Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole

Belser (Rabbinic Tales of Destruction), a professor of Jewish Studies at Georgetown University, delivers a rigorous and broad-minded analysis of disability in the Bible, bringing “critical testimony from disability communities” into conversation with “more conventional sources of Jewish wisdom.” Arguing that disability can affect “bodies and minds in a thousand different ways,” Belser examines Moses’s “clumsy tongue” as a part of “divine design”; Jacob’s limp, which “lingers” after his encounter with an angel, “as a powerful reminder that disability is an essential part of what it means to be human”; and Leviticus’s restrictions against priests with physical deformities as evidence of the brutal (and age-old) “power of ableism” that marks “certain bodies” as “inferior.” Elsewhere, Belser contrasts scriptural descriptions of sisters Leah (who had “weak” eyes) and Rachel (the striking woman Jacob loved) to posit that beauty—with which disability is often contrasted—is culturally “positioned as a measure of a woman’s worth, the most crucial fact to understand about her personhood.” Belser’s rebuttal that “conventional beauty... cannot hold our splendor” uplifts, and it echoes the book’s eloquently argued message that disability is “part of God’s own brilliant beauty” and “pulses through the very fabric of God’s making.” This is an impressive achievement. (Oct.)