And Your Days of Mourning Shall Be Ended
by Kochav Yehudis
Deuteronomy 28:58-60: "If you fail to observe faithfully...the Lord will inflict extraordinary plagues upon you and your offspring, strange and lasting plagues... malignant and chronic diseases. He will bring back upon you all the sicknesses of Egypt that you dreaded so, and they shall cling to you."
Part 1: From Which You Shall Never Recover
27:15: "But if you do not obey the Lord your God to observe faithfully all His commandments...all these curses shall come upon you and take effect."
Some weeks, it is hard not to hear the voices of my enemies when I read a parshat.
28:21 "The Lord will make a pestilence cling to you..."
Deuteronomy, as a whole, contains many rules and edicts. Holy texts often do. And according to many a conservative and sometimes literal interpretation, I break those rules.
28:27 "The Lord shall strike you with...hemorrhoids, boil-scars, an itch from which you shall never recover."
I am a lesbian, married to a Muslim, no less. I don't keep kosher, I don't give up leavening for Passover.
28:22 "The Lord will strike you with consumption, fever, and inflammation..."
The particular punishments for rule-breaking in Ki Tavo made it quite the hard-hitting parshat to dissect as I am deeply mired in discussions with my doctor about how to manage chronic inflammation from (suspected) endometriosis.
28:35 "The Lord will afflict you at the knees and thighs with a severe inflammation, from which you shall never recover - from the sole of your foot to the crown of your head."
In the Jewish Study Bible I use as my primary text, Deuteronomy is on odd sight. Tiny squares of text surrounded by swaths and swaths of descriptions, explanations, context. That's all very well and good. Study is sacred, knowledge is power. But I'll be honest; I didn't look at any of it. Instead, I read Ki Tavo, and I let myself feel.
And what I felt was angry.
I believe that as Jews (even strangely multi-religious ones like myself) we make our tradition. While people may exclude one another, tradition itself cannot. Tradition is ours to build, interpret, act on. It expands to contain us because we weave it around us with every prayer, every ritual, every observance. For me, that means judging when to re-interpret parts of sacred text, and when to flat out say I disagree with them and they have no place in my Judaism.
28:28 "The Lord will strike you with madness, blindness, and dismay, you shall grope at noon as a blind man gropes in the dark...constantly abused and robbed, with none to give help."
I'm a cultural researcher, and someone who simply exists in society as it currently is, and so although I only began Torah study a few years ago, I'm familiar with the trope of disability as an outward show of some internal failure. It's not just common, it's baked into the very fabric of most media, from age and "ugliness" (usually racialized and disability-coded features) being used to define villains in children's media to Anakin Skywalker's need of a life-support suit after his fall to the Dark Side in Star Wars (if you've read my writing before, you knew this piece would include a Star Wars reference somewhere). And increasingly I am sick (pun intended) of it this ableism in media.
My most favorite folk translation of Isra-el is "G-d wrestler." From the name given to the one who grappled with the Divine and come away limping to the "people Israel," this translation states a willingness to struggle with, even against, supposed edicts of the Divine. We are not meant to simply take what is given at face value. If the text says G-d punishes with disability, I am ready to fight. When the text lays out curses of chronic disease, I will question, and wrestle.
The fact of the matter is that Torah is words written and interpreted by people, and people are fallible.
~~~~~~~~
Part 2: You Shall Eat Your Own Issue
There is another place in this parshat where I am reminded of the fallibility of people. I'm actually a little worried to share this. It's feels vulnerable - like it might alienate me from disabled community. I will share anyway. After all, it is the month of Elul, and as I wrote previously, I follow the practice of reciting Psalm 27. "Achat Sha'alti meit Hashem..."
"The Lord is my shepherd, whom should I fear?"
