How does Judaism approach the topic of disability? In this episode of The Bible for Normal People, Julia Watts Belser joins Pete and Cynthia to examine how the Hebrew Bible portrays disability and how Jewish tradition engages these texts in both ancient and modern contexts. She explains what a “blemish” means in Leviticus, the rabbinic tradition of sacred interpretation, and how disability wisdom can make a better world for everybody. Join them as they explore the following questions:
What are some ways that the Hebrew Bible describes disabilities?
How does the concept of “blemish” (mum) in Leviticus 21 contribute to a biblical understanding of disability?
How does the biblical categorization of disabilities compare to modern definitions?
What assumptions about the human condition might have led biblical writers to describe disabilities the way they did?
Is there evidence of judgment or stigma placed on disabilities in Leviticus 21?
How did later Jewish traditions, like the rabbis, reinterpret Leviticus 21 and its implications for disability?
How does ableism shape societal attitudes, policies, and norms toward people with disabilities?
What insights does disability experience bring to interpreting the Bible and engaging with religious traditions?
What role does interpretation play in Jewish tradition, and how is it seen as a sacred and creative act?
Why is it important to engage deeply with the “difficult parts” of biblical tradition?
How can disability wisdom inform community building, care, and inclusion in faith traditions?
Quotables
Pithy, shareable, sometimes-less-than-280-character statements from the episode you can share.
“Disability appears in so many of the different formative stories in the Hebrew Bible—from stories about Moses having a speech difference, or some commentators say a stutter, to Isaac becoming blind, to Jacob walking with a limp.” — Julia Watts Belser
“I think it's really important to steer clear of what sometimes gets called retroactive diagnosis—looking at a particular biblical figure and trying to figure out, how would we classify them medically if we could sit them down in a doctor's office today? I think that's so risky because the ways that we think about and narrate disability have changed dramatically over time, and they continue to change.” — Julia Watts Belser
“Part of what I want us to do when we look at disability in the Hebrew Bible is to really be alert to those changes [over time]. To pay attention to historical and cultural differences, so that even though disability has always been a part of the human experience, it's played out in so many different ways over time.” — Julia Watts Belser
“I want to just be really clear that I think this is a place for me as a reader where I just take it as bedrock that God loves disabled people. That, for me, is not up for debate. So I see [Leviticus 21] as a moment where the biblical text is giving us a really strong, powerful record of the impact of human prejudice. You know, ableism and disability disapproval have been with us for a long time. And I think we see that in a passage like Leviticus 21.” — Julia Watts Belser
“There I was after synagogue, in line for a little snack, and a visitor to synagogue came up to me—a wheelchair user—and they said, “What's wrong with you?” And the sort of conventional answer [is] a kind of diagnosis, right? “Oh, this is why I use a wheelchair, there's something wrong with my body, and here's the story.” I don't frame disability in those terms. I think instead about what's wrong here is actually that we live in a world that has been set up to work for certain bodies and minds and instead has disenfranchised a whole lot of other people. What's wrong here has much less to do with my own body and much more to do with architectural barriers, physical barriers, structures about how we organize time, expectations that everyone's going to move through the world in the same way, that everyone's going to work at the same pace, that everyone's going to be productive in the same way.” — Julia Watts Belser
“When we think about disability, I want to orient us toward the question of ableism. When I talk about ableism, I mean a big social structural system. A system that shapes policies, practices, norms, and attitudes in ways that end up marginalizing people with disabilities, as well as people who are thought to be disabled.…It's not just a matter of meanness or niceness. Ableism gets encoded in the very way that we've built this world, in the way that we structure time and pace, in the way school works, education systems work, the way jobs are structured.” — Julia Watts Belser
“We live in a world that is full of really tight, constricting norms and expectations about how bodies and minds are supposed to work, and those end up shoving certain people to the margins.” — Julia Watts Belser
“Part of my commitment is to help all of us develop a more critical perception for noticing and observing and attending to these different kinds of experiences. Because disability as a whole is, of course, a very vast category, and there are so many different kinds of disability experiences. I myself am a wheelchair user, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to disability. There's so many different types of barriers, so many different types of norms, so many different types of expectations.” — Julia Watts Belser
