Symposium Introduction

Julia Watts Belser’s Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole illustrates the expansive, world-shaping power of interpretation. This book is hermeneutical in the most capacious and existential sense; a quality of keen attention informs how Belser lives and interprets her own life within a set of social conditions, in conversation with ancient narratives, and guided by a spiritual orientation. This is a book that, in other words, models not only a way of reading but also a way of being.

The title of Belser’s book is noteworthy both because of what it says and because of what it doesn’t say. Notice the second word of the title: the first-person plural possessive our. While, as this symposium shows, this is a book for everybody, Loving Our Own Bones can and perhaps should also be read as a love letter to disability community, to those readers whose hearts-minds-bodies have experienced the injustices and pain of living in an ableist world. Belser consistently eschews the temptation to speak in imperative voice (“love your own bones!”), especially on those occasions when she directly addresses the reader. Loving our own bones, she indicates, is the starting point for a community of thinker-activists who have shaped Belser. While she often writes in the first-person singular, the book is a testament to the power of a community that claims rather than shuns disability.

What one wouldn’t necessarily know from the title of this book is how deeply engaged it is in a corpus of texts long considered sacred and authoritative in Jewish traditions (and, to a lesser extent, in Christian traditions). Belser is an attentive reader of these texts: attentive to the world of possibilities that open up through careful and loving reading, and to the painful legacies of ableism these texts and their readers have perpetuated. She performs something of a magic trick here: her formidable scholarly expertise in ancient rabbinic literature and the Hebrew Bible to which it responds enables her draw on a full, diverse palette of hermeneutic stances and methods. Yet this highly readable book addresses readers who may have only the faintest or most superficial contact with the Bible and its legacy. Finally, Belser speaks as a rabbi who has guided others through the profound harm and sense of betrayal religious texts and communities, among others, have caused so many disabled people. The result is a surprising, nuanced, careful work that gives its audience a glimpse of the many modes in which sophisticated and sensitive readers relate to a text they – and Western religions – just can’t quit.

The contributions to this symposium, and Belser’s responses, reveal the interplay of forces at work when people with different intellectual orientations and positionalities engage with world-shaping texts. Martin Kavka writes of the audible “gasp” he, and many readers, may utter when encountering a faithful reader of biblical texts say that they “hate” a biblical narrative: “Is that even allowed?” Kavka grasps and elaborates on the invitation to readers hidden within Belser’s admission, which is just as earnest as the invitation to honor the spark of insight Belser feels when making the connection between the prophet Ezekiel’s vision of “God’s wheels” and her own life as a wheelchair user.

Robert Monson foregrounds intersectional questions prompted by his own reading of Belser’s book as a Black disabled scholar of disability and theology. “Who has the right to be disabled?” he asks as he illuminates the ableist frameworks that require Black excellence at the cost of honoring Black disabled body-minds. Monson’s question, and his meditation on the uneven violence that links environmental racism, for instance, to Black communities and thus Black disability, offers critical correctives to those who would slip from the “disability wisdom” Belser and so many others have cultivated into “disability as superpower.”

Wendy Zierler brings Loving Our Own Bones into literary criticism and, specifically, modern Hebrew literature, which resonates with echoes of the biblical lexicon. Hebrew is a language in which embodied experience remains close to the root; as Zierler points out, the Hebrew word ʿetsem means “bone” but comes to mean both “self” and “essence;” this linguistic tether of selfhood to one’s bones beautifully illustrates precisely Belser’s operating assumption: that our bodies’ experience of the world is formative for who we are. At the same time, modern Hebrew fiction, like many other bodies of literature, often must be read against the grain lest disability symbolism be read as though it were disability truth.

