We’ve truly reached a new milestone in Fat Torah history: the arrival of the trolls. Sure, we’ve had one or two comments or private messages on social media in response to a post or an email. But we recently got a little flood of trolling on a lovely piece that Kathryn Post of Religion News Service wrote about our work in the context of other religious fat liberationists.

You’ve heard of the four cups of wine, the four children, the four questions? How about “Four Ways to Free Your Passover from Fatphobia?”

What I love about fatphobia...wait, that didn't come out quite right. Let me try again: what I find so deeply compelling about the work of Fat Torah is that the insidious pervasiveness of weight stigma --harming so many different people in so many different ways-- also means that the healing and liberation can start from anywhere.

I wish I could just jump ahead to the particular ways that fatphobia intersects with Jewish life and practice. I want to write about fatness and musar, fatness and kashrut, fatness and fasting, fatness and mikvah. And I want to write about how the Torah loves fatness and that when it seems to denigrate fatness it is actually denigrating complacency.

In unpacking the ubiquitous trope of people being “concerned for your health” if you are fat, we started by looking at concern (or caring) itself. While strangers certainly make comments about fat people’s bodies (especially fat women’s bodies), fatphobia framed as concern is encountered most frequently and most painfully in our most intimate circles. When “caring” is toxic, those who care about us most can cause the most harm.

The first step in moving from un-caring to true caring is to recognize that every fat person, like every human being, is unique. Rabbi Yitz Greenberg reads this fundamental idea from the pages of Talmud. There (BT Sanhedrin 37a), human uniqueness, and the expression of God's great Oneness in infinite human diversity, is related through the midrash of the coins: a flesh-and-blood king has coins minted in his image and every single one looks the same. But we humans are like coins minted in the image of the Holy One and every single one of us looks different.

It was a few years into my own journey of body liberation and fat activism (all of which I look forward to telling you more about in future posts) and I was visiting the West Coast. I was staying with a family friend whom I'd known all my life. We were in those moments of arrival when I had entered the house but not yet been taken to the room where I'd been staying. I was sitting on a comfortable couch, but not entirely comfortable -- both nervous and excited to be catching up. But I slowly started to feel like I was being interviewed. It became clear that my hostess was asking me about my size under the guise (the eternal guise!) of "being concerned about my health."

Ancient history. I feel unaccountably blessed that my early years of dieting are now a hazy memory. At the same time, this ancient history feels like an amulet that I carry with me, a holder of mystery, a protective talisman.

When people ask me what Fat Torah is and what its aims are, I find that I keep circling back to the same story: My then-three-year-old daughter and I went to the Chanukah party for her gan (Israeli pre-K and kindergarten). I was 39 weeks pregnant and feeling...39 weeks pregnant. We walked into the synagogue sanctuary to find it teeming with delighted preschoolers and their parents: the music was about to start and our first activity would be dancing!

I can still feel in my chest the feeling of inhaling newfound liberation. I can still sense at my back the whoosh of an old, confining reality crumbling and being washed away like Pharaoh’s army. I can still hear the thought that popped into my sixteen-year-old head that day in a parking lot with my mother: “On the other side of the wall, there is no wall.”