“The prophetic work of developing that critical consciousness to say—Who's getting excluded here? What does this norm assume about how bodies and minds are supposed to work?—That is actually ongoing work for all of us to take on. And it's one of the reasons why I think working in cross-disability solidarity with folks who have a lot of different kinds of disability experiences, why that feels so important to me.” — Julia Watts Belser
“Even though there were times when I really wanted to be “normal,” I think there was also always part of me that just felt a kind of fierce fidelity to my actual embodied self.” — Julia Watts Belser
“When we think about Jewish tradition, I think it's first and foremost, always crucial to understand the significant role that commentary, debate, and interpretation play in the way that Jews think about text.” — Julia Watts Belser
“In a traditional Jewish context, you never just read the biblical text on its own. You're always reading, you're meant to read with and be in conversation with centuries of commentators who are in conversation with earlier generations of commentators, who are in conversation with earlier generations of commentators. The importance of this tradition, of an ongoing conversation with text, is really baked into traditional Jewish modes of reading and thinking about the Bible.” — Julia Watts Belser
“That idea that interpretation is a sacred act is deeply built into Jewish tradition. And I take that as an obligation.” — Julia Watts Belser
“One of the things that sometimes surprises readers from outside the tradition is how daring sometimes the rabbis are willing to be. Sometimes we think that it's a very modern problem, or it's a very modern issue, to have a kind of deep problem with the text. But when we look at ancient rabbinic text, I see many places where the rabbis are really grappling hard with the text and sometimes working to dramatically reinterpret, reimagine, and change what seems to be, from an otherwise straightforward reading, a pretty straightforward biblical law.” — Julia Watts Belser
“That kind of commitment to interpretation as a sacred act, and as a sacred social responsibility—that's a very powerful orientation that goes deep in Jewish tradition.” — Julia Watts Belser
“When I read Leviticus 21 every year, because it comes around every year in the Jewish annual reading of the Torah, I brace myself. But I take that every year as a kind of a goad, a witness to ableism in action. When I encounter that text, I let it be in my world as a witness to so much violence that has been done. And then it is also part of the fuel of my own commitment to drawing something new and beautiful from this complicated, tangled, meaningful, but complex inheritance. But what I don't want to do is just paper over it and wrap it up with a bow.” — Julia Watts Belser
“Torah told slant. Torah told through the limp. That's my other reading strategy, which is to ask not just what does Jewish tradition or what does the Bible say about disability, but what does disability experience offer and bring to the Bible, to spiritual life, to our engagement with religious tradition and with religious community?” — Julia Watts Belser
“There's so many ways in which when I ask myself to read with disability in mind, my own disabled, lived, enfleshed experience. I see things, I come to know things, I taste things in the biblical text that I otherwise would never have found.” — Julia Watts Belser
“Disabled people matter. Our lives have value. We are beloved and we deserve a world that welcomes us. That's just bedrock. Rather than trying to fix people's bodies and minds and make them fit some tight constricting notion of what's right or good or normal, I want us to work to change the world we live in. And I want us all to commit to building a world that cherishes disabled people as we are. A world that wants us to thrive.” — Julia Watts Belser
Mentioned in This Episode
Class: November Class “Get a Grip on the Epistles” taught by Dr. Jennifer Garcia Bashaw
Books: By Julia Watts Belser & Nancy L. Eiesland
Join: The Society of Normal People online community
Support: www.thebiblefornormalpeople.com/give
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Pete: Today on the Bible for normal people I'm here with my wonderful co-host and nerd in residence, Cynthia Shafer-Elliott, welcome back to the podcast, Cynthia.
Cynthia: Oh, thanks Pete. It's great to be here.
Pete: No, it's great to have you. So, okay. Today we're talking about a Jewish perspective on disability with Julia Watts Belser.
Cynthia: Yeah. Julia is a rabbi, a scholar, and a spiritual teacher who works at the intersections of disability studies, queer feminist Jewish ethics, and environmental justice. She is a professor of Jewish studies at Georgetown University as well as a core faculty in Georgetown's disability studies program. Her latest book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole won a national Jewish book award and also is coming out in paperback very soon.
