There are many many times when reading Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones—certainly the best book on theology and disability that I know, and one of my favorite three works of theology published in this century—when I have gasped. I should say something about that gasp. I remember first uttering it when I was at home sick as a child, and I plunged myself into the world of adulthood by watching soap operas. I couldn’t believe that the people on the television screen could do the things they did, say those things to each other, or behave that way. I didn’t always want to imitate the people I was watching—I had landed on Days of Our Lives in the middle of its famous “Salem Strangler” storyline of 1982, but I did not want to strangle anyone—but I knew when watching soap operas that the horizons of my life had broadened, and I was confident that they had broadened for the better. Knowing more possibilities for living made me think that it was more likely that I would land on some possibilities that would eventually bring me pleasure.

What brought about this gasp while reading? Belser begins one of her chapters by summarizing the story from the biblical book of Genesis about Jacob tricking his father Isaac, whose “eyes were too dim to see” (Genesis 27:1), into granting him a blessing that will lead him to thrive personally and politically, at the expense of his older brother Esau, who ought to have received it. And then: “Let me tell all the things I hate about this story.” I gasped. I did not gasp because I thought that Belser is mistaken to hate the story. Her reasons—the story makes a disabled person into a fool, and praises deception—are very good ones. Indeed, had her criticism of the assumptions of the story appeared in some brief for a new “new atheism,” I would have not batted an eyelash. But I gasped, because I knew, as all readers of Loving Our Own Bones know by this point in the book, that Belser is not only an academic but also an ordained rabbi, a religious authority who credits the Jewish tradition as a source of wisdom, and who writes lyrically about the God she knows through both the texts of that tradition and perhaps also personal experience.

What religious authority says that they hate the texts of their tradition? Yes, “texts” in the plural. It’s not just Genesis 27. When a Jewish early medieval collection of biblical commentaries (midrashim) entitled Midrash Tanḥuma imagines a rabbi responding to Deuteronomy 1:1 (“These are the words which Moses spoke…”) by assuming that Moses’s ability to speak these words entails that his earlier speech disability (Exodus 4:10) has been cured, Belser writes “If I could, I’d blot these words out of the book. . . Torah becomes a tool for erasing disability. It’s a shaft to my heart.” And there are other examples of Belser rejecting classical Jewish texts throughout the book. Is that even allowed? Is a group of people, somewhere, plotting on how they might rescind her rabbinic ordination? And when did Julia Watts Belser join the cast of Days of Our Lives?

Belser’s readings free her audience from the destructive belief that to speak out of a tradition means either to endorse it in its entirety or to remain silent when the disturbing parts are invoked, feeling that one has no other option but to curl up into a ball when troubling and hateful texts get read. You cannot possibly live well when you give authority to a text that ridicules you, either by agreeing with it or by remaining silent while others passionately agree and look at you with disdain and pity. The permission that Belser gives her readers to proclaim their hatred from the rooftops is an integral part of the value of Loving Our Own Bones. To love oneself fully and effectively, it is necessary to mark out a set of things and words that deserve our hatred.

It is true that hatred is not the only mood of Loving Our Own Bones. Belser gives beautiful re-readings of the texts that she hates. When analyzing the story of Isaac’s being tricked on account of his disability in Genesis 27, Belser adds a reminder of the narrative of Abraham’s binding of Isaac in Genesis 22 in the third-century collection of midrashim known as Genesis Rabbah. There, the origin of Isaac’s blindness is in Abraham’s preparing to murder him; according to the rabbinic author(s) of that midrash, once the angels saw Abraham get ready to kill his son, they began to weep, and their tears fell into Isaac’s eyes. Pairing these two stories allows Belser and her readers to imagine Isaac “as a survivor of intimate violence” at the hands of his father, as having to relearn how to trust others in the ensuing decades of his life. And what about that offensive text from Midrash Tanḥuma? There, Belser insists on imagining Moses speaking the words of Deuteronomy while stuttering all the while, “without flinching … without shame.” There is nothing in the biblical text that forecloses that option for us! And for those of us who have stuttered or do stutter, nothing could be more empowering than the sudden realization that this option has been in front of us all along.

Yet if I were to focus on these healing readings at the expense of the hating ones, I fear that I would be getting Belser wrong. Belser talks about many passages from the Bible, or from later strata of the Jewish tradition, that she is right to describe as hurtful. But she never says that they are false. Her readings are “offerings” and “invitations” to find an uneasy home in biblically grounded religious traditions. That home is an uneasy one, because her readings are never decodings. After all, we do not know for certain how fluent Moses was in reciting the words of Deuteronomy. The text does not tell us, and we later readers have the right to infer that the text imagines Moses stuttering all the while, or to infer that he was healed, as hurtful as that inference is.

