Disability Pride
At Beth Chayim Chadashim today, I deliver a drash about disability. It is reproduced below, and there is a recording of the drash if you’d rather listen to it. Please let me know what you think about it, either on BlueSky, on the Fediverse, or via email. (If you know me from Discord or Signal, those are also places I’m happy to hear from you.)
My name is Síle Ekaterin Liszka, my pronouns are fae/faer, they/them, or she/her, and I am disabled. Tonight, I want to talk to you about an issue that is near and dear to me. Shivyon b’ga’avah, equality in pride. Specifically, I want to talk about disability pride.
The Americans with Disabilities Act, or ADA, gives us some scope for what a disability can be. Per the Department of Justice, Civil Rights Division, a person with a disability is someone who has a physical or mental impairment that substantially limits one or more major life activities; has a history or record of such impairment, such as cancer which is in remission; or is perceived by others as having such an impairment, such as a person who has scars from a severe burn.
We are all born disabled. At birth, we are all unable to walk, we are all unable to talk, to see, to hear, to read, to hug, to pray, to feed ourself. But as we grow and develop, we may become temporarily able. Temporarily able to walk, to talk, to see, to hear, to read, to hug, to pray, to feed ourself. And we may, Baruch haShem, live long enough that we lose some of those abilities. Or there may be events in our lives, things we can or can’t control, which return us to some part of that state of inability.
Some of the most important figures in the grand tapestry that is Torah were disabled. Sarah was unable to conceive. Yitzchak was blind when he gave his blessings. Moshe initially demurred from the task G?d had set him because he had a speech difference; in response, G?d gave him an assistant, Aharon, his brother, to help speak on his behalf. I could go on. In Loving Our Own Bones, Rabbi Julia Watts Belser writes of two different prophets’ visions of the world to come; the translations of the verses I quote are hers.
Isaiah, the first of them, declares in Isaiah 35:5-6, that, “Then the eyes of the blind will be opened, the ears of the deaf will be unstopped, the lame will leap like a deer, and the mute tongue will sing with joy.” But we, Rabbi Watts Belser and I, don’t find this vision enticing. I am deafblind, and have been since birth; I am also autistic, and one of the consequences of that for me is that I am hypersensitive to sound: ’normal’ hearing hurts. This world to come would have me suffer, therefore.
And, sure, maybe G?d will make me not be autistic when G?d takes my deafblindness away. But the person that would remain after that would not be me. Did G?d command me to be as fully ‘me’ as I possibly can be, only to then declare that I won’t be myself in the world to come? There are disabled and chronically-ill people who think this would be a utopia, but, just like us Jews, if you ask two disabled people a question, you’re likely to get three opinions. But there’s another interpretation of the world to come.
Jeremiah, the other prophet, sets forth his vision of the world to come in Jeremiah 31:8-9: “The blind and the lame, among them; pregnant women and women with children, together. They will return here as a great assembly…on a level road, on which they shall not stumble.”
Do you notice the difference here? Jeremiah declares that, rather than taking away our disabilities, G?d will set us upon a level road, one meant for us to traverse without stumbling. But we don’t have to wait for G?d to level the road. We don’t even have to wait for our governments to do it, either. We can do the work of leveling the road in this world, ourselves. I’d like you to think about the disabled people in your life. What challenges do they face? Have you asked? What can you do to level the road for them?
The biggest obstacle we disabled people face is not the active malice of the present regime, for all that the actions it takes make our lives harder. It’s the passive indifference in everyday life. It’s building owners refusing to build ramps or add automatic doors until they’re sued. It’s the placement of signage without Braille, at a height where wheelchair users can’t even read the sign. We are made unequal, not because people hate us or find us inconvenient, but because people are indifferent. Surely someone can tell me where the bus stop is. Surely someone can tell me when it’s safe to cross an intersection that has no audible or vibrating signal. Surely…
And so, we return to shivyon b’ga’avah, ’equality in pride’. The disability pride movement is an offshoot of Pride, marrying as it does the ideals of Pride and disability activism. We are demanding, not asking, for the dignity and respect we are due as b’tzelem elohim, created in the Divine Image. We will not be shamed for needing support. We are not ’less than’ our temporarily-able friends and family.
And yet, one of the biggest ironies of accessibility is that it benefits even non-disabled people to do it. What obstacles do we ourselves face in everyday life? JAN, the Job Accommodation Network, has a website at AskJAN.org, where you can find information on various disabilities and what accommodations can be made for them. They even offer a keyword-based tool for looking up situations and potential solutions for them. However, accessibility exists only when disabled people do not have to request accommodations to be able to access venues and media—because those accommodations were already made.
Finally, I want to express my appreciation to everyone at Beth Chayim Chadashim, not just for giving me the opportunity to share my experiences as a disabled person with you tonight, but also for giving me the opportunity to attend virtually every week and on holidays. Because I am also here, and I am also queer.
Shabbat shalom.
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