Pete: All right, folks, with all that said, let's get into this wonderful conversation with Julia.
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Julia: “Torah told slant, Torah told through the limp. And that's my other reading strategy, which is to ask, not just what does Jewish tradition or what does the Bible say about disability, but what does disability experience offer and bring to the Bible, to spiritual life, to our engagement with religious tradition and with religious community?”
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Cynthia: We're so happy to have you here, Julia. Welcome to the Bible for Normal People.
Julia: Thank you so much. I'm really thrilled to be here!
Cynthia: I am really excited for you to be here because as a fellow Hebrew Bible scholar, I'm really interested in the studies of disabilities and in particular, you know, what your work has been doing on it. So I guess a really good place to start for our talk here today is maybe just to start with a basic question. What are some ways that the Hebrew Bible describes disabilities?
Julia: Yeah, it's a wonderful question. It's a great place to start. And it's actually a really complicated one. I mean, if you crack open the Bible, disability is everywhere. Disability appears in so many of the different formative stories in the Hebrew Bible—from stories about Moses having a speech difference, or some commentators say a stutter, to Isaac becoming blind, to Jacob walking with a limp. But when we want to think more globally about the way the Hebrew Bible categorizes or thinks about disabilities, books often look at places like Leviticus 21, which is a really significant place for articulating a biblical concept of disability that's described as a mum. That's a Hebrew word that I think is best translated as blemish, right? A mum or a blemish.
So Leviticus 21 is a passage that describes priestly blemishes, a whole bunch of things that disqualify biblical priests from serving at the altar. So it's a really interesting place to think about a particular kind of construction of disability, because the biblical text gives us a list of what this category includes. It includes physical disabilities, it makes an explicit mention of people who limp, sometimes it's translated as people who are lame. It includes people of short stature, people who have a hunchback, people who are blind.
But interestingly, it also includes a lot of things that modern folks, at least modern readers in the United States, don't usually think of as disabilities. Things like boil scars. Or having once had a broken arm. So we already get to see that this category of the mum or the blemish doesn't entirely overlap with modern notions of disability. That passage, for example, never includes intellectual disability. It also doesn't mention deafness, and that's particularly significant because elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible, we definitely see texts that do recognize intellectual disability, deafness, as quite stigmatized experiences.
So there are definitely other passages, other texts that certainly think about those two and a whole other host of experiences as disabilities. So the concept of the blemish doesn't really cover the entirety of the category, but I think it's an interesting way to see some of how that category begins to take shape.
Cynthia: Yeah, so it sounds like you're saying that there's a lot more diversity about addressing, you know, this aspect of the human condition.
Julia: Yes, absolutely. We see a tremendous diversity here and, you know, there's other frameworks in biblical text, for example, for thinking about experiences of chronic illness, experiences of madness, or things that feel evocative of contemporary notions of depression or other kinds of mental health disabilities.
But I think one thing that I'd want to really caution against: I think it's really important to steer clear of what sometimes gets called retroactive diagnosis, right? Looking at a particular biblical figure and trying to figure out like, how would we classify them medically if we could sit them down in a doctor's office today? And I think that's so risky because the ways that we think about and narrate disability have changed dramatically over time, and they continue to change.
And part of what I want us to do when we look at disability in the Hebrew Bible is to really be alert to those changes. To pay attention to historical and cultural differences, so that even though disability has always been a part of the human experience, it's played out in so many different ways over time.
Pete: Julia, can I jump in here? Because the question is coming up for me, just in terms of how we might use the word disability in our culture and the kinds of things that the Bible talks about. With Leviticus 21, for example, and the blemishes, was there—it might be hard to answer this question, but I'm just curious—if there might be some sense of individuals who have blemishes like this or less than in a sense, or are they, is there any, um, judgment placed upon these kinds of disability?