Loving Our Own Bones somehow manages to speak to the widest possible audience, remain faithful to Belser’s own unique experience of disability, and illuminate the structural ableism that shapes her experience (and connects it to that of many others who are now or will become disabled). Judith Plaskow, in the symposium’s final contribution, highlights the challenge Belser has met in doing so. Belser understands – and helps her readers understand – that having limits is a universal dimension of being human. At the same time, Plaskow notes, this book is not driven by the search for universals; if anything, Belser is suspicious of them. Instead, she attends to what that search often eclipses: the structural violence that unevenly and inequitably meets the fact of human limits and, in Plaskow’s words, “the rich and generative nature of disability culture and the deep wisdom that can be part of living with disability.”

Martin Kavka

Response

Let Me Tell All the Things I Hate

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.

  • Julia Watts Belser

    Julia Watts Belser

    Reply

    Response to Martin Kavka

    Dear Martin,

    Thank you for this gorgeous response. I’m moved by so many things: the way you call attention to reading as an embodied practice, the way you invite us to linger with the gasp. I love the way you ask us to orient toward feeling, to consider reading and writing as an enterprise not just of the head, but also the heart.

    Loving Our Own Bones is a book born of feeling. One way to trace its beginnings is to follow the wild shock of recognition that shivered through my bones when I first recognized the kinship between Ezekiel’s vision and my own lived disability experience, when I named for myself the soul-deep yes of God on Wheels. But there are other genesis stories, other crucibles I could point to: the flush of joy I felt one transformative night on a dance floor surrounded by queer disabled friends, the incandescent feeling of inhabiting my own skin without the faintest trace of shame; the kinship my childhood self-forged with her own disabled body, the fierce love she felt for her own limp.

    I think of Loving Our Own Bones as a love letter to disability community. Love grounds this book, but it’s a particular kind of love: a love that is a catalyst for political imagination, a love that wants and needs to shift the terrain of the possible.

    That’s an insight I learned from Black lesbian feminist Audre Lorde, whose writing has had a deep influence on my own thought and practice. In “The Uses of the Erotic,” Lorde writes about the transformation that happens within us when we find and touch the deepest sources of our joy, when we recognize its possibility and creative force. She argues that once have felt the truth of that yes, it becomes our responsibility “not to settle for the convenient, the shoddy, the conventionally expected, nor the merely safe.”1

    We live in a world that wants to shrink us. But I want our lives to be as wide as the sky.

    My bedrock commitment is to the work of naming and transforming deep patterns of social and structural violence—especially the harm that religious texts and traditions have done to disabled people, to women and nonbinary folks, to people of color, to trans and queer people, to so many of us whose bodies and minds have been marked as other, as different, as less. This is how I understand my responsibility as a rabbi: not to be an apologist for tradition, but to commit over and over again to the practice of naming harm and bearing witness, of dreaming other possibilities, of building a world that welcomes us.

    This is not exactly a model of religious leadership that tends to get taught in rabbinical school. It’s a path rooted in feminist and womanist practice. It rests on a decidedly different understanding of religious authority—one that does not cede the power of the sacred or its political force to biblical text or to tradition or to any of the voices who lay claim to it. To put it bluntly: When I open the book of Genesis or when I delve into a passage of Talmud, I do not assume that the text is right, that its judgements are good. I do not assume that the words on the page or the interpretations of commentators have fully and truly named the sacred. I do not assume they serve as an exemplar of right action or ethical judgement. It seems utterly plain to me that sometimes tradition misses the mark.

    Judith Plaskow argues that attempts to ground feminist conviction in Scripture make a grave mistake “because they disguise or deny the authority of the reader.2 While it can seem appealing to argue that one’s feminism is authorized and sanctioned by the Bible, such claims leave the authority of the text firmly in place. Plaskow wants readers—all readers—to take responsibility for the choices we make, for the readings we accept. So do I. I hold to the insight of Jewish feminist Adrienne Rich, who reminds us that:

    To separate from parts of a legacy in a conscious, loving, and responsible way in order to say “This is frayed and needs repair; that no longer serves us; this is still viable and usable” is not to spurn tradition, but to take it very seriously.”3

    That’s a core part of what I do in Loving Our Own Bones. It’s one of the reasons I choose speak plainly about texts that I hate, about texts that rub hard against my heart, about texts that buttress violence, about texts that do harm. I want us all to learn the sacred skill of saying no.

