Mission Yearbook: Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, author of ‘Loving Our Own Bones,’ helps others

Julia Watts Belser, a rabbi and faculty member at Georgetown University, recently delivered a lyrical and deeply thoughtful Grawemeyer Religion Award address at Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Watch her presentation here.

Belser’s books include “Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole.”

“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 the 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.”

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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.

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.”

Mike Ferguson, Editor, Presbyterian News Service, Interim Unified Agency (Click here to read original PNS Story)
 

Let us join in prayer for:

Meg Rift, Executive Assistant, Stated Clerk’s Office, Interim Unified Agency  
Kathy Riley, Associate for Emotion, Spiritual Care, Presbyterian Disaster Assistance, Interim Unified Agency 

Let us pray:

God of wholeness, may the world you intend be the one we seek. May the way you love be the way we love, so that even broken hearts pulse with your grace. Amen.