Woodstock Theological Library (WTL) is happy to highlight a recent monographic acquisition, Disability and World Religions: An Introduction. One of the essays therein is authored by Professor Julia Watts Belser, our friend and colleague in Georgetown University's Department of Theology. Amy Phillips, WTL’s rare materials cataloger, is delighted to interview her about her contribution in this book:
Disability and World Religions: An Introduction is the second book in the series Studies in Religion, Theology, and Disability. In the series introduction, the editors write: “While books from a Christian standpoint have dominated the discussion at the interface of religion and disability so far, Jewish, Muslim, Buddhist, and Hindu scholars, among those from other religious traditions, have begun to resource their own traditions to rethink disability in the twenty-first century.” (vi) So, in this intersection of Judaism and disability, you’re one of the pioneers, but do you have forerunners in this unique endeavor?
What a wonderful question! I’m indebted to the scholarship of Judith Abrams, whose book Judaism and Disability: Portrayals in Ancient Texts from the Tanach through the Bavli (Gallaudet University Press, 1998), really opened up a conversation about the way classical Jewish texts approach disability and treat people with disabilities. There’s tremendous work being done right now on disability in the Hebrew Bible, as well as among scholars working with late antique Christian texts and in the ancient Roman world. It feels like we’re at a moment when there’s tremendous energy and excitement about the study of disability in religious texts – and in contemporary religious practice. When it comes to articulating disability theology, I’d like to lift up the pioneering work of Nancy Eiesland, a brilliant scholar and activist whose book, The Disabled God: Towards a Liberatory Theology of Disability (Abingdon Press, 1994), transformed the landscape of disability and Christian theology. Eiesland laid out a Christian disability liberation theology, using the symbolism of Christ as the disabled God to articulate an understanding of Christian religiosity that was aligned with the concrete grassroots struggle for disability rights and justice.
Knowing now who has influenced you, how would you characterize your own work and how is it distinctive from your predecessors and colleagues?
In my own work, I’m often engaging two different kinds of questions: First, I study the way disability is portrayed in post-biblical Jewish texts like the Talmud, which are some of the most formative texts for shaping Jewish religious life and practice. When I do that work, I’m working as a literary and cultural historian, trying to uncover the way disability operates in Jewish texts and traditions, to take a critical look at how these texts use disability to express different ideas about power, the meanings they give to bodies marked as different or deviant, and the way disability intertwines with other cultural systems like gender, race, and sexuality. A second strand of my work involves crafting queer-feminist Jewish disability ethics and theology. When I work in this vein, I’m interested in thinking creatively about how to craft a way of thinking religiously that lifts up the perspectives of disability activists, that aligns Jewish thought and practice with broad-based intersectional movements for justice and liberation. While I ground my work in my own Jewish tradition, I try to grapple seriously with the important, challenging work that’s coming out of the Movement for Black Lives, Latinx theology and politics, trans activist work, Muslima theology, poor and working-class struggles, as well as the disability justice movement, led by disabled people of color. It’s really generative work for me: I’ve been working collaboratively with disabled dancers and artists, as well as drawing on my own experience as a poet and writer, drawing forth different ways of imagining God, different ways of catalyzing religious commitments to do the concrete, gritty work of protecting and sustaining marginalized communities in these difficult days.
In your essay “Judaism and Disability”, I was really struck by your mention of Shelly Christensen’s interpretation of the story in Numbers where Miriam, at one point in the wilderness journey, has a skin disease and she must wait outside the camp of the community for seven days. The community does not journey onward until she can join them. Christensen’s interprets this passage as demonstrating that: “…inclusion is meant to remind us that, like our ancestors, we cannot move on unless everyone is present…We must learn to accept that when one member of our community is left behind, we are not whole.” (102) This is such an eye-opening and meaningful way to read this text! On the other hand, what about the part of the story where Miriam has to be separated from the community in the first place? In this case, there seems to be a part of the biblical text that doesn’t easily leave us a creative way to assess or tease out the lesson of acceptance or inclusion.
Indeed.To me, it’s really important to acknowledge that even as religious texts contain the seeds for many powerful insights about inclusion, acceptance, and disability justice, they also contain texts that have been used to stigmatize and marginalized people with disabilities. It’s urgent that we lift up passages that underscore the work of justice, that we share with one another the lessons from our traditions that inspire and undergird a world that prizes difference and celebrates inclusivity. But I think it’s also important to confront the ongoing fact of stigma and violence, and to recognize that religious traditions have often contributed to that history as well.
What do you do when you encounter a biblical or rabbinic text that portrays disability as a stigmatized or undesired condition? Of course it takes discipline, research, and openness to a text to try to engage with what it says, but is there ever a time where you just say: “this is really too upsetting or frustrating”?
A great example would be Leviticus 21, a passage that describes how priests with disabilities were not allowed to offer sacrifices at the altar. Scholarly work on this passage helps us better understand it in its historical and religious context. When people first encounter those verses, they often assume that priests with disabilities were not allowed to be priests. That isn’t true. A priest with one of the listed disabilities does not lose his status as a priest. He still has access to his priestly portion, and he retains a higher religious status that a lay Israelite. He’s only barred from offering sacrifice on the altar. But there’s still a significant act of exclusion here, and I don’t think it’s helpful to gloss over that. When I encounter this text, I read it as a reminder of the long legacy of stigma and exclusion that has shaped the lives of so many people with disabilities, myself included. I read it as a reflection of that reality, a reminder to not flinch from recognizing the corrosive effect that stigma and social violence has in disabled people’s lives. That said, in this case, I do think there is a liberatory message to be found in the way Jewish tradition has grappled with these verses. In my own scholarly work, I’ve shown how rabbinic texts interpret those verses to radically limit their scope. The rabbis emphasize that a Jew with a disability can bless the congregation or lead them in prayer, as long as they are known and “familiar” to the congregation. I find that to be a really powerful message, and a hopeful one.To me, it suggests that congregations have a religious responsibility to break down barriers and challenge stigma, so that people with disabilities become full and familiar members of our congregations—and so that our particular religious and ethical insights become part of the fabric of our communities.
Entry written by Amy Phillips on 7/19/2017