    I also want to draw attention to a second element of Plaskow’s analysis of religious authority that I find crucial: her emphasis that authority unfolds through the ongoing, emergent discernment of interpreters in community. Refusing to anchor authority in traditional texts doesn’t have to thrust us back into pure individual subjectivity. Take the case of feminism: Plaskow calls attention to the way that feminist social movements help give women tools to insist on the importance of our own experience, to hone our own critical sensibilities, and to critique the voices and texts within culture and religion that have devalued our lives. As Plaskow says, “I did not get my feminist perspective from God, but neither did I or any other individual woman invent it in a vacuum. We developed it together.”

    That recognition grounds another choice I make in Loving Our Own Bones: the choice to center the work of disabled artists and activists as an essential part of my own canon. Many of the works I turn to most often are unabashedly secular: deeply dissident, brilliantly queer, gloriously irreverent. At the same time, I recognize these works as doing something profoundly sacred—pushing back against all the forces that dishonor and disdain disabled people’s lives, all the ways that dominant culture treats disabled people as disposable, as nothing more than trash.

    While I was in rabbinical school, I built for myself a practice of deliberately placing my books out of order on my bookshelf—slipping Eli Clare’s disability manifesto Exile and Pride in between the volumes of rabbinic commentary on Genesis and Exodus, shelving my collection of queer feminist poetry in the midst of my tractates of Talmud. I did it in part because I wanted a visceral reminder to not subordinate the knowledge borne out of justice struggle, because I want to claim queer, feminist, and disability wisdom as essential and sacred. But I also did it because I believe that it matters for Jewish tradition, because I believe that Torah as it’s been traditionally constituted has something vital to learn from the voices and perspectives of those of us who often get pushed to the margins. I believe Torah needs feminist, queer, trans, Black, Brown, indigenous, and disabled dissidence—that bringing these insights back into conversation with text can be a gift to tradition, a way of making it more holy and more whole.


    1. Audre Lorde, “Uses of the Erotic” in Sister Outsider: Essays and Speeches. (The Crossing Press, 1984), 57

    2. Judith Plaskow, “It is Not in Heaven: Feminism and Religious Authority,” in The Coming of Lilith: Essays on Feminism, Judaism, and Sexual Ethics, 1972-2003. (Beacon Press, 2005), 125.

    3. Adrienne Rich, “If Not With Others, How?” in Blood, Bread, and Poetry: Selected Prose 1979-1985.  (W.W. Norton & Company, 1986), 204-5.

Robert Monson

Response

Is That Even Allowed? What’s in a Name?

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.


  1. CDC, “Disability and Health Overview | CDC,” Centers for Disease Control and Prevention, May 2, 2024, https://www.cdc.gov/ncbddd/disabilityandhealth/disability.html.

  2. The concept of the “perfect” body shapes so much of our public policy and theologies. For more on this I bring Lamar Hardwick’s book Disability and the Church: A Vision for Diversity and Inclusion as well as Candida Moss’s book Divine Bodies: Resurrecting Perfection in the New Testament and Early Christianity. These two resources challenge our concept of disability and the perfect body.

  3. Kala Allen Omeiza, Autistic and Black: Our Experiences of Growth, Progress and Empowerment (Jessica Kingsley Publishers, 2024), 150.

  4. I realize that my framing here is one that could be perceived as negative and centering on the physical aspects of the body. I do so intentionally because this part of America’s history cannot be understated and should enter conversations around disability. Bodies were made brittle through dehumanizing treatment. The untold anxiety and trauma that so many faced also cannot be fully ignored. Any attempts to only tell of the beauty of disability will undoubtedly feel uncomfortable in light of America being a disabling apparatus. Not all disabilities are harmful or caused by outside forces.

