One of the many things I’ve learnt from Student Rabbi Yael is that giving a D’var Torah about Moana is fair game. So here goes.

I imagine you’re probably wondering what could possibly be so profound about a kids’ film – well, so was I! I sat down to watch it one afternoon in April 2021, when I was living in Belarus, a country gripped by political violence, 1500 miles from my family, while also trying desperately to work out if I was a man or a woman. (Spoiler: I’ve still got no idea.) And to top it all off I was in bed with flu. I needed a distraction.

And yet what I got was this.

Girl lives on the land, but longs to be on the water. Girl has no idea why she wants this, she knows only she is desperate to be in one realm, but finds herself confined in another. Girl spends a full third of the film trying to avoid confronting this longing. She tries so hard to live the life that her parents and her community had planned for her. But the urge to swap land for sea is too strong to ignore – and thus begins a voyage of self-discovery.

Needless to say, the film resonated. As I wrote in my diary at the time:

I can’t help but find resonance in the idea of a kid who defied their tradition and the role they were born into, and not out of moral conviction, but out of a deep and fundamental sense that it felt right. Her parents wanted to protect her, to make life easy for her. She tries to embrace her planned life, but her “true calling”, if you like, keeps resurfacing and ruining everything for her. She observes everyone else playing by the rules. She really tries to make it work. “I’ll be satisfied if I play along [she sings] but the voice inside sings a different song… What is wrong with me?” – How many million times have I asked myself that question?

And then, at the climax of the film, Moana helps an angry, fiery, male-looking lava monster reconnect with its true identity as a beautiful, female mother-creator-goddess. “Let her come to me,” Moana says just after becoming the first person in a millennium to see the demon for who they really are. “Let her come to me.” Really??

Four years on, I like to think I’m more mother-creator-goddess than angry lava monster. But I guess you can be the judge of that…

So. In this week’s parashah, we read about how the covering for the mishkan, the tabernacle, is to be made of “fine linen, goats’ hair, tanned ram skins, dolphin skins and acacia wood”. Dolphin skins? What were dolphins doing in the desert, so far from their element? As a self-identified sea creature trapped on land, my empathy was triggered. Were they lost – beautiful creatures of the ocean condemned to wander the dry, sandy wastes? Or were they trans dolphins, who had rejected the sea to embrace a life on land?

Rabbinic commentary offers no direct answers. Instead, it turns out that tachash, the leather product in question, is one of those biblical words that no-one is quite sure how to translate. The dolphin version is suggested by the Arabic tuḥash, referring to that animal. Meanwhile, the Septuagint, the Temple-era Greek translation of the Torah, calls it “hyacinth”, while the Aramaic targum renders it sasgona, literally meaning “rejoicing in many colours”. From here, the Rabbis go to town. Apparently, the tachash is a large, wild, kosher, hoofed animal, eight metres long, with rainbow-coloured hide and a single horn on its head. It was created miraculously, came to Moses specifically for the occasion, and afterwards was hidden away.

Yep, the tabernacle is officially made from the the skin of a giant, rainbow-coloured unicorn. On the day I come in the sight of God to officially adopt a trans identity and name, the Torah gives me rainbow unicorns. Could it get any queerer?

But before we get carried away:

There is a postscript to this story, and it comes from archaeology. Babylonian cuneiform inscriptions describe a product called duchsu: leather embroidered with tiny ceramic beads. It was prestigious: a pair of duchsu sandals were found in Tutankhamun’s tomb, gifted to his predecessor by the Mittanian king. Meanwhile, in a metaphor in Ezekiel, God provides Israel with a pair of tachash sandals, presumably similar to Tutankhamun’s. It was hyacinth-textured, and certainly “rejoiced in many colours”. And the technology was well-known in the middle-east at the time. According to Rabbi Dr Norman Solomon of the Oxford Centre for Hebrew and Jewish Studies, it was “no[t] badgers, seals, dolphins or unicorns… rather a standard luxury product of the ancient near east”.

So, bye-bye unicorns.

But on reflection, perhaps it doesn’t matter that the tachash may not have actually been a unicorn. After all, I don’t imagine anyone came here today hoping to be convinced that unicorns were real. But their absence from biology textbooks doesn’t make them any less meaningful as a symbol. Unicorns are magical, frivolous, wild, rejoicing in their many colours. They don’t fit into empirical science’s rigid taxonomies – and that’s their entire point. When I assert my gender, sometimes I feel the expectation to provide proof. After all, most people learn their gender by looking between their legs. My gender has no such obvious physical manifestation. Everything I know about my gender I’ve learnt by experiment, by trial and error. I’ve found the more feminine I present, the happier and less miserable I feel. I haven’t the faintest idea why. But in that sense, gender is a tachash: inscrutable to empirical science, yet magical, frivolous, rejoicing in many colours. And when it comes to building our own personal mishkan, enabling God’s presence on Earth, maybe this is my invitation – all our invitations – not to limit ourselves to Linnaeus but rejoice just a tiny bit in our many colours.