{"id":107531,"date":"2023-10-31T17:05:10","date_gmt":"2023-10-31T15:05:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=107531"},"modified":"2023-10-22T13:01:07","modified_gmt":"2023-10-22T11:01:07","slug":"13-05-93","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/?p=107531","title":{"rendered":"The Antidote to Ableism"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"\"<\/a>The Antidote to Ableism<\/a><\/strong><\/span><\/h5>\n

JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN<\/strong><\/span><\/p>\n

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COURTESY JULIA WATTS BELSER<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n

In her new book, Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, a disability activist and scholar, takes a \u2018revelatory and revolutionary\u2019 look at everything from the story of Moses to the value of Shabbat<\/strong><\/span><\/h4>\n
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I first met Rabbi Julia Watts Belser in 2016 in Boston before a keynote address she delivered called \u201cDisability and the Art of Midrash.\u201d In that talk, she laid out how she interprets text, tradition, and Torah from her perspective as a disabled woman. The approach, said Watts Belser\u2014who uses a wheelchair\u2014is \u201cTorah told at a slant.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser continues her ongoing work in Jewish justice and, as her new book, Loving Our Own Bones<\/a>: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole,<\/em> notes, her \u201ccommitment to center the wisdom of queer, feminist, and disabled Jews.\u201d In the book, she sources Jewish texts to contextualize and craft new conversations on disability.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As a rabbi, Watts Belser has taught Torah through queer, feminist, and disability lenses to communities across Jewish life, facilitating conversations about access, equity, and belonging. Watts Belser\u2014who is also professor of Jewish studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University, core faculty in Georgetown\u2019s Disability Studies Program, and a senior research fellow at Georgetown\u2019s Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs\u2014told me in a recent interview that she aims for these teachings to be \u201crevelatory and revolutionary.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser traces her activism to her undergraduate days at Cornell University, where she enrolled in a disability studies course. \u201cIt changed my life,\u201d she told me. \u201cI devised a campus-mapping project where a group of us documented barriers in the physical environment, focusing especially on wheelchair access. It was a visceral experience of understanding ableism as a system and structure that results in concrete acts of exclusion.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Her early college experience, she added, \u201claid the groundwork for a life of activism because it helped me diagnose the problem differently. It taught me that we built this world in ways that disadvantage certain people. It also helped me see that we could build it differently. It\u2019s an ethical imperative.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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According to Jay Ruderman of the Ruderman Family Foundation, whose work includes the Ruderman Synagogue Inclusion Project, Watts Belser embodies the \u201cbelief that inclusion and understanding of all people is essential to a fair and flourishing community.\u201d The Ruderman Foundation\u2014whose advocacy for the disabled began in the Boston Jewish community with a gift to Jewish day schools stipulating that all children, including those with disabilities, were entitled to a Jewish education\u2014advocates for \u201cthe inclusion of people with disabilities throughout society.