  5. “Lead Poisoning in Flint, Michigan – National Partnership for Women & Families,” accessed December 6, 2023, https://nationalpartnership.org/report/clean-water-case-study-flint/#.

  6. I have recently been disturbed by the information that I have researched in the Ruderman White Paper that was published in March 2016. In this multilayered document, the Ruderman Family Foundation did extensive research into police interactions that resulted in violence. They note that “up to half of all people killed by police in the United States are disabled, and that almost all well-known cases of police brutality involve a person with a disability. This is true both for cases deemed illegal or against policy and for those in which officers are ultimately fully exonerated.” As a Black, disability scholar, I am horrified that not only are people being disabled by the police, many who are already disabled are being put to death at alarming rates.

  7. When disability began to manifest in different forms in my body, I had a very distinct lack of resources. I didn’t know where to turn or how to reconcile God with what was happening in my body. I am profoundly glad for the work of Julia Watts Belser, Lamar Hardwick, Amy Kenny, Cole Arthur Riley, Morgan Harper Nichols, and so many who helped provide avenues of flourishing for me.

  • Julia Watts Belser

    Julia Watts Belser

    Reply

    Resonse to Robert Monson

    Dear Robert,

    Thank you for this powerful reflection. I am honored by the questions you ask and the trust you offer, the way you write from and through your own embodied experience to illuminate crucial political and spiritual questions—about who gets to claim disability, about the way that racism so often and so brutally forecloses this terrain. As I sit with your words, I come back to a conviction that grounds my own work in the world: It matters to reckon with violence.

    I’m thinking about TL Lewis’ trenchant insight that “violence is both a cause and consequence of disability,” that ableist practice and imagination fuels racism and is inextricable from it. I’m thinking of the way Ta-Nehisi Coates describes racism as a force that lands with visceral brutality upon black bodies—the way “it dislodges brains, blocks airways, rips muscle, extracts organs, cracks bones, breaks teeth.”1 I’m thinking about enslavement and imprisonment; I’m thinking of Lamar Hardwick’s analysis of the way assumptions about the inferiority and undesirability of Black bodyminds remain so deeply rooted in white American religious thought.2 I’m thinking about Sami Schalk’s incisive recognition that black disability politics are not always grounded in disability identity, that requiring a certain kind of identification with disability often means overlooking a potent tradition of Black activism in practice.3 I’m thinking about the long legacy of environmental racism, the way Black neighborhoods have so often been treated as sacrifice zones, the way Black bodyminds have been made to bear the consequences of white people’s greed.

    I’m thinking about the way racism structures and shapes economic precarity, the way capitalism bears down hardest on certain bodies, the way poverty intensifies ableism’s brutality. Poverty makes it more likely that people experience disability, and it also makes disabled people’s lives more difficult: Who can afford to rest? Who has access to more capacious insurance, better assistive technology, or day-to-day supports? I think about the way racism compounds educational inequity and health care injustice, the way it contours the negotiations that are an endless part of disabled people’s lives, the way it makes sharpens the apparatus of evaluation and scrutiny that judges certain bodies as not trustworthy, not competent, not good enough.

    It matters to name this as violence.

    In Loving Our Own Bones, I argue that disabled people deserve space to acknowledge loss and grapple with grief—without having such feelings turned against us or used to undercut our own existence. We need more better ways to hold complex disability feelings, more space to acknowledge frustration and rage and longing and pain.