Julia: Leviticus 21 is a very judgy passage. [Cynthia and Pete chuckle] It's definitely clear that these conditions, these experiences, it sees them as unfortunate, negative conditions, and it describes them as a kind of affront to God. So I want to just be really clear that I think this is a place for me as a reader where I just take it as bedrock that God loves disabled people. I mean, that for me is not up for debate. So I see this as a moment where the biblical text is giving us a really strong, powerful record of the impact of human prejudice. You know, ableism and disability disapproval have been with us for a long time. And I think we see that in a passage like Leviticus 21.
Pete: Yeah. And these are blemishes that keep men from serving as priests?
Julia: That's right. Well, so they don't actually disqualify a man from being a priest. They disqualify him from the most sacred, the most important task of the priesthood, and that is serving at the altar, performing sacrifice. But it's important because sometimes people think, “Oh, that takes his priesthood away.” And that's not the case.
Cynthia: That’s a good clarification. So then to kind of follow up on this, so what might be some assumptions about the human condition that would lead biblical writers to say what they say?
Julia: I mean, so one of the things that's really interesting about Leviticus 21 is that this category of the mum, the blemish, is focused particularly on aesthetics or visual appearance, and it seems that one of the things that's really at play here is the idea that a priestly body, a priest who has a “blemish,” is displeasing to God.
Now, one of the things that's really interesting here is that not all of the blemishes that are mentioned in Leviticus 21 are likely to be visible in ordinary circumstances. For example, Leviticus 21 includes crushed testicles, which if those are visible to ordinary eyes in the middle of the temple, there are other problems going on.
So, um—
Pete: Well, it might be audible from the man screaming his head off at that point.
Julia: Right, well let's assume a past wound. [All laugh] Um, but the, um, but that passage as well as blindness, things like that are suggestive of the idea that the priestly body is imagined as a kind of microcosm of the ideal human form. It's meant to not disturb or distract in any way. And so this idea of the sort of smooth, unblemished, harmonious body becomes held up as an ideal.
One of the things that's really interesting to me is that later Jewish texts make that concern about distraction really explicit. In Jewish traditions, the rabbis actually are very, the classical rabbis, the ancient rabbis were, I think, deeply uncomfortable with the assumptions embedded in the biblical text that God has a problem with certain bodies, that God finds certain bodies distasteful.
And so instead, they argue that the core problem here is that other worshipers might be distracted by the disabled body of the priest. Now, when I read a text like that, I think two things. I think, first of all, that's really interesting because it already helps us recognize that the key problem here isn't the body per se. It's about the reaction to the body, right? It's a social experience. It's a fact that this particular priestly body gets read as, seen as, treated as weird, strange, undesirable, not pretty. All of those things turn out to be distractions from the act of prayer.
Now here's where it goes wrong, though. The rabbis say, okay, that means we shouldn't have the blemished priest performing his work. What the shift that I think is really important to make is to say everyone in the community has a responsibility to manage their own distraction. Let's put the onus, the responsibility, on the people, the community at large. Because bodies and minds are what they are, right? I want a world that welcomes us, regardless.
Pete: You know, and you're illustrating something here that I really would like to get into with you, this idea of, of, of going beyond the Bible.
Julia: Yeah.
Pete: In a sense. Which, which I think is so hugely important, not just for the issue of disability, but almost anything we can put our fingers on in terms of engaging this ancient text from a modern point of view.
But I'd love to just back up a little bit here and talk about, you know, you have an approach to this. You have an approach to understanding disability within the life of faith and the Jewish tradition. And you refer to it as flipping the tables on the question of disability. So could you explain to us, what are the tables you're flipping? What does that mean?
Julia: Okay, so I start the book with a story when a visitor to my synagogue, there I was after synagogue, you know, getting my bagel in line for a little snack and a visitor to synagogue asked, you know, came up to me as a wheelchair user and they said, what's wrong with you?
And that's the sort of conventional answer, what's wrong with you, answers with a kind of diagnosis, right? Explains, “Oh, this is why I use a wheelchair, this is, you know, there's something wrong with my body, and here's the story.” I don't frame disability in those terms. I think instead about what's, what's wrong here is actually that we live in a world that has been set up to work for certain bodies and minds and instead has disenfranchised a whole lot of other people, right?
