Grawemeyer Religion Award winner Rabbi Julia Watts Belser delivers a beautiful vision of disability empowerment

LOUISVILLE — Julia Watts Belser, a rabbi and faculty member at Georgetown University, delivered a lyrical and deeply thoughtful Grawemeyer Religion Award address Tuesday at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary.

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Belser’s books include “Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole,” the winner of the National Jewish Book Award.

“I want to lift up a core commitment I see at the heart of disability culture: a fierce and unabashed commitment to insist on worthiness, brilliance and the value of disabled people’s lives in a world that so often treats us like trash,” Belser said. “I name that work as sacred, that conviction we can help each other to spit out poison … that conviction that we deserve a world that welcomes us.”

She said her aim during Tuesday’s address was to “to show how disability wisdom can transform the way we read the Bible and other sacred texts. … I think disability wisdom can shiver something vital and new into the ways we name and know God.”

Belser defined disability expansively, including neurodivergence, depression, chronic pain and fatigue, and long Covid.

“We live in a world that is set up to accommodate certain kinds of bodies and minds. That’s what I mean when I talk about ableism,” Belser said.

In the Talmud, the rabbis talk about the “world’s most wicked city, Sodom,” and how it was destroyed alongside Gomorrah as recorded in Genesis 19. But Sodom was destroyed for reasons other than sexual activity, the rabbis pointed out: it was, as Ezekiel 16:49 explains, that Sodom and her daughters “had pride, excess of food and prosperous ease but did not aid the poor and needy.”

“The sin of Sodom is a failure of hospitality,” Belser said. “It’s a practice of cruelty, violence, brutality and greed.”

In the Talmud, the rabbis teach that Sodom had one bed “on which they laid each and every guest,” Belser noted. “If a person was too tall, they cut off his feet.” Short people were stretched until they fit the guest bed.

“I find this a powerful story for thinking about ableism, where we force everyone into the same too-tight box,” Belser said. “We live in a world that would rather chop us up and spit us out than cherish the riotous diversity of all humankind.”

Another truth — one that’s not spoken of frequently, she said — is “ableism hurts all of us. Ableism isn’t good for any body or any mind.”

“One way ableism works is it makes a fetish out of productivity,” Belser said. “It tries to sell us a lie, that our fundamental worth is tied to our work. That lie hits hardest against people with disabilities.” Some can’t work, “and some of us need accommodations that all too often get refused. Ableism is that fear that gnaws us in the night.”

Belser next turned to the example of Moses, “no confident speaker, even though he speaks directly to God.” She called Moses “a disabled prophet whose disability is recognized and affirmed by God.”

Moses asks God to “please send someone else” to speak to pharaoh. “I take Moses’ hesitation as a witness to the way internalized ableism creeps into our hearts,” Belser said.

God assures Moses, “I will be with your mouth and teach you what you are to speak.” The Hebrew verb at the start of that verse is “part of the way God names God’s self when God first speaks to Moses at the burning bush,” Belser said, where God says, “I will be who I will be.” God’s presence in the mouth of Moses “is in the very place where Moses might have imagined God to be absent.”

“This verse has become something of a touchstone for me when I am frustrated with my own disabled bones,” Belser said. Some days, she lays a hand on her knee or hip or thigh “where I feel my disability acutely, and I whisper those words to myself — a balm, that promise of presence.”

In short, God meets Moses’ access needs. God tells Moses to take Aaron, his brother, “in a moment we might call the first reasonable accommodation in the Bible,” Belser said. “It is for me a powerful reminder that disabled people deserve a world of abundant access, a world that offers kinship and support.”

In verse 14, God’s anger is kindled against Moses. “These words feel like a knife in my heart. They name a hard truth of living in an ableist world,” Belser said. “When we ask for support, when we acknowledge disability, we open ourselves up to anger, frustration and the vulnerability of being denied. I don’t want to paper over that pain, but I also want to open up a different possibility. For years, I read this text as though God was an inflexible boss. I read it as God’s failure to offer empathy.”

Belser offered this possibility: “What if the moment of divine anger reflects God’s own vulnerability? What if it’s a witness to God’s own need? What if God also has access needs?”

Most of us “default on the notion that God is all everything, all capable all the time,” she said. But “here’s the thing: thinking about theology through the prism of disability has given me a radically different perspective. I no longer think of God as being distant from disability. I think of God as one who knows disability from the inside.”

“What if God can’t do God’s work in the world without Moses, without me, and without you? What if God needs us” in the same way Belser needs help with lifting a stack of books or driving to the store. “What if God needs us in a way that is visceral and vulnerable? What if God relies on us?”

In verse 16, God tells Moses that Aaron will serve as a mouth for him, and Moses will serve as God for Aaron. “If we let this verse tell us something about the nature of God’s power, Moses directs and depends on Aaron, both in charge and in need, in the very same moment,” Belser said. “Perhaps God’s position is precarious. As far as I can tell, God can’t pick up a single stone without a human hand to lift it. This is terrain many disabled people know intimately.”

In the disability community, “we often talk about the beauty and the power of interdependence,” she said. “I want to be real with you: We are living in a moment when the concrete care systems that support disabled people’s lives are under profound attack.”

“When I say it matters that religious communities recognize disability as a justice issue, I don’t mean God and Moses as an ancient story. I mean I want us to fight hard for a world where we all have access to health care. That’s what I’m here for,” Belser said. “That’s what I want. I think about a world that knows and honors the brilliance of disability difference.”

A decade or more ago, Belser found herself in an in-depth study of Ezekiel 1, which envisions God’s “immense chariot and its shimmering wheels. It was electric. God on wheels! Yes,” she said. Even though God is lifted up by four angelic creatures, “it’s the wheels that Ezekiel lingers with. The biblical text is lush with wheel love.” Belser, who uses a wheelchair, sees verse 20 — “Wherever the spirit would go, they went, and the wheels rose along with them, for a living spirit was in the wheels” — as written “just for me.”

“That was a moment of kinship, rolling down a smooth, gentle grade,” she said. “The way I lean into a curve .. the twinned vibration of Earth and wheel, the intricate interplay of muscle and spin.”

“If God wheels through this world, God knows the sharp frustration of wheelchair life — the curb without a cut, the church or synagogue with no accessible place to pee,” she said. “I think God knows what it’s like to make a long and lonely trace of the perimeter. God knows the haggling, the negotiations at the door. God knows the longing and the giving up and the slow trudge home.”

Maybe the question we need to ask is not where is God, but how have we shut God out?

“As much as I love the image of God on wheels, I want more. I’m thinking about a Deaf God, a God with Down syndrome,” Belser said. “I ask myself what a blind God knows and how an autistic God perceives this world. I want to revel in the holy science of a nonspeaking God’s heart.”

“I want to build a world with you,” she said, “a world that knows that thing we thought we had to hide might be our best beloved, a world that savors neurodiversity. I want to build a world that prizes us, that praises our particularity, a world that celebrates and cradles us, a world that wants us here, a world that desires us. Thank you.”

Each year the Grawemeyer Awards honor the power of creative ideas to improve our culture via music composition, education, religion, psychology and world order. Business executive and family man H. Charles Grawemeyer established the awards in 1984 at the University of Louisville in collaboration with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Academics and community members choose among nominees from around the world to ensure that each winning idea is relevant to society at large. The University of Louisville announces the winners in December and presents the awards at a ceremony the following April. Each award winner receives $100,000, which they may use, if they choose, to develop and accelerate the spread of their powerful ideas. Learn more here.