Reviewed by Diane R. Wiener
Content Warning: war, ableism, oppression
The tone, tenor, and energies threaded throughout the deservedly award-winning Loving Our Own Bones are familiar to me in part because I have happily been in Julia Watts Belser’s wonderful presence. It is by no means a necessity to be or have been in her direct company for this book to be a rousing, inflective, and gorgeous read. On the contrary: loving your own bones can happen even if you are all alone.
Rabbi Belser is one of a mighty minority of spiritual teachers who work “at the intersections of disability studies, queer feminist Jewish ethics, and environmental justice,” as her website bio makes clear. The National Jewish Book Award team, including Jamie Wendt (for the Jewish Book Council), have done well at describing both the book and Julia’s life’s work.
When I first met Rabbi Julia in the fall of 2015, she arrived aboard her chariot (her true af word for the wheelchair) where we had been invited to speak during the Black Liberation Theology of Disability consortium at Union Theological Seminary in New York City. The groundbreaking approach to liberation theology insisting upon an anti-racist, anti-ableist, overtly intersectional politics was forged and advanced by now-Reverend Kendrick A. Kemp. I remain grateful that Julia and I were among the small handful of Disabled white Ashkenazi Jews welcomed to and connected during that powerful gathering, where I also met Dr. James H. Cone, Dr. Cornel West, among many others. My admiration and gratitude for Julia also preceded that fall gathering nearly nine years ago and they have surely persisted since that time.
I have had the privilege and joy of collaborating with Rabbi Julia on other occasions, including during the fall of 2021 global online event, “On Being a Vicarious Witness: Aktion T4 and Contesting the Erasure of Disability History,” led and coordinated by Prof. Kenny Fries in connection with the team of the Office of Interdisciplinary Programs and Outreach at the Burton Blatt Institute. Prof. Fries, Perel, and Quintan Ana Wikswo, all Queer Jewish Disabled writers and artists, discussed their work on Aktion T4, “a prime crucible of disability history.” Julia was our moderator.
And what an incredible moderator she was. It is this same approach that is brought to bear in the book. This moderation style is not (oh-Sheol-no) of or from a person who is merely cordial. On the contrary, Julia, who is a first-class-mensch (through and through), in this book, as also happened during that October 2021 event, encourages questioning, debate, facing difficulty, and is never, ever about the nausea that accompanies so-called respectability politics. It is perhaps still quite uncool to appeal to authenticity in the 21st century, but, well, Julia, goddess-dammit, YOU are one of the realest fucking people in the whole world.
Now that I have cursed so brazenly, and perhaps offended some of you, others who are still reading may wonder: how can a person be so accessible, so kind, so full of love, and truly such a badass? Julia is such a person, and such a writer, as this book attests. Throughout her career, she insistently seeks to find and bring to the forefront the beauty and meaning in “classic” and arguably “fringe” Jewish religious texts while critiquing their ableism, ethnocentrism, misogyny, and the teeming evidence of other oppressive forces’ presence historically and currently. Julia offers us and is her own form of Mishnah. In the Disability Justice labors and ongoing activist praxis of care, self-care, community care, mutual aid, and speaking out against the myth that COVID-19 is “over,” Julia’s still-new book centers “radical inclusion” (as Alison Kafer and others have noted).
This book therefore reminds everyone (as so much of Julia’s work has done) about the plethora of Disabled bodyminds in the Judeo-Christian bible and elsewhere. The book instructs able-bodied, neurotypical readers how freedom means (regardless of ADA “exemptions”) that every church, mosque, meeting hall, and shul requires ramps, image descriptions, sign language interpreters, scents sensitivity protocols, captioning, large print, digital content and full-on digital access, alternative spaces for quiet reflection and noise reduction, and speech delivery pacing adaptations, etc.
For Julia, as she also wants her readers to glean for ourselves, Disability is, consequently, a fact of everyday life. Disability’s major “concern” or “consequence” is not Disability itself but rather the ableism with which it unhappily and unendingly experiences an unwelcome company. There is nothing particularly “unique” or “special” about disablement, Rabbi Julia argues in this book–as she has wisely articulated elsewhere, and always. However, there is, yes, always something “unique” and “special” about each Disabled person’s storying, self-actualization, power, and promises as well as pursuits of possibility.
Loving Our Own Bones is simultaneously heavy and light, relentlessly, ubiquitously, and, of course, Jewishly didactic and exegetical (“like” the Proverbs) and full of painterly poesis (“like” the Psalms, the Song of Songs, and Ecclesiastes).
And there is something (there are some–really, so many–things) about Jewish Disabled experiences that must be uncovered, examined, owned, refused, and celebrated specifically and intersubjectively. Julia teaches us, shows us, that we need to have the chutzpah to acknowledge beauty, disenfranchisement, and abjection without ever denying privilege. Doing this work with love for our own bones is a subversive, honest, holistic act–an act both of faith and secular humanness. We must cease our complicity with relentless, brutal dynamics and put an end to our roles in epistemic terror and local as well as global acts of physical violence and war, which, after all, lead to disablement. This is what I wish and strive for, anyway. As Julia says, “I know the ache of wanting” (p. 106).
Title: Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole
Author: Julia Watts Belser
Publisher: Beacon Press
Year: 2023
Editor’s Note: Loving Our Own Bones is available in an array of formats with commitments to accessibility and plain language. For more information, visit Rabbi Julia’s website.
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About the Reviewer
Diane R. Wiener (she/they) became Editor-in-Chief of Wordgathering in January 2020. The author of The Golem Verses (Nine Mile Press, 2018), Flashes & Specks (Finishing Line Press, 2021), and The Golem Returns (swallow::tale press, 2022), Diane’s poems also appear in Nine Mile Magazine, Wordgathering, Tammy, Queerly, The South Carolina Review, Welcome to the Resistance: Poetry as Protest, Diagrams Sketched on the Wind, Jason’s Connection, the Kalonopia Collective’s 2021 Disability Pride Anthology, eMerge, and elsewhere. Diane’s creative nonfiction appears in Stone Canoe, Mollyhouse, The Abstract Elephant Magazine, Pop the Culture Pill, and eMerge. Her flash fiction appears in Ordinary Madness; short fiction is published in A Coup of Owls. Diane served as Nine Mile Literary Magazine’s Assistant Editor after being Guest Editor for the Fall 2019 Special Double Issue on Neurodivergent, Disability, Deaf, Mad, and Crip poetics. She has published widely on Disability, education, accessibility, equity, and empowerment, among other subjects. A proud Neuroqueer, Mad, Crip, Genderqueer, Ashkenazi Jewish Hylozoist Nerd, Diane is honored to serve in the nonprofit sector. You can visit Diane online at: https://dianerwiener.com.