\u201d To that end, Ruderman said: \u201cWe admire Rabbi Watts Belser\u2019s work to incorporate Jewish wisdom, ethics, and literature in her quest to bring about impactful social change for marginalized communities.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser opens and closes Loving Our Own Bones<\/em> with the awesome image of correlating the wheels of her own wheelchair to those of God\u2019s chariot. The insight came to her years ago at a Shavuot service, which traditionally includes a reading from the Book of Ezekiel. In her book, she highlights Ezekiel\u2019s description of the chariot as vast and \u201clifted up by four angelic creatures with fused legs, lustrous wings, and great wheels. The wheels \u2018gleamed like beryl,\u2019 they were \u2018wheels within wheels\u2019 and the \u2018spirit of the creatures was in the wheels.\u2019\u201d The image immediately dazzled Watts Belser and led her to the extraordinary idea that God has personally experienced disability.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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At the end of the book, she comes back to God\u2019s chariot wheels to invoke \u201ca moment of representation and kinship\u2014of seeing myself as a wheelchair user reflected in God\u2019s way of moving through the world. While initially captivated by the idea that the text was a mirror to my own experience, I began to think theologically about the significance of God\u2019s wheels. What do they offer? What do they allow God to feel and to know? For me, there is something about the physicality of my experience as a wheelchair user. I feel the ground roll up through my body in a way that most walking people do not. I feel the vibration of the ground coming up through my wheels and into my body. It\u2019s a visceral sense of connection.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In her readings of Moses\u2019 and Isaac\u2019s disabilities, Watts Belser discusses the implications of healing versus curing. For her, the distinction between the two words is not a matter of semantics. She asserts that Moses\u2019 speech impediment is not a defect that needs to be cured<\/em>. Moses will always stutter, and he is aided through a set of accommodations that include his brother Aaron as interpreter and a magnificent staff that Pharoah experiences as dangerous magic and Watts Belser says is \u201cassistive technology.\u201d The description is more than a clever bit; it places the staff on par with Watts Belser\u2019s wheelchair embodying the wheels of God\u2019s chariot.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In Loving Our Own Bones<\/em>, Watts Belser is clear in her writing that she wants \u201cto upend the assumption that lies beneath Midrash Tanhuma that when Moses delivers the words of Deuteronomy, he speaks with flawless fluency. Why should we imagine that Moses has lost the distinctive quality of his own speech? Why should we imagine his mouth remade?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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In an episode of the Association for Jewish Studies\u2019 podcast, Watts Belser told her interviewer that Midrash Tanhuma \u201cclaims that Moses was cured because he learned Torah. \u2018You said you were not a man of words,\u2019 the midrash asserts, reflecting on Moses\u2019 protest in Exodus 4<\/a><\/span>, \u2018and here now, you speak exquisitely.\u2019\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser acknowledges there is healing at the heart Moses\u2019 story. However, she says, \u201cMoses is freed of internalized ableism, that terrible sense of insufficiency that led him to tell God he wasn\u2019t fit to lead because of his own stutter. But I also mean to name the way that the community is transformed\u2014how people learn to listen more keenly to Moses\u2019 voice and value him as a stuttering speaker.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