Such uneasiness suffuses Loving Our Own Bones. For me, this is most powerful when Belser tells a story of being with friends on a boardwalk. One of those friends suggests that the group ride a Ferris wheel. The path proves to be inaccessible; Belser, bound to her wheelchair, generously allows the group to ride without her. Then “and there, in the darkness, I cried.” Her words about those tears fell into my eyes and have changed how I see. The strength it takes to communicate such vulnerability is unfathomable to me. For as Belser goes on to say, the watchword of the wheelchair-bound, the stutterer, and other disabled persons is “never let them see you grieve.” As soon as others know that not riding a Ferris wheel hurts, or that being unable to begin pronouncing a word that begins with a sibilant or a plosive consonant feels like an eternal dying, then that gives others permission to look down on you, see your life as less valuable, “push our bodies out of public space, figure us not worthy of time, investment, care, or love.” Nonetheless, to carry on as if everything were fine, to never let them see your pain, is also a lie. In this double bind, there is so much to hate and resent in the world, just as there is much to hate and resent in the texts of religious traditions.

Belser lives and writes in this uneasy space with unparalleled elegance. But what does it mean to love and hate tradition at the same time? What does it mean to adore something while being angry with it? I am not sure that this is a question that an exchange at Syndicate can answer. Indeed, I am not sure that it is even a scholarly question; it seems more fitting for a conversation between friends confessing their struggles to one another, and those friends might very well want to protect that conversation from outsiders and their prurient ears. And so, I want to transform that question into something more scholarly. What does tradition become for those who simultaneously love and hate it? Certainly it is no longer a site of authority. For Belser, the tradition has no right to abuse, to belittle, to cut, to deride.

Yet tradition still remains valuable, even after it no longer dictates. Early in Loving Our Own Bones, Belser describes religion as “to me, a grammar of the imagination.” Figuring out what that might mean is the reader’s task throughout the book, and it is not quite an easy one. A clue might be the frequency of dream-talk in Belser’s prose. She has dreams. They are to be adored. But they can’t be abstract. They need practices to give them shape. For example, observing the sabbath is part and parcel of Belser’s maintaining a “commitment to building and dreaming a different way of being.” Reading traditional texts seems to be another such practice. It is hating a text that gives birth to a dream of another world than the one that dominant readings have handed down to us. It is re-interpreting a text, showing how an alternate reality can seep through its edges, reading it against its grain but not irresponsibly, that enables that dream to become something more than a pie-in-the-sky utopia.

Scholarship lies in generating these new readings. It also lies in finding people from the past who have generated them. When it does that, it also serves an existential function of finding allies among the dead, of making one feel less alone when one reads. In reading Belser’s attentiveness to the messiness of disabled lives, stretched between moments of pain and moments of healing, I wanted to find more allies for her, in gratitude for her being an ally to me. Perhaps oddly, Loving Our Own Bones reminds me of nothing so much as the lesson that the late critic Erich Auerbach taught in his classic essay “Odysseus’s Scar,” written during World War II, and which positioned the narrative style of the binding of Isaac as superior to that of Homer’s Odyssey. The Hebrew Bible, for Auerbach, was like life, rarely able to be communicated through a “smoothing down and harmonizing of events, to a simplification of motives, to a static definition of characters which avoids conflict, vacillation, and development.” As James I. Porter noted in an important article on Auerbach, if “Odysseus’s Scar” wanted to highlight life as a jumble and a “confused, contradictory multiplicity of events,” then the wartime context of Auerbach’s writing “Odysseus’s Scar” also signals that Auerbach wanted to highlight “the very sorts of things … that Homeric legend and Nazi propaganda would each disown and evade.” Healing, in its smoothness, cannot redeem. But accepting the ordinary reality of pain—not at the expense of pleasure, but alongside it—just might be able to do so. In those points lay Auerbach’s allyship. There are times when I fear that we live in a world where hardly anyone gives us permission to accept pain in its ordinariness, because it requires hating the simple, the smooth, and the healed, and it is always possible to lose oneself to that hatred. But Julia Watts Belser shows how we might hate and dream at the same time. I am especially grateful to her for her bracing honesty. Loving Our Own Bones is liberating, for it gives its readers more, better, and healthier possibilities for living. It is my favorite soap opera. I gasp, gleefully.