I find it hard to dissect aspects of my identity. I am disabled and lesbian. I am autistic and queer. I'm drawn to the term neuroqueer, coined by Nick Walker, which feels like it captures who I am more completely. I also really enjoy "disgaybled" as a label. This multiplicity means that when I was more active on social media I tended to be very vocal about both my autistic and queer identities during Pride Month. As I came to terms with the limitations autism placed on me, I sometimes referenced Spoon Theory, as first written about by Christine Miserandino, to describe how I struggled. Unfortunately, more than once and with varying levels of aggression, I had other members of the disabled/chronically ill community tell me, in no uncertain terms, that I should not be using "spoons" to refer to my autistic experience.
28:54 "He who is most tender and fastidious among you shall be too mean to his brother and the wife of his bosom and the children he has spared to share with any of them the flesh of the children he eats, because he has nothing else left as a result of the desperate straits to which your enemy shall reduce you..."
The more distance I have gotten from these conflicts, the angrier they have made me. An ableist society does not care what keeps someone in bed all day. It could be pain from endometriosis, depression, injury, burnout. At the end of the day, any of these and more mean someone may not be capable in the way society considers "normal." Any of these and more can inspire ableism in a culture that only values us for what we can produce.
28:66 "The life you face shall be precarious; you shall be in terror, night and day, with no assurance of survival..."
28:33 "You shall be abused and downtrodden continually, until you are driven mad by what your eyes behold..."
I could unpack all the ways that autism impacts me, and everything else my doctors and I discuss, and the ways in which this intersects with broader societal issues to make my life precarious to "prove" I am "disabled/ill enough" for Spoon Theory to be accessible to me
28:67 "In the morning you shall say "if only it were evening!" and in the evening you shall say "if only it were morning!"...
but I should not have to, nor should anyone else. I do not believe we move toward liberation by policing or gatekeeping the language our fellow precarious community members use to describe their lived experience. I do not believe that G-d punishes us for transgressions with disability. But I do believe sometimes we inflict punishment on each other rather than reaching toward solidarity.
~~~~~~~~~~
Part 3: And Your Days of Mourning Shall Be Ended
So where do we go from here?
The Torah is a complex text with many layers that it would take far more than one lifetime and one person to dissect. My interpretations are far from perfect. Community is, likewise, complex, and takes the same openness, curiosity, and hard work to understand, and to bring alive. And the people in it, including me, will make mistakes, exclude where we should welcome, fail to help, feel cursed or curse the life of another. But an opening of the gates is possible.
A Torah portion comes with a Haftarah, and this week's is found in Isaiah. For even the most literal interpretation of the punishments laid out in Ki Tavo, there is hope in Isaiah.
60:2 "Arise, shine, for your light has dawned..."
Where the parshat proper is full of the greatest horrors and threats, Isaiah instead gives us the dawning of a new day.
60:10 "For in anger I struck you down,
but in favor I take you back..."
There's a lesson in this pairing, in a parshat promising edicts and curses together with words assuring thriving and glory in every way imaginable.
60:5 "As you behold, you will glow;
Your heart will throb and thrill..."
60:11 "Your gates shall always stay open -
Day and night they shall never be shut..."
I see in Isaiah possibility. Not necessarily for a miracle cure for chronic illnesses (although we'd gladly take that too), but a future with wide open gates for all to move through the world as they please. As we move through this month of Elul, this build up to the high Holy Days and period of return to our best selves, I pray that we may all leave behind the curses of Ki Tavo, and move instead toward the wide open future and hope of of Isaiah.
Kochav Yehudis (she/her): I am an autistic Ashkenazi lesbian deeply invested in multidisciplinary work, multireligious ritual, theater (and other) artistry, homemaking, storytelling, and cultural research, seeking the path of the Hebrew Priestess. My dream and calling is to connect people to the most honest story of themselves through artistry, scholarship, and ritual. I believe deeply in the body as a source of the Divine and want to open access to that embodied connectivity for others. As a settler, I hope, pray, and fight for Indigenous sovereignty from Palestine to Turtle Island and beyond. I am driven in this and all of my work by the Jewish concept of tikkun olam; I perceive the world is broken, I perceive the world is beautiful, and I commit to sacred repair. I believe great change starts closest to the heart. I live out my values in a sacred multi-religious partnership with my wife Olivia.
