Loving Our Own Bones
Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole
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- $17.99
Publisher Description
The essential read on disability, spirituality, and social justice that won the 2025 Grawemeyer Award in Religion, the 2024 National Jewish Book Award, and more
A transformative spiritual companion and deep dive into disability politics that reimagines disability in the Bible and contemporary culture
“What’s wrong with you?”
Scholar, activist, and rabbi Julia Watts Belser is all too familiar with this question. What’s wrong isn’t her wheelchair, though—it’s exclusion, objectification, pity, and disdain.
Our attitudes about disability have such deep cultural roots that we almost forget their sources. But open the Bible and disability is everywhere. Moses believes his stutter renders him unable to answer God’s call. Jacob’s encounter with an angel leaves him changed not just spiritually but physically: he gains a limp. For centuries, these stories have been told and retold in ways that treat disability as a metaphor for spiritual incapacity or as a challenge to be overcome.
Through fresh and unexpected readings of the Bible, Loving Our Own Bones instead paints a luminous portrait of what it means to be disabled and one of God’s beloved. Belser delves deep into sacred literature, braiding the insights of disabled, feminist, Black, and queer thinkers with her own experiences as a queer disabled Jewish feminist. She talks back to biblical commentators who traffic in disability stigma and shame. What unfolds is a profound gift of disability wisdom, a radical act of spiritual imagination that can guide us all toward a powerful reckoning with each other and with our bodies.
Loving Our Own Bones invites readers to claim the power and promise of spiritual dissent, and to nourish their own souls through the revolutionary art of radical self-love.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
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.