Receiving Dr. Julia Watts Belser’s book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole was a remarkable moment. I have been living with my own disabilities for quite some time and have dedicated a good portion of my research and public facing work to amplifying the lives of disability activists and scholars. Throughout this wonderful resource, Belser draws us in with the power of story, metaphor, imagery, and insight. In doing so, she clears pathways for many disabled bodies to be heard, seen, and perceived. In the opening of the book, Belser describes her relationship to disability in this way “I claim disability as a vital part of my own identity, as a meaningful way of naming and celebrating the intricate unfolding of my own skin and soul.” (Belser, 3) As a Black, disabled scholar that often thinks through dynamics of power, privilege, and position, I must ask boldly but gently if Black bodies that find themselves disabled get to approach disability with this same vigor? Put simply, is it in the best interests of Black people to claim disability in a meaningful way? This essay sits with two resonant portions of the book, the ability to name/claim disability, and the implications of being made in the image of God.

The CDC defines disability as “any condition of the body or mind (impairment) that makes it more difficult for the person with the condition to do certain activities (activity limitation) and interact with the world around them (participation restrictions).”1 While this definition is not perfect, it serves as a starting point to begin to think about framing disability. Belser is so thoughtful in how she winds her particular story of disability throughout the pages of her book through some of the overarching narratives that have already been written concerning what it means to be disabled. This thoughtfulness gives space for conversation, for life, for pushback, and storytelling. “I want to tell you a story about power, about the thousand ways our cultures mark certain bodies and minds as normal, while designating others as deviant and defective” (Belser, 1). These are powerful words as one considers the simple fact that for all the definitions that we give for disability, many issues stem from how we have shaped our cultures to have consideration and reverence for “the perfect” body. 2

Often, when disability is framed, it is spoken about in terms of what a particular body “isn’t.” Conversations and policies sometimes stem from what a disabled body lacks, rather than seeing each body for what it is. What would happen to our society if all bodies were shown for what they are? What if we lived in a society that didn’t demonize some bodies or label them as “less than?” Ableism is built into structures that undergird many of our communities in ways that we are aware of and ways that we are not. Sometimes, being disabled isn’t the most pressing issue in a person’s life, but rather the ways in which interlocking systems of oppression make being disabled life more difficult.

Who has the right to be disabled? Over the years, I have been in discussion with Black friends as we contemplated our relationship to the word “disabled.” Despite a range of factors such as arthritis, terrible chronic migraines, PTSD, anxiety, depression, chronic fatigue, Crohn’s disease, autism, and more, many of my Black friends seemed hesitant to readily claim that they were disabled. In fact, so many of them seemed to take offense at thinking of themselves in that way. As I have continued work in bringing awareness to Black disabled bodies, I have noticed a lag in Black people being able to receive the proper support and awareness that they need to join the rest of disabled communities, scholars, and activists. As some gleefully remark that their disabilities are a superpower, many Black folks are left behind as they are just coming to terms with what their bodies can and cannot do.

In returning to the thought of accessing the right to be disabled, I would be remiss if I didn’t mention the many invisible disabilities that I and many other Black folks engage with regularly. I can’t help but think of all of those, like me, who have mental disorders that preclude us from the normal, perfect, body. We struggle to be taken seriously and often struggle to be heard. I have benefited from the work of those like Kala Allen Omeiza who are bringing Black diasporic disability into national conversation. In her book Autistic and Black: Our Experiences of Growth, Progress, and Empowerment she tells the story of a young autistic boy named Akha. He is nonverbal but was eventually able to obtain a letterboard to communicate. He shared this “I want the world to know that I am just like you. I may seem different, but inside I am just the same. I think. I feel. I dream. I hope. I laugh. Take the time to get to know me. Don’t judge me by my outside. There is so much more to me.”3 I bring up young Akha’s words because I don’t see them as foreign to much of the wisdom that Rabbi Belser is sharing in her book. She beautifully shares the insight that her disability has given to her and the outlook that it gives her on the world, her Jewish tradition, and God.

America as a Disabling Apparatus

I often speak and write about America being a disabling apparatus. This is critical for me as I bring this reality into conversation with Loving Our Own Bones. When I say disabling apparatus, I mean that from its very inception, America was formed in a way that harmed so many bodies for the sake of creating this so-called new world. America was built on disability. In this new world Indigenous bodies were misused and died. Black bodies were sold as stock and treated in ways that were horrendous. Bodies were mutilated and brutalized under the guise of Christianity, to build the riches that then needed to be maintained by further brutalization.4

Flint, Michigan is another example of the ongoing ways that environmental hazards, capitalism, and racism interlock to create disabled minority bodies. Ignoring the concerns of water activists and parents, governmental officials years ago decided to switch the city’s water supply to the polluted Flint River. As lead pipes eroded, communities were impacted steadily. According to some reports, “health records from 2008 to 2015, researchers found that fertility rates in Flint dropped by 12 percent and fetal deaths rose by 58 percent after the water was switched to the Flint River in 2014.”5 Lead exposure has harmed the reproductive health of residents as well as reportedly caused behavior disorders, hearing problems, and issues associated with cognition. Disability is nuanced and can be caused by genetic factors, racism, police brutality6, environmental disasters, trauma, and a host of other things. With this in mind, what should the relationship of those who have been swept into the disabling apparatus that is America have with their disability?

