Loving Our Own Bones

Starred review from August 1, 2023

Belser's (Jewish studies and disability studies, Georgetown Univ.; Rabbinic Tales of Destruction) book is a triumph of theological insight, disability activism, and honest, personal, hard-won wisdom. She weaves her own experience as a queer, disabled, feminist scholar and rabbi into critical, sensitive, profound encounters with Jewish and Christian sacred writings. Belser challenges texts and practices that have harmed and marginalized disabled communities, yet she still returns to these texts to reread, to confront ableist implications and interpretations, and to reject or claim. Her skill in engaging these passages is a superb example of how to draw spiritual direction from within a religious tradition, while asking hard questions and refusing to accept when power is wielded, consciously or unconsciously, against marginalized communities. The book asks, what would it mean if, instead of imagining God as an able-bodied man wielding infinite power, the world could see the God who identifies with the experience of the wheelchair user? To answer, Belser turns to a passage in Ezekiel that offers a vision of just that, a glimpse of "God on Wheels." VERDICT An excellent, impressive addition to the conversation around theology and disability that shines on many levels.--Zachariah Motts

Copyright 2023 Library Journal, LLC Used with permission.

Starred review from September 25, 2023
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.