So what's wrong here has much less to do with my own body and much more to do with architectural barriers, physical barriers, structures about how we organize time, expectations that everyone's going to move through the world in the same way, that everyone's going to work at the same pace, that everyone's going to be productive in the same way.
I want to orient us when we think about disability, I want to orient us toward the question of ableism. When I talk about ableism, I mean big social structural system. A system that shapes policies, practices, norms, and attitudes in ways that end up marginalizing people with disabilities, as well as people who are thought to be disabled.
Um, and I think one of the things that's most important to think about when we think about ableism is that it's not just a matter of like meanness or niceness. Ableism gets encoded in the very way that we've built this world, in the way that we structure time and pace, in the way school works, education systems work, the way jobs are structured.
We live in a world that is full of really tight, constricting norms and expectations about how bodies and minds are supposed to work, and those end up shoving certain people to the margins.
Pete: Yeah, you know, the term that comes to mind, Julia, as you describe it that way, is I think a biblical theme in general, which is those who are marginalized calling power to account.
Julia: Yes.
Pete: You're able to do that because you have a disability. You see things that other people don't see. It's almost, I would say it's not, not to be too flowery here, but it's almost like a prophetic responsibility, you know, to, to call out the structures that are dehumanizing.
Julia: That's right. And part of my commitment is to helping all of us develop a more critical perception for noticing and observing and attending to these different kinds of experiences. Because disability as a whole is, of course, a very vast category, and there are so many different kinds of disability experiences.
I myself am a wheelchair user, but that’s just the tip of the iceberg when it comes to disability. There's so many different types of barriers, so many different types of norms, so many different types of expectations.
So let's use your term, the prophetic work, right, of building that kind of, developing that critical consciousness to say, who's getting excluded here? What does this norm assume about how bodies and minds are supposed to work? That is actually, that is ongoing work for all of us to take on. And it's one of the reasons why I think working in cross-disability solidarity with folks who have a lot of different kinds of disability experiences, why that feels so important to me.
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Pete: So, Julia, also in your book, you have a really very powerful story, I think, about you as a child, and if you wouldn't mind relaying that to us.
Julia: Sure, I'd love to. So, as I said, I'm a wheelchair user now, but I used to walk as a child, and I walked with a limp. And you know, everyone wanted to fix it up. You know, I went to physical therapy. I had these exercises. I tried to “walk right,” right? I was a very dutiful good kid, right? And so I did my exercises night after night. I practiced over and over that totally elusive motion of heel before toe, heel before toe.
But one of the things I remember most vividly from my own childhood, is I remember listening to the offbeat of my particular quirky stride, and I remember loving the sound of my own step. Right? It was like my signature. That was something that was so distinctive and particular to me, and I knew that they were mine. Right? That rhythm of my walk, that particular like, sound of the limp.
And I think that's one of the first spiritual insights that I trace to my own disability experience.
Pete: Can I ask how old you were?
Julia: Um, good question. I'm not sure. I was probably like five or six, you know, yeah, it was—
Pete: That’s awfully young to have a spiritual insight like that.
Julia: It was an early memory. And I, I just, I remember thinking I liked that about me. I think that decision to savor this particular quirk, this thing that other people didn't really value. I think that is a core, actually, that is a spiritual core that has gone on to shape and inform and infuse so much of my disability work. I think that orientation to saying yes to the particulars of my own body mine feels like a kind of cornerstone piece.
Now, I should be clear. My, um, my experience with disability, especially growing up was not all roses. There were definitely a lot of moments where I wanted the earth to swallow me up. You know, I mean, I can think about childhood experiences of falling off the balance beam and everybody laughing, being the last to be chosen for dodgeball, you know, so there were plenty of excruciating moments as well.
But even though there were times when I wanted, right? When I really wanted to be “normal,” right, I think there was also always part of me that just felt a kind of fierce fidelity to my actual embodied self. And that's the thing. If I could bottle that and just give it away, right? Maybe I wouldn't bottle it. Maybe I just spritz it like with a nebulizer, you know? Um, I would just love, that's the thing that I would most love to give to this world.