I don’t think that there is a one size fits all answer to the above question. I agree wholeheartedly with  Belser when she states that “Disability is an ordinary fact of life…like most identities, it’s a mixed bag: sometimes painful, sometimes frustrating, sometimes flush with exquisite, unexpected joy.” (Belser, 3) I believe that many Black bodies will and do resent their disability. For some, it is a source of shame and abuse. Still others fear what it will mean for them to suddenly not be the magic unicorn that society expects for them to be. What will become of Black people when they are allowed to take off the cape of imperviousness? Terms like “Black excellence” and “Black girl magic” are sometimes aspirational and at other times a curse for Black disabled bodies that can’t keep up with the productivity this society demands. Disconnecting from the excellence that is demanded of Black bodies can be a financial and social death sentence. I would love to hear Rabbi Belser speak into what it could mean for Black disabled bodies to divest from the excellence that is demanded of us and make beauty in our disabled identities.

I wonder if one part of the way forward is the God on wheels that Rabbi Belser brings forth at the end of the book. This image, borne out of an encounter that she had with the book of Ezekiel and the chariot wheels depicted there is one that could powerfully, but gently hold Black bodies. I must bring my personal experience even more into this essay because I remember where I was when I first heard the term “God on wheels.” I was a speaker at a disability conference in Boston. I had just given a talk on the possibilities that are possible for Black disabled bodies in the Clearing that Toni Morrison depicts in her novel, Beloved. As I sat down to listen to the virtual keynote speaker talk, Julia Watts Belser began to speak about the possibilities that the God on wheels has afforded to her. I shed tears as I saw a God that was different than the conquering King that I have been given imagery for time and time again. Even though I don’t require a wheelchair, I saw that this God could empathize with the pains that I endure and the joys I have at being who I am. In her message she spoke about access, and joy, and disabled life.

In reflecting on the God on wheels, Rabbi Belser states that “I want to revel in the holy silence of a nonspeaking God’s heart. I want to glimpse God through each way disability unfolds in this world, through your flesh and mine.” (Belser, 236) Here I think about each Black disabled body that hasn’t been treated with the dignity and reverence that Belser is displaying. Does the God on wheels know Black autistic folks? Does the God on wheels know those young Black children sitting in special education classrooms without support? Does the God on wheels know those Black folks with chronic anxiety that disrupts every facet of their decision making? I believe and hope so. What awaits us now is marking out a path for all those Black bodies to find a place to rest, make beauty, and have avenues to flourish.7 In this essay I have brought forth the elements of this book that have most resonated with me, the ability to name/claim disability, and the God on Wheels. The thoughts that I have provided are less of a pushback and more of a conversing with, in the hopes that we can expand the table of disability.

Loving Our Own Bones is a powerful and important book that simultaneously opens up new understandings of biblical texts and offers important insights into disability and ableism. Belser’s astute observations and questions about even very familiar biblical narratives bring into sharp focus both personal and structural dimensions of disability. Every chapter of the book is rich, interesting, and challenging, but if I had to choose a favorite, it would be “The Land You Cannot Enter: Longing, Loss, and Other Inaccessible Terrain.” In this second chapter on Moses, Belser focuses on his disbarment from entering the promised land, and she uses this painful aspect of the story to explore the ways that disability can mean loss and unfulfilled longing. This chapter most clearly captures a tension that intrigued me throughout the book between the universal aspects of disability experience and its deeply personal and particular dimensions.

Belser describes “The Land You Cannot Enter” as the part of Loving Our Own Bones that feels most dangerous to her in that it risks reinforcing the only story that nondisabled people tell about disability: namely that it is about lament, sadness, and grief. I appreciate Belser’s courage in raising issues around loss, her willingness to make herself vulnerable, and also her skill in sharing that vulnerability with a light touch. She has an extraordinary ability to talk about her own experiences in ways that bring home the larger points she wants to communicate yet never leave one feeling that she has shared more than one wants to know. This second chapter on Moses also resonates particularly deeply for me as someone with a chronic illness who recognizes myself in many of the temptations to minimize loss that she describes. It feels safer to shrug off closed doors, to say that they do not matter and to focus on what is possible than to come face to face with the terrain of desire–just as it is easier to disavow the necessity for grief than to acknowledge it.

