It is not said on the taking of medication it is specifically not to be said over daily events, for which there are different blessings and it is never said over a disease. Here is how it begins:Įvery day I say a blessing in Hebrew over my medication: “Blessed are You, O Lord our God, who has kept us, preserved us, and brought us to this time.” That blessing is traditionally said at the beginnings of holidays, on the eating of new kinds of fruit, and at any joyous occasion at which Jews want to heighten their sense of gratitude by becoming mindful of the singularity of the moment and the precariousness of the lives that have brought us to it.

Instead, I will link you to it it was published in Zeek, as the essay A Blessing Over Progesterone. Ladin’s poignant memoir takes us from the death of living as the man she knew she wasn’t, to the shattering of family and career that accompanied her transition, to the new self, relationships, and love she finds when she opens the door of life.Joy Ladin's extraordinary memoir Through the Door of LIfe: A Jewish Journey Between Genders begins with a short chapter I wish I could excerpt in full. We stare with her into the mirror as she asks herself how the new self she is creating will ever become real. We look over her shoulder as she learns to walk and talk as a woman after forty-plus years of walking and talking as a man. We eavesdrop on her lifelong conversations with the God whom she sees both as the source of her agony and as her hope for transcending it. Ladin recounts her struggle to reconcile the pain she experienced living as the “wrong” gender with the pain of her children in losing the father they love. With unsparing honesty and surprising humor, Ladin wrestles with both the practical problems of gender transition and the larger moral, spiritual, and philosophical questions that arise.

In Through the Door of Life, Joy Ladin takes readers inside her transition as she changed genders and, in the process, created a new self. Professor Jay Ladin made headlines around the world when, after years of teaching literature at Yeshiva University, he returned to the Orthodox Jewish campus as a woman-Joy Ladin.

National Jewish Book Award Finalist for Memoir

Through the Door of Life by Joy Ladin