Cynthia: Oh, that's just beautiful, Julia. Thank you for sharing that with us. If we could maybe circle back a little bit to telling us about maybe how the Jewish tradition and other voices can help us go beyond, you know, the Bible, to address disability.
Julia: That's a beautiful question. It's, I think, a really important one. When we think about Jewish tradition, I think it's first and foremost, always crucial to understand the significant role, the huge role that commentary, debate, and interpretation play in the way that Jews think about text. In a traditional Jewish context, you never just read the biblical text on its own. You're always reading, you're meant to read with and be in conversation with centuries of commentators who are in conversation with earlier generations of commentators, who are in conversation with earlier generations of commentators.
So it's like the importance of this tradition of an ongoing conversation with text is really baked into traditional Jewish modes of reading and thinking about the Bible.
There's also within Jewish tradition a real pride of place given to the significance of interpretation, the importance of interpreting a text, of not leaving it as a static, timeless, unchanging document, but as a Torah is something that is understood to be alive. The rabbinic tradition in particular, classical rabbis in the first couple centuries, so right around the time when the New Testament is being canonized, when very important Christian figures like Augustine and Origen are doing their work. Right around this time, that's the period that we call the classical rabbinic period or the age of quote, the rabbis.
During this time, the rabbis were really articulating a strong understanding that what they called oral Torah was as important as the written Torah, the text that we have now on the page. That in fact, you can't understand the written Torah without the oral Torah. They tell this amazing parable. It's the story of the flax and the wheat.
A great king, they say, aka God, right? Gave two of his servants, a bushel of flax and a bushel of wheat. And then the king went away for a little while and came back and asked the servants to show what they had, right? And one of the servants came out with the gifts, the bushel of flax and the bushel of wheat perfectly, pristinely preserved. And the other one came out and presented the king with a tablecloth and a fine loaf of baked bread. And it's that one, right? That guy who weaves the tablecloth and makes the bread that the rabbis choose as the exemplar for how one should engage with the scriptural tradition, and it's also how they authorize and understand their own tremendous creativity, interpretive creativity as something that is desired by God.
Pete: It's even sacred.
Julia: Sacred. Exactly. It is a holy act to interpret. Um, now of course, there's a lot of authority questions going on here. The rabbis are articulating this idea of oral Torah, but they're also saying that they're the ones who are the masters of oral Torah. So the question of who gets to be an insider is of course another question that's really laden with power dynamics. But that idea that interpretation is a sacred act is deeply built into Jewish tradition. And I take that as an obligation.
Pete: I've even exact a sacred obligation. I've even heard it as sort of an act of worship. And I, you know, I just, I think pausing here, Julia, is like really important for maybe many of our listeners that I think that in my opinion, Cynthia, correct me if you, if you disagree, I think the Christian tradition as a whole has understood more or less what you're saying.
You know, you have the history of interpretation in Christianity, including the medieval church, which is, yeah, they get it. You know, like these words don't mean much to us unless we get a little creative with them and put them into our context. But I think for those of us living in, you know, in the wake of the modern movement and then maybe the postmodern movement too, we forget all that.
And you know, the evangelical tradition, for example, and the fundamentalist traditions in Christianity, they, they don't, you know, “the Bible is authoritative. You don't mess with it.” And what I think you're saying, and what I know from, from various Christian traditions as well, is that, well, no, it's because the Bible has an authoritative role, it is for that reason that it requires a lot of interpretive flexibility or else it doesn't mean anything to you.
Julia: That's right. And the rabbis, I think, really recognize—I think one of the things that sometimes surprises readers from outside the tradition is how daring sometimes the rabbis are willing to be. And here again, I mean, I mean the classical rabbis, I think sometimes we think that it's a very modern problem to have, right? Or it's a very modern issue to have a kind of deep problem with the text. But when we look at ancient rabbinic text, I see many places where the rabbis are really grappling hard with the text and sometimes working to dramatically reinterpret, reimagine, and change what seems to be, from an otherwise straightforward reading, a pretty straightforward biblical law.
And so that kind of commitment to interpretation as a sacred act and as a sacred social responsibility, that's a very powerful orientation that goes deep in Jewish tradition.