This chapter also speaks to one of the things I find most powerful about disability theory more generally—its capacity to shed fierce light on aspects of the human condition. When I first read the section about Moses being unable to enter the promised land, it immediately struck me that we all have lands we cannot enter. I thought of a friend who is tone deaf who once remarked that had she been able to sing, her whole life would have been different. I thought of my own impossible desire to launch my retirement by walking part of the Camino de Santiago.

Belser’s discussion of limits reminds me of Deborah Creamer’s book Disability and Christian Theology: Embodied Limits and Constructive Possibilities which lays out what Creamer calls a “limits” model of disability as a complement to the established medical and social models.1 The first—and older—model of disability sees it as a physical condition best addressed by the realm of medicine; the second defines it as a sociopolitical category created by the power structures that privilege certain bodies as “normal.” The limits model incorporates insights from both these others but sees disability primarily as “an instantiation and reminder of human limits.”2 Rather than dividing people into the categories of disabled and nondisabled, it highlights the ways in which limits are an intrinsic part of existence, “a common and unsurprising aspect of being human.”3 The limits model views disability not from the perspective of some presumed “normality” with which it is then compared and judged lacking but as part of human variability. Disability, Creamer argues, is not just a matter of yes or no but also “when, where and how” in that individuals’ experiences of limits may vary both on a daily basis and over the lifespan.4 When disability theory begins from the reality of human variability, it creates space to reflect on the huge range of specific ways in which people embody limits, on the ways some limits are seen as “natural” and others as “defective,” and how limits become disabling due to physical or social barriers. “Disability,” Creamer says, “might be understood as limits that are not accommodated by the environment.”5

At moments, Belser’s language very much echoes Creamer’s. In a beautiful statement toward the beginning of “The Land You Cannot Enter,” she points out that the elemental forces of the world do not bend themselves to individual desire. All human beings must come to terms with the reality that we cannot always have what we want (96). Later, she says that the hunger for what is out of reach “isn’t only a truth disabled people know. It is a deeply human story, part and parcel of what it means to be alive. All of us come up against the limits of the possible, the compass of what our bodies or our minds will allow” (108). At another point, in discussing how Jacob’s encounter with the angel left him with a limp, she says that limp is “a powerful reminder that disability is an essential part of what it means to be human. Rosemarie Garland-Thomson calls disability ‘the etchings left on flesh as it encounters world,’ a phrase [Belser] love[s] for the ways it names disability as an ordinary consequence of living, a register of our experience” (178).

Yet when I commented to Belser that the chapter seemed like a place where she was touching on a universal aspect of human experience, she pushed back, saying that she was suspicious of the tendency to too quickly universalize the experience of disability. Although she did not elaborate on the reasons for her resistance, I can understand it on a number of different levels. First, there are important differences among limits in terms of how deeply they affect people’s everyday lives. Someone who needs a twenty-four-hour aide to perform activities of daily living is not in the same position as someone who cannot sing or walk the Camino. Secondly, there are also major differences in which limits society accommodates and which it exacerbates or ignores. Disability activists have made crystal clear that the built environment actively shapes who can move about easily in the world and who cannot. To say that everyone is limited runs the danger of flattening or shrugging off societally created barriers as if there were no obligation to address them because limits are a fact of human life.6 It reminds me of Jimmy Carter saying “Life is unfair” when he was criticized for supporting Congressional passage of the Hyde amendment that denied abortion funding to poor women. Yes, life is unfair, but he and Congress had just deepened rather addressing the unfairness.

But third, universalizing limits also misses the positive insights that come from disability experience and community. A central theme of Loving Our Own Bones is the rich and generative nature of disability culture and the deep wisdom that can be part of living with disability. That wisdom shines on every page of the book, both when Belser brings a disability lens to biblical texts and when she evokes her own embodied knowledge as a wheelchair user. Her descriptions of her relationship with her chair, the satisfactions she gets from “a life lived on wheels” and “the exhilarating physicality” of feeling the earth’s vibration through her shoes (9) could easily go unheralded were disability subsumed too quickly under the shared reality of limits. Thus, right after she names the universality of disability in discussing Jacob’s limp, Belser also says, “Yet even as I affirm disability as a fundamental aspect of what it means to be human, I’m not content to only universalize. There’s another dimension of disability that matters to me: the recognition of disability as difference” (178).