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Disabled folks aren\u2019t on this earth to enlighten or inspire. We weren\u2019t born to put other people\u2019s troubles in perspective, to cheer you up, to remind you that it could be worse. We aren\u2019t exemplars of courage or cautionary tales. We aren\u2019t your heartwarming story, your feel-good click.<\/strong><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The essence of Watts Belser\u2019s thinking about Moses\u2019 stutter encapsulates her holistic thinking about disability. She noted in an email following our conversation that her readings of Moses and Isaac\u2019s disabilities \u201cask us to reimagine the way we regard disability, to challenge the common perception that disability is a personal flaw or private lack that needs to be minimized or overcome.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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She considers Isaac\u2019s blindness and Rebecca\u2019s ruse in presenting Jacob as Esau to receive his father\u2019s blessing of the firstborn in texts that associate Isaac with low vision or blindness throughout much of his life. There are virtually no visual cues in Isaac\u2019s origin story and beyond. For example, Isaac\u2019s name evokes the sound of laughter. On Mount Moriah, he asks his father where the lamb is\u2014a natural question from a child for whom so much has been hidden. He intuits that Rebecca is beautiful, but his love for her is not attached to her physical appearance.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser further explained in her email: \u201cOf course, there\u2019s no definitive claim to be made here about whether or how Isaac perceives during his early years. But instead of assuming that every biblical character senses according to the normative pattern, I\u2019m inclined to let the available evidence invite us to ask: What if Isaac has never been secure in his sightedness?\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Loving Our Own Bones<\/em> is also an intimate portrayal of Watts Belser\u2019s relationship with her wheelchair. In the book, she describes how \u201cI flow together with my wheels\u2014two intertwined bodies becoming one as we roll.\u201d She says that \u201cover the decades, I\u2019ve built relationships with many different wheelchairs\u2014getting to know their preferences and particulars, coming to understand how they move through the world and what that means for how we live together.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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As Watts Belser and I discussed the mobility her wheelchair provides her\u2014she has traveled the world on her own\u2014we segued into a nuanced discussion of ableism. She firmly and rightly rejected my comment that I did not think of her as disabled. \u201cWhen people tell me \u2018I don\u2019t think of you as disabled,\u2019 it\u2019s meant as a compliment,\u201d she told me. \u201cBut it\u2019s predicated on a very negative view of disability. It assumes the category of disability is horrible, tragic, limited, and disastrous. Disability is a part of life. It can be a source of great understanding\u2014an opening to feel and know and explore things I might otherwise have never done.\u201d She further explained she proudly uses the term disability \u201cbecause I believe that living a vibrant unabashedly disabled life is a brilliant way of refuting ableism\u2019s lie.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser cautions against \u201cmaking a silver-lining story out of disability. It\u2019s bogus and it does tremendous harm to people.\u201d In the book, she refers to those stories as \u201cinspiration porn.\u201d She writes in her book: \u201cDisabled folks aren\u2019t on this earth to enlighten or inspire. We weren\u2019t born to put other people\u2019s troubles in perspective, to cheer you up, to remind you that it could be worse. We aren\u2019t exemplars of courage or cautionary tales. We aren\u2019t your heartwarming story, your feel-good click.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Watts Belser told me that the idea of a disabled person as inspiring or serving as a role model brings comparisons that \u201cdo no one any good. We all have a stake in working to undo ableism. It would be a great service if the word \u2018inspiration\u2019 is not presented as an ideal.\u201d She wants readers to \u201crecognize and resist the kind of violence that follows when we force people to fit into a one-size-fits-all society.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Her thinking on Shabbat observance is similarly forthright and unambiguous in refuting ableism as all-encompassing. \u201cShabbat is my antidote to ableism,\u201d she pointed out. The beauty of Shabbat is to counter ableism\u2019s emphasis on hyperproductivity. \u201cShabbat is a way of unraveling some of those assumptions that my worth is measured by my work; my value is bound up with my ability to make and earn and produce.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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For Watts Belser, Shabbat \u201cunbinds\u201d people from our fast-paced world: \u201cAbleism isn\u2019t good for anybody with a body or mind,\u201d she said. \u201cIt has its claws in all of us, but it most profoundly targets disabled people.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Among Watts Belser\u2019s observations, perhaps the one that most concisely conveys the spirit of Loving Our Own Bones<\/em> is the concept of disability \u201cas spiritual dissent.\u201d She explains: \u201cBeing disabled in a world that often treats disabled people with disdain has taught me to say no. Disability has taught me to say no to lies about who we are, to say no as unapologetically as I can. It\u2019s a crucial lesson for all of us.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Her ideal world is embodied in an anecdote from her book about a young deaf girl. Her teacher said that in the world to come, the girl would be able to hear. The girl countered that in the world to come, God would know sign language.<\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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Judy Bolton-Fasman\u2019s<\/strong> work has appeared in The New York Times, The Forward, The Jerusalem Report, and other venues. She is the author of Asylum: A Memoir of Family Secrets.<\/em><\/span><\/p>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n

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The Antidote to Ableism JUDY BOLTON-FASMAN COURTESY JULIA WATTS BELSER In her new book, Rabbi Julia Watts Belser, a disability activist and scholar, takes a \u2018revelatory and revolutionary\u2019 look at everything from the story of Moses to the value of Shabbat I first met Rabbi Julia Watts Belser in 2016 in Boston before a keynote […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":[],"categories":[6],"tags":[26,24],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107531"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=107531"}],"version-history":[{"count":5,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107531\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":107797,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/107531\/revisions\/107797"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=107531"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=107531"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.reunion68.se\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=107531"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}