Pete: It is powerful to understand the role that biblical interpretation, I think, invariably plays in both the Christian and Jewish traditions. We might not always know it on the Christian side, but it is the case. And I know just riffing here a little bit, James Kugel, who was one of my doctoral professors, he's very prone to say that if it were not for the flexibility of the interpretive tradition, the text would have died. Because it just would have been a relic of the past.
Julia: That's right.
Pete: And people keep reading it, and they have to bring it into their own context. Which means you have to start interrogating and debating it a bit. And one thing that I lament, the history of the Christian tradition generally understood that I think very well until the Protestant Reformation.
That's a sort of simplistic way of putting it, but it didn't help, you know, and “you have one text and one meaning and it's scientific almost, and you just have to get the Hebrew down, which is easy enough.” Yeah, right. Or the Greek down, which is easy enough. Yeah, right. And then you have all the answers, but the text resists that because it's so multivocalic, it's so diverse and it's so ancient and it's so weird. It takes a lot of interpretive energy.
So I appreciate what you're saying. And I think that's, that's a lesson that if I could drive one thing home to people who are Bible readers and want to be serious about it, it's that very point that you're making. So I appreciate that greatly.
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Pete: You mentioned in your book, a couple of things, going right to the “difficult parts of the tradition.”
Julia: Yeah.
Pete: And then also, maybe we can weave into this also, how you talk about Torah told slant or with a limp. And I think that's a strategy for how you communicate these texts to people, right? So—
Julia: Yes, so I'll talk about both aspects. So first the going, going straight to the difficult parts of the tradition. I mean, this is one of the, I think one of the hallmarks of my work and the way that I read. I tend to orient toward trouble. I find myself again and again drawn to texts that I personally find difficult, particularly texts that feel like they portray disability or disabled people in ways that rub hard against my own politics, my own desires, and my own heart.
You know, I think that my orientation, in some ways it's really shaped by that kind of deeply Jewish commitment to wrestling with the text, right? To trusting actually the enterprise of being in a good argument with the text as something that can be life-giving and generative and meaningful that can also help shift my own understanding, but also shift the way that we readers relate to and engage with text tradition. So I find myself very drawn toward the critique of texts as a kind of sacred act.
I think sometimes it's important to say—I like to say the holy no, right? No, I will not actually accept and take in this particular aspect of the text, but neither will I just push it away and refuse it. Instead, I want to go deep into that very place of trouble because I find often that by going into that place of trouble, I come to understand much more about the way in which cultural violence against disabled people, against women, against so many, right, so many minoritized and marginalized communities is done in our world in the Bible's name.
Pete: So those difficult texts are in a way, just to use the term, gifts or invitations even to explore more deeply?
Julia: Well, “gifts” for me is maybe a little bit, it's maybe a little overstating the way I feel about it. When I read Leviticus 21 every year, right? Because it comes around every year in the Jewish reading of the, the annual reading of the Torah. When it comes around every year, I brace myself. I often skip synagogue because I don't want to hear…
Pete: Okay. It's a really bad gift.
Julia: [Laughs] Right? Exactly. But I take that every year as a kind of a goad, a witness to ableism in action. When I encounter that text, I let it be in my world as a witness to so much violence that has been done. And then it is also part of the fuel of my own commitment to drawing something new and beautiful from this complicated, tangled, meaningful, but complex inheritance. But what I don't want to do is just paper over it and wrap it up with a bow.
Cynthia: Yeah. Like Jacob with the angel or with the divine messenger, he's not going to let him go until he blesses him. But when he does, he walks away with a limp.
Julia: He walks away with a limp.
Cynthia: Yeah.
Julia: And I think that takes us really beautiful to that second part. What does it mean to, right? Torah told slant. Torah told through the limp. And that's my other reading strategy, which is to ask, not just what does Jewish tradition or what does the Bible say about disability, but what does disability experience offer and bring to the Bible, to spiritual life, to our engagement with religious tradition and with religious community?