    Since the book has come out, I’ve been thinking with two new brilliant disability studies works that likewise probe the terrain of “bad” feelings: Mimi Khúc’s dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss and J. Logan Smilges’ Crip Negativity. In a powerful rejection of traditional notions of resilience and mental health, Khúc calls readers to linger with the realities of unwellness, with the recognition that we are “all differentially unwell.”  She orients our attention to the ways in which the world makes us sick (some of us, more than others), and she invites us to linger with the questions, “What hurts? And how do we go on living while it hurts?”4 I’ve also found myself deeply moved by J. Logan Smilges’ articulation of “crip negativity,” his recognition of the power and provocation that lies with bad feeling—the refusal to swallow pain, to fake a smile, to make nice.5

    We live in a world that demands perfection from its minoritized subjects. I’m thinking of the razor-sharp excellence expected of Black people, the way a racist system is ready to pounce at the first sign of weakness. Ableist systems likewise dangle the promise that if you excel, if you overcome, you might be granted some small measure of safety. Of course, excellence has never been enough to blunt the force of racism, just as it does not shield disabled people from the violence of ableism. But the lure is strong. In this landscape, it makes a perverse and terrible sense that it’s riskier for minoritized peoples to claim disability. Excellence often gets used as a survival strategy for navigating white supremacy, and disability has so often been understood as the very antithesis of excellence.

    These days, a lot of disability affirmation works to resist that devaluation by claiming disability as its own kind of brilliance. I recognize the strategic power of this move. But I also know this: I don’t want disability to be a superpower. I don’t want disability to be acknowledged only when it spurs creative genius. I want a place for disability that doesn’t have to mask pain or disguise discomfort, a place durable enough to hold the ache.

    That takes me back to God on Wheels, to the potency that can unfold theologically and spiritually when we embrace a God that is not modeled on the image of the conquering King. It’s balm to my heart to hear you name how God on Wheels speaks to you, to hear your own yes in response to this naming of God as one who knows both disability pain and disability joy.

    But as much as I revel in the potency of God on Wheels, as much as I savor the spicy subversiveness of claiming my own body-knowledge as a mirror to the holy, I also want to guard against a danger. I don’t want God on Wheels to become an exclusive single image for disability theology. When I write in Loving Our Own Bones, that “I want to glimpse God through each way disability unfolds in this world,” I mean I want my invocation of God on Wheels to be just one of a thousand disability theologies, just one glimpse and shimmer of a God who knows disability from the inside.

    You offer a powerful testimony from Kala Allen Omeiza’s Autistic and Black, and it makes me want to trace the theologically potency of nonspeaking people’s experience. I hesitate here, because I don’t know this terrain. But I’m thinking about what a Nonspeaking God might know about the underside of power: way this world runs roughshod over nonspeaking people’s agency, the way it burns to have one’s competence denied, over and over again. I think of how a Nonspeaking God might help us reimagine revelation as a dissident speech practice, as an act that breaks through the facile fluency of the speaking world. I think about the time it takes to communicate, about the effort involved, about the way communication costs. I think of the way that so many AAC devices come built with preprogrammed scripts, the way that communication often gets limited by other people’s assumptions about what you want to say. I think about the creativity it takes to work within constraints: to craft a poem, to articulate anger, to honor grief. I want to linger with the embodied knowledge that nonspeaking people carry, I want to learn what it might reveal about the potency and ingenuity of God’s own Word in the world, about the power of revelation and its limits, how it bursts through cracks and crevices.

    I want us to build a world that allows more disabled people the access to resources it takes to draw out these possibilities, that affords more of us the time and tools to write and dream, to imagine and instigate. I want a world committed to dismantling the hierarchies that so often slam shut the door.


    1. Ta-Nehisi Coates, 2015.  Between the World and Me.  (New York: Spiegel & Grau, 2015), 10.

    2. Lamar Hardwick, How Ableism Fuels Racism: Dismantling the Hierarchy of Bodies in the Church. (Brazos Press, 2024).

    3. Sami Schalk, Black Disability Politics. (Duke University Press, 2022), 13-4.

    4. Mimi Khúc, dear elia: Letters from the Asian American Abyss. (Duke University Press, 2024), 4.

    5. J. Logan Smilges, Crip Negativity. (University of Minnesota Press, 2023).

Judith Plaskow

Response

February 13, 2025, 1:00 am

Wendy Zierler

Response

February 20, 2025, 1:00 am

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