But if Belser is wary of too quickly universalizing disability experience, she is equally wary of particularizing and minoritizing what is, after all, a fundamental aspect of the human condition. The assumption that disability is something that affects only a small percentage of the population has numerous problematic consequences. On the one hand, when nondisabled people assume that every new individual they meet likely fits societal norms for properly functioning minds and bodies, they readily look right past disabled folks, failing to see them at all. Especially because many physical, cognitive, and other disabilities are not readily observable, they are easily attributed to a host of other factors. People with disabilities who are members of other socially stigmatized groups are particularly likely to be labelled drunk, rude, lazy, or other disparaged traits (168). On the other hand, where disability is obvious and cannot be denied, it often elicits anxiety or dread in nondisabled people. They then often see only someone’s disability and not who they are as whole people, as if disability were the only or most important thing in their lives. These responses deny the ordinariness and pervasiveness of disability as the etchings the world leaves on flesh. They overlook the truth articulated by Rosemarie Garland-Thomson that “If we live long enough, we will all become disabled.”

Fear of disability as an exceptional but always-looming fate has another very serious consequence. It leaves disabled people needing to constantly manage the feelings of those who are nondisabled. Belser hesitates to discuss feelings of loss because she does not want to feed the equation of disability with tragic suffering that is such a major theme in popular culture. The ubiquity of this trope leads perfect strangers to tell her that they would rather die than be disabled or to offer unasked-for sympathy or to volunteer to pray with her. These are all modes of othering, of distancing from disability as something that could not possibly befall the self. They are of a piece with the urgent inquiries from strangers about “how this happened,” the need to know masking a wish to assure oneself that whatever the “cause,” it could not happen to them. The danger of acknowledging loss, then, is that it supports ableism. If disabled lives are lives of unrelenting sorrow that are better off ending as soon as possible, then why support the many urgent social changes that would allow disabled people to function fully in public space? Isn’t it more comfortable for the nondisabled to push people with disabilities out of view so that those whose minds and bodies fall in the narrow range of what is considered normal are not confronted with their own vulnerability and finitude? (101, 169)

If neither universalization nor particularization will do then, the question is how to find a way between the poles, to learn what disability experience has to teach about what it means to be human without denying the contours of different disability experiences or the distinctive contributions of disability culture. There’s a helpful analogy between the twin dangers of universalizing or particularizing disability and the dangers of doing the same with queerness. When everybody becomes queer, it is easy to overlook the distinctive burdens placed on those whose relationships and self-presentation make them readily identifiable in a homophobic and transphobic culture. It also misses the richness of queer cultures and the ways LGBTQIA+ people have pioneered new ways of forming families and relationships and of being in the world. At the same time, particularizing queerness easily ends up turning LGBTIQQ people into a marginalized other and misses the invitation to everyone to question the constraints of gender norms and reimagine intimate relationships. Belser clearly tries to wend her way between these poles, but I am interested in seeing her reflect more explicitly on the ways she simultaneously affirms and critiques both universalization and particularization

As a work of disability advocacy, Julia Watts Belser’s book, Loving Our Own Bones, declares the unabashed right of everyone created in the image of God, to cherish oneself on one’s own terms. As a guide to disability studies interpretation, it insists on reading religious texts and fashioning a theology from the specific, visceral, embodied experience of one’s own disabled or differently-abled bones. It also reminds those of us who currently consider ourselves able-bodied, that disability, essential to the human, creaturely, mortal condition, is coming for us all.

I have bolded the word essential, because another meaning for the Hebrew word for bone – etsem–is “essence.” The expression ʿetsem haʿinyan means the “essence or heart of the matter” – that personal, interpretive, interrogative crux that Watts Belser gets at in every chapter of this book. What does it mean, she asks, to be a disabled Jew, rabbi, believer, student of holy texts, community member, wheeler about town, explorer and lover of God’s wide, wild world?

Another meaning of ʿetsem is “self.” To do something beʿatsmi means to do it “myself.” Watts Belser asks us to consider what it means, in our American, individualistic culture, if I can’t do it all by myself. With gentleness and love, she prods us to view the disabled person’s need to delegate and depend on others not as a something lesser, to be pitied, but as a reflection of God’s own need to depend on others– all of us– to bring God’s word and way to the world.