And that's where I think that disability has, that's a place where I'm much more willing to say, there is a place where I say yes, yes, yes, to the gift. That disability can, um, you're good. You're good. That's where I feel disability experience can bring us deeper, sharper questions and perspectives on what it means to make community, on what it means to give each other good life giving generative care, what it means to offer each other a shelter, right?
I mean, there's so many ways in which when I ask myself to read with disability in mind, my own disabled, lived, enfleshed experience. I see things, I come to know things, right? I taste things in the biblical text that I otherwise would never have found.
One of the places where that really comes alive for me is, uh, the reading of the first chapter of the book of Ezekiel. This is a vision where the prophet is, the prophet Ezekiel has a vision of God. It's a really extraordinary vision, but it's actually not God at all that Ezekiel sees. What Ezekiel sees is the divine chariot. And the text lingers on the wheels, the barrel flashing bright, shimmering, extraordinary, luminous wheels.
For me as a wheelchair user, finding that text, hearing that text, I will never forget the moment when I was sitting in synagogue and I heard that text and felt it in my own bones—God has wheels. I mean, for me, it was just such an extraordinary moment of seeing and feeling my own body as a wheelchair user reflected literally in the divine image.
I think it was also really beautiful for me to think about the way that image, that sense of God on wheels also links into my sense of disability joy. I mean, I love, there's a lot of complex, a lot of difficult aspects of being a wheelchair user, but there's also some extraordinary pleasures in this particular life. I love rolling down a smooth, gentle grade and feeling, you know, the air on my face and the vibrations of the ground and the pavement rumbling up through the wheels of my wheelchair and the frame of my wheelchair and up through my sit bones and up through my body. It's such an intimate connection with land and with ground. There are moments when it's so beautifully fun.
I think about that particular pleasure, and I think about that as something that a wheeled God also knows, and it makes me really joyful to think about that piece of—I love to think about the idea of God knowing disability from the inside. The pain and the difficulty and the isolation, the challenge, how it feels to be shut out of things, but also, also those moments of fierce, exquisite pleasure and satisfaction and joy.
Cynthia: Yeah, I mean, I could talk to you all day. [Laughs]
Julia: Thank you. It's, the feeling is mutual. It's likewise.
Cynthia: This has just been such a pleasure. So we have time for just one more question, unfortunately, I wish I could ask you so many more, Julia. But, you know, you were talking about this joy. And then I kind of want to follow up with that a little bit. Do you have any parting words of joy or wisdom? And then kind of a second part, but kind of unrelated to that would be any resources that you might have to suggest to our listeners.
Julia: Well, I'll take the resource piece first, which is to say there's extraordinary, wonderful scholarship in the field of disability studies and religion. Especially, and, um, also in disability studies and biblical studies. So I, there's just incredible diversity of resources and richness out there. One classic text that's been really important to me and has been important for a lot of us in this field is Nancy L. Eiesland’s The Disabled God. And so readers who are looking to dive deeper might pick up Nancy Eiesland’s book as a first start, but may it be a beginning because there's really, there's so much beautiful, beautiful scholarship in the world.
And then you asked about any parting words that I might offer. And, you know, I think what I would say is, disabled people matter. Our lives have value. We are beloved and we deserve a world that welcomes us. That's just bedrock. Rather than trying to fix people's bodies and minds and make them fit some tight constricting notion of what's, you know, right or good or normal. I want us to work to change the world we live in. And I want us all to commit to building a world that cherishes disabled people as we are. A world that wants us to thrive.
Pete: Thank you, Julia. Thank you. That was wonderful. Thank you for those parting words, for spending time with us, and for, I think, giving us all a lot to think about. So thank you.
Julia: It's been a huge pleasure to be in conversation today. Thanks so much!
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Outro: You've just made it through another episode of the Bible for Normal People! Don't forget you can catch our other show, Faith for Normal People, in the same feed wherever you get your podcasts. This episode was brought to you by the Bible for Normal People team: Brittany Hodge, Stephen Henning, Wesley Duckworth, Savannah Locke, Tessa Stultz, Danny Wong, Natalie Weyand, Lauren O'Connell, Jessica Shao, and Naiomi Gonzalez.
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