God’s Body in Pain: Disability and Divine Solidarity in Jewish Text and Tradition

Julia Watts Belser at UC Berkeley, November 29, 2023. Helen Diller Annual Lecture.

Moderated by Duncan MacRae, Associate Professor of Ancient Greek & Roman Studies; Co-Director, Berkeley Center for the Study of Religion, UC Berkeley.
ASL Interpretation by Rivka Hozinsky and Jennifer Mantle.

Jewish midrash offers powerful evocations of divine lament, most famously through imagines of God weeping in response to the destruction of the Jerusalem Temple. While scholars have often examined God’s emotional distress in the face of human suffering, this talk probes the ethical and theological significance of Jewish texts that imagine God’s body in physical pain. Julia Watts Belser uses disability studies theory to probe how Jewish midrash imagines the divine body as viscerally wounded by violence that brutalizes the bodies of God’s beloved people through a close reading of Exodus Rabbah 2:5, a medieval midrash that portrays God as physically affected by the violence of slavery in Egypt. Thinking with contemporary disability studies scholars who study disability and slavery, Belser shows how the midrash portrays God’s physical risk in ways that underscore both the brutality of enslavement and the agential power of disabled bodies even in situations of profound constraint. The midrash uses divine pain to claim liberation as an invested act, one that emerges out of visceral embodied connection—an act in which God acts not only out of a recognition of the people’s suffering, but also to save God’s own self from the enslaver’s lash.

Julia Watts Belser is a rabbi, scholar, and spiritual teacher, as well as a longtime activist for disability, LGBTQ and gender justice. She is a professor of Jewish Studies in the Department of Theology and Religious Studies at Georgetown University and core faculty in Georgetown’s Disability Studies Program, as well as a senior research fellow at the Berkley Center for Religion, Peace, and World Affairs. Author of Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, among other scholarly books, she has held faculty fellowships at Harvard Divinity School and the Katz Center for Advanced Jewish Studies at the University of Pennsylvania. She’s also an avid wheelchair hiker and a lover of wild places.