There are times when one must rage and expose the hurt and other times when must limit what one shares. Watts Belser rightly expresses raw rage and hurt at texts such as Leviticus 21:16-23, which forbids those with a physical “defect” (mum) to come before the altar. Or Isaiah 35:6, with its promise of a better world as expressed through images of blind eyes being opened and the lame leaping like deer, visions that Watts Belser sees as “built on the backs of disabled folk.” At the same time, she speaks of the “problem of letting people into your pain…To give voice to pain is to feed ableism’s arsenal, to open myself up to the assault of those assumptions: that disability is unendurable, that my life is unrelenting loss, that the world would be better off without my presence” (110).

Watts Belser attempts to counter that pain by re-interpreting classical sources in ways that support rather than undermine the loving of one’s own disabled bones. As a feminist interpreter of traditional Jewish sources, I, too, have pursued the project of reinterpreting biblical and rabbinic sources to support my values and theology. Like Watts Belser (89), I have read Moses’ stutter as a proud feature of his leadership and his speaking of God’s word1 and have reinterpreted Miriam’s leprosy in Numbers 12 as a mark of prophecy rather than punishment.2 But as Watt Belser writes, there is “another truth, which I have come to realize over many years of building a spiritual life…I cannot always find what I need within the text (21).

For an alternative I often turn to modern Hebrew literature: that creative corpus that remains inexorably connected to the past by virtue of the Hebrew language and its ancient sources, but that forces tradition, from its modern, secular, disruptive vantage point, beyond past limitations. Those last words stare back at me with potential reproach. In looking “beyond limitations” am I adopting an ableist stance? Following Watts Belser, I want to hold two things at once, to push against but also honor limits. Echoing her reading of Moses’ inability at the end of Deuteronomy to enter the Land of Israel, I want to acknowledge that one may not always get what one desires (96). I will confess outright, then, that the modern Hebrew literary depictions of disability that I have assembled below, fall somewhat short of the “fierce joy” that fuels Watt Belser’s disability activism” (9). Even so, they anticipate some of her arguments. And they demonstrate the power of creative writing to turn the wheels of different thinking around disability.

The Talmudic tradition of controversy and debate between ḥevruotot (study partners) furnishes a model for provocative and generative conversation, if not always the interpretive outcome one seeks. I mention this because, for several years, I have been working on a book that enacts a kind of literary ḥevruta between the fiction of Hebrew Nobel Laureate S.Y. Agnon (1887-1970) and his literary friend and colleague, Devorah Baron (1887-1956), one of the first Hebrew women prose writers. In these various readings, I demonstrate how throughout their careers Baron and Agnon borrowed from, argued with, and revised each other’s work on various themes, including illness and disability.

Baron’s and Agnon’s approach to disability reflects their different conceptions of agency and (dis)empowerment in Jewish and Hebrew literary culture. In an early story called “Henikh” (1910/1927), for example, Baron tells the story of a young hunchback tailor named Henikh (evocative of the biblical Enoch, “who walked with God and then was no more”3), who is constantly mocked by his employer and co-workers. Early on in the story, the shop owner’s wife announces, with Henikh in earshot, that “human limbs – if only one would pulverize them and reconstitute them one by one, the way one fixes an old, tasteless dress like this one, surely this ugly, dwarf, defective one (baʿal mum, a term derivative of the Leviticus 21 as mentioned above) would come out tall and handsome.”4 Despite this, Henikh catches the eye and regard of a (Gentile) female co-worker similarly named Hendze, who comes to his rescue when he is physically bullied by the more able-bodied men in the shop. Henikh and Hendze carry on a brief romance; Henikh gives her a ring as a token of his affection, and she gives him a pocket-knife.  That is, until Hendze is raped by a returning soldier, and Henikh takes his own life with that same pocketknife in seeming desperation over having failed to protect her, a plot that directly links disability with female sexual vulnerability. Loving one’s own bones does not seem to be a viable option in Baron’s early-twentieth century experience, where the forces of society seem inexorably arrayed against anyone without social, economic, or military might.

Baron’s “Perel” (1911) also features a hunchback, this time a young woman named Perel, doted upon by her rabbi father, but pitilessly teased and tattled on by her sisters and later, when her father succumbs to illness, abused by her widowed and destitute mother who sees her as nothing but a burden. Perel’s name captures her dual status in the family – regarded as a precious pearl by her father, but subject to constant bullying and peril (péril, in French, a language Baron knew and translated), by the other members of her family. Perel attempts to dodge the danger at home by making herself small and inconspicuous, the very opposite of what Watts Belser argues is needed in disability activism, that is, the willingness to “claim the room” (33).  She also frequently escapes  down to the river to meet her friend/beau Yoel the musician (klezmer), complaining to him about her mother’s cruel treatment, while  he attempts to console her with talk about “some big city with a well-known hospital and expert doctors, hayodʿim lizqof kefufim, who know how to stand upright up the bent-over and straighten the crooked.”5 Baron’s story thus anticipates Watts-Belser’s discussion of the pain experienced by those who are “lured, for a moment or a lifetime, by the hope of healing” and “that sense that our own words don’t measure up. That our own bodies, our own selves require repair. I want to spit out that bitter lie.” (91) Indeed, Baron’s “Perel” depicts how the combination of abuse and quixotic promises of healing’ lead to Perel being locked out of home, and consequently, dying from illness and exposure. Only the narrator-sister’s regret over her tattling on her sister at the end of the story holds out any hope for a better way.

