own adolescence.  Just as it was a mistake to sexualize my adolescent desires for friendship, it would be a mistake to sexualize all of the healing that I searched for in my students. A successful coming out process does not end with a blanket ascription of every pain to sexual repression.  It leaves you right where everyone else is: in the middle of a thousand complicated causes and effects.

 Over the course of many years, I gained the confidence to play with the erotics of knowledge in my teaching and in my personal relationships.  Pretending it isn’t there, or pretending it’s all there is – these are both wrong.  The erotic component of daat does not somehow “pollute” the entire enterprise.  It’s there, and it’s a power in which our mystical tradition immerses itself.  The union of God and Israel through Torah.  The erotic joining of the transcendent Holy One and the immanent Indwelling.  The secret of the cherubs: how eros, writ large, is not a sublimation of sex but how sex is but a subset of the great desire that creates art, families, cities.

 Carnal knowledge does not reduce to intellectual knowledge, and intellectual knowledge isn’t sublimated sex.  Both are sublimated God.  What is the sexual act, really, but daat, an act of communication, of self-expression and receptivity to the expressions of the Other?  How different is sexual intimacy from the intimacy that exists between sincere and extending friends?  Or the intimacy that exists between teacher and pupil? 

 Lichshov, to fuck – this is what we are afraid of.  But daat can take many forms, as it is expressed in body, heart, mind, and spirit.  Ultimately, daat is our Awareness itself, the reflection of the great ayin, the primordial Emptiness That Loves.  It is the root of sex and Torah and the consummation of each.  And so it is impossible to expect real communication without it.  We expect our teachers to be like priests, as if priests can ever exist without molestation.  We suppose that we can insulate our children from all desire, and that we can teach real values without involving our whole emotional selves.  Both suppositions are wrong.

  Da’at is an apprehension and knowledge of that which exceeds expression, a reflection of what lies too deep even for tears.  It unites the intuitive with the rational, the erotic with the intellectual, ultimately arriving at a place of simultaneous knowing and un-knowing in the face of infinity.  Da’at points toward, gestures towards, what is beyond boundary.

 The moment of revelation: taking off the shirt, the socks, the underwear.  Our clothes are masks that we wear to reveal and to conceal, but our bodies are ourselves as we did not choose them.  I have no interest in the embodied masks of Chelsea gym boys.  The imperfect, not-up-to-ideal Jewish body, in its delicate, pre-Zionist shape; pale and skinny, as if fragile, utterly without pretension in presentation – I want the honesty of it.  I want to see each potential flaw, delight in every hidden vein, sinew, and bone. When the naked body is revealed, we stand two men “face to face,” as the Zohar and the Ari describe the highest, most concealed form of Divine union, and as Buber and Rosenzweig and Levinas would later employ as their metaphor for the most complete form of knowledge.  When we look into the face of the Other, we see that which is not-ourselves in a way that nothing else in the world can ever be.  We see the New.

 In the openness of learning we are entered by Newness and expanded into It.  Our mouths stand slightly agape, as if ready to lick the words of the text, dribbled with honey by our teachers.

 Is this lovemaking?  Sometimes we act as though all that is important must be concealed.  Our genitals are called “privates,” and hidden away.  Although our bodies seem designed to call attention to our sexuality, most of our clothing acts like it isn’t there – even, as in the case of men’s pants, crushing a man into the shape of a Ken Doll.  And what else is “private”?  Our intimate thoughts, on any subject.  Our relationship, or lack of one, with God.  Our family histories.  Anything that might be an answer to “a personal question.”  That which is concealed, our ‘privates,’ is that which informs.  And secret knowledge can only be known experientially.  Is the feeling of “nakedness” that I perceive in writing this essay merely a projection of a wish, a fanciful metonym for anatomy?

 No: full knowledge, full truth, naked daat radiant and carnal, lies in the brain and the body and the spirit and the heart, and beyond all of them.  The pathology of language is pornographic, replacing the knowledge which can only be known beyond it.  While in the closet, I collected three degrees, wrote four full-length books, tried three or four different careers, and spent a decade thinking my way through everything and everyone that has occupied my attention.  Now, I am tired of substitute information.  I want to know a knowledge which unites the knower and the known: the love of God and men, the primordial Torah that existed before words were ever written.
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 
 

 Jay Michaelson is the director of Nehirim: A Spiritual Initiative for GLBT Jews (www.nehirim.org), and the chief editor of Zeek: A Jewish Journal of Thought and Culture (www.zeek.net).  A teacher of Kabbalah, spirituality and Embodied Judaism, he was a finalist for the 2003 Koret Young Writer on Jewish Themes Award.  Jay’s recent work includes The Inflected Letters: Stories of Faith and Desire and The Gate of Sadness: Enlightenment and the Broken Heart (forthcoming).  He lives in Brooklyn.