Thinking about God’s cane
Dr. Ora Horn Prouser to deliver Trachtenberg talk on disabilities and text study
The Bible is full of short, sharp stories, tersely told. Each word matters, in no small part because there are so few of them.
There are many lenses through which we can look at those stories to see what in fact is there all along — but had not been visible until a particular time and place and set of circumstances resolves it to clarity.
Dr. Ora Horn Prouser of Franklin Lakes is the CEO and academic dean of the Academy for Jewish Religion. She’s both an administrator and a practicing academic; she’s earned formal credentials as an educator from the Jewish Theological Seminary, and she has thought deeply about the implications of human beings having been created bzelem Elohim — in the image of God.
As she’ll discuss in the Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg Memorial Lecture at Temple Emeth in Teaneck on September 20, much of that work has focused on the intersection of the study of Jewish sacred texts and disability studies.
She came to the work a long time ago, Dr. Prouser said. “It’s always been clear to me that our Jewish educational system has been somewhat behind the times — or at least certainly it was decades ago, when I started this work, serving children who are diagnosed with various disabilities.”
As a scholar of texts, she did not see her role as coming up with practical solutions for special education, although certainly she is grateful to those organizations, including the Sinai Schools and Yachad, that do the vitally important hands-on work. “I don’t have a degree in special education,” she said. “Instead, I come at it as a biblicist. I think that one of the ways to study the Bible in modern times is to relate it to the different areas of study that are going on in the general academic world.
“For example, this is what we did with feminist studies of the Bible. Feminist studies as a field was very widespread before it made it into the biblical studies world.”
In other words, she said, the application of a feminist understanding to already examined phenomena produced new ways of looking at the same thing. Those new ways didn’t supplant the old ways. Instead, they supplemented them.
“I’ve been working with the intersection of biblical studies and disability studies for a decade now,” she said. “Part of the beauty of bringing this different lens to Bible studies is that it enables us to learn new things, to see the Bible in different ways, and to gain insight that impacts all of us.
“I see my task as laying the groundwork for understanding the importance of issues of disability in the Bible, and in our Jewish community. And I have brought an awareness of that to our work at AJR.
Okay. That’s the background. What does Dr. Prouser see when she looks at the Bible through the lens of a specialist in disability studies? What are some specific stories?
Her published work in the field began with “Esau’s Blessing: How the Bible Embraces Those With Special Needs,” in 2012 — the book was a 2012 National Jewish Book Council finalist and then won top honors in the 2016 Special Needs book awards competition.
“That work was looking at biblical characters as individuals with disabilities,” Dr. Prouser said. Her method was specific and precise. “I read the pshat of the text” — that is, the literal, straightforward meaning, free of midrash or symbolism or any other sophisticated enhancement. Just the text.
“I wanted to gain an understanding of disability from the language of the biblical text itself,” she said, conceding that “sometimes, as with feminist readings, it means reading against the grain.
“This reading might not have been the original way of understanding it, but the language is there. It’s all there, in the text.
“The character who got me started was Esau,” Jacob’s older brother, their father Isaac’s favorite. “I read Esau as someone with ADHD.
“Of course, the idea of ADHD did not exist in the ancient world, but if you look at the language of the text, at his activities and his nature, you can see all the characteristics of somebody with ADHD.
“He is both hyperfocused and easily distractible.” Those are classic ADHD symptoms. “And he’s weak in social skills. I can back all this up with text. These examples are right in the text, but of course he is not labeled in any way, because those labels did not exist then.
Then there’s Esau’s younger brother, Jacob, “who literally becomes disabled,” Dr. Prouser said. “He developed his limp exactly when he goes from being Jacob to being Israel.
“This is very basic to understanding disability within the biblical text.
“Many people who read the text know that Jacob limps right after he struggles with the angel — the man — however you want to define that figure — but most people don’t think about whether Jacob keeps limping after that point.
“But the Jacob before that struggle shows a physical prowess that Jacob after the struggle does not. Think about Jacob telling Esau that he doesn’t want to travel together because the kids would be too slow. Maybe it’s Jacob who’s slow.
“The Jacob who does not react to the rape of Dinah until his sons come home — maybe he’s still limping and doesn’t want to do anything because he can’t. People ask why he didn’t do anything sooner. I don’t want to defend Jacob here, but I have some empathy for him because he didn’t feel able to react physically or confrontationally at that point.
“Similarly, there’s Moses. People know that he says that he cannot speak well when he is at the burning bush, but most people don’t think of the Moses in the desert as someone who can’t speak well. They forget that he still is not speaking well when he was asked to speak to the rock.
“What was that test? What was that request? Why was he so hesitant to speak? So much comes up in the text, if you read it with disability studies at the forefront of your mind.
“There is real reason to be proud of our tradition,” Dr. Prouser continued. “In other traditions, people with disabilities were marginalized, or almost discarded, but in the Bible, people with disabilities are in the forefront.’
Much of this work comes from “Esau’s Blessing,” she said. Now she’s gone beyond it. “The work I have been doing since then, which I will bring to this lecture, is asking about what it means to think of the God in the Bible as having disabilities.”
She explained.
“What brought me to that was that I was spending some time looking at Psalm 23. The Lord is my shepherd.” She found herself focusing on verse 4, which includes “Your rod and your staff — they comfort me.”
“At the time, I was using a cane,” Dr. Prouser said. “I was really meditating on this section, focusing on it, and it dawned on me that what this means is usually a pastoral scene.” If God is the shepherd, then the people are the sheep. “But rod means stick. You lean on a stick. It is a cane.
“What does it mean to think of God as having to use a cane?
“The metaphors, and the images that go along with them, are so wide-ranging. God is father, God is mother, God is ruler, God is warrior. What if we had one more image? What if God is struggling with a disability?
“What would that mean to our understanding of what it means to be bezelem Elohim? Created in the image of God?
“This is the work I am doing now.
“And there’s also work that other people have done. There’s interesting imagery in the Psalms talking about God as living in a world of utter darkness, and people have said that it describes what it feels like to be blind.
“So does that mean that God is always blind? In no way is that what I’m saying. I want to be clear about it. What I am saying is that we can add one more image of God to the many, many, many images that the Bible has, and that it would add a tremendous amount to our understanding of God.w
“This just really broadens our understanding of the concept to btzelem Elohim.”
Who: Dr. Ora Horn Prouser
What: Will talk about “Living in the Image of God: Viewing the Divine Through the Lens of Disability Studies
Where: At Temple Emeth in Teaneck
When: On Friday, September 20, at 9 p.m. It will follow a festive Shabbat dinner at the shul at 6.
Why: For Emeth’s annual Rabbi Joshua Trachtenberg memorial lecture
To register for the dinner: Go to the synagogue’s website, www.emeth.org, and scroll down.
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