Agnon’s story “Ovadiah baʿal mum,” (Ovadiah the Blemished or Disabled, first published in 1922 and then revised in 1931), includes several of the elements of Baron’s hunchback stories, but in a less hopeless form. The protagonist of Agnon’s story is a disabled, hunchback water carrier named Ovadiah, his name evoking the biblical book of Ovadiah, which serves as the Haftarah for Vayishlaḥ, that Torah portion featuring the episode of Jacob’s wrestling with and wounding at the hands of an angel, (Genesis 32:22-31), which Watt Belser reinterprets in her book as a kind of dance of disability.

Agnon’s Ovadiah claims to be engaged to a maidservant named Sheyne Serel, who has other ideas and thus is given to going out dancing with other men, and on the Sabbath, to boot. On one such occasion, Ovadiah goes to the dancehall to implore her to change her ways and be faithful to him; instead he gets attacked by her would-be dance partners, chief among than a scoundrel named Red Reuven, who lewdly thrusts Ovadiah’s crutch between Ovadiah’s legs and raises him up in the air in a perverse dance, as he and his buddies sing a mocking song. Red Reuven then snatches the crutch out of Ovadiah’s hands, attempts to break it, and when he fails, hurls it into the stove, at which point, Ovadiah collapses to the floor like a dead man. Reading that passage in Agnon’s story, I cannot help but think of Watts Belser’s description of Moses’s staff – what she refers to as a form of “assistive technology”  and a “companion for the journey,” and her sense of horror that that moment in Exodus 4:3 when God tells Moses to cast his staff to the ground, so as to show him a sign and turn it into a snake” (78).

In the aftermath of this attack, Ovadiah is taken to the New Hospital, a place formerly designated for treating  roving bandits as well as  “kol tsaruʿa vekhol zav”6–those with skin irruptions or a sexual discharge, deemed in the Leviticus as forms of ritual impurity–but which has now become a modern, caring facility. At this hospital, Ovadiah is treated not merely for his injuries, but for a previously undiagnosed kidney infection. Over the course of his hospital stay, he is singled out by an evangelist nurse on account of his biblical name, accorded every kindness, and at the end, even given a new crutch with a rubber tip at the bottom. By the end of his months of convalescence, even his hump ceases to weigh down his back as it had before. Ovadiah remains in the hospital until right before the Jewish New Year, indicative of a new beginning. He remains troubled that during the many months of his hospital Shayne-Serel never comes to visit, but innocently decides that even if she hasn’t come to see him, he’ll go see her. Unbeknownst to him, during this same period, Sheybe Serel has been serially raped and impregnated by Red Reuven and cast out in shame from her employer’s home. Upon leaving the hospital Ovadiah is mocked and ranted against by several acquaintances on account of Sheyne Serel’s condition. Ignorant of what this all means, he goes to a candy store to buy and bring Sheyne Serel a treat. Unable to find herself at her former address, he eventually finds her sitting outside on a stoop, angrily nursing her new baby. Too afraid to give her the candies, he bends down to put them in the infant’s palm, implying his willingness, however naive, to love and care for this child. To be sure, this is no conventional happily-ever-after story. Ovadiah’s seeming obliviousness to the more sordid nature of his community marks him as an unlikely hero and savior and an implausible spokesman for empowered disability. Unlike Baron’s “Henikh,” however, where disability and rape come together in a plot of utter ruin, here, a still-disabled man, who experiences cruel discrimination and abuse but also compassionate care, holds out promise of love and care to the son of an abused and jaded woman. Ovadiah holds out that hope not because he has been rendered conventionally able-bodied but because he is a person of faith, an oved-Yah – a servant of God. The description at the end of the story, however improbable, of Sheyne Serel’s baby’s nursing “beqol demamah daqah” – with a still small voice, evocative of God’s revelation to Elijah in 1 Kings 19:11-13, suggests the revelatory capacity of such resilience, kindness, and alliance– its own form of “approaching the altar.”