The Torah of the Nest
by Rabbi Julia Watts Belser
I used to dread the choreography of Simchat Torah. As a wheelchair user, I find most celebrations of the holiday profoundly inaccessible. I cannot circle round and dance, hold hands, kick up my heels. I flinch from shouts. I dislike crowds. I find it hard to navigate the wild bright chaos of other people’s joy.
I dance with Torah differently.
Most synagogues I know celebrate Simchat Torah with hakafot, long lines of people weaving round the scrolls with hands entwined, with song and laughter and delight. I usually find my place on the outskirts, at the edges of the gathering. It’s a space I savor, where I can fold myself into the ripples and eddies of the moment, where I can sink into gentleness and ease.
Until one year, when someone offered me a Torah scroll. Now let me tell you: I am not the right person to lead a circle dance. Even if I had the temperament, the mechanics are all wrong. To move, I need both hands free and on my wheelchair rims. To spin? I need a partner who knows the physics and the possibilities of wheels.
But something came upon me, a fierce and unexpected yes.
Whenever I hold Torah, it’s a full body embrace. We settle the scroll in the cradle of my lap. I wrap my arms around her mantle, feeling the wood of her rollers shift and shiver like bones. My cheek rests against the velvet cover, and I know the weight of her. How luminous she is, and how alive.
Once I have my arms around the Torah, I am rooted firm in place. I cannot move. So the dancing forms around my body, the circles winding brilliant around the anchor of my flesh and wheels. As the hakafah flows around me like a river, I know myself not just as one who holds Torah, but as one who is Torah. We are encircled; we are embraced.
Whenever I think of that moment holding Torah, I think the words I love from Genesis 1:2, a verse we chant on Simchat Torah. It is the beginning of all beginnings, a moment when the Earth herself is still unformed, the moment when g*d’s creative impulse first stirs within the depths of time and space:
וְר֣וּחַ אֱלֹהִ֔ים מְרַחֶ֖פֶת עַל־פְּנֵ֥י הַמָּֽיִם
V’ruaḥ elohim meraḥefet al p’nei hamayim
The breath of the Infinite rustles the face of the water.
The medieval Torah commentator Rashi offers a powerful image to explain that unexpected verb meraḥefet, to rustle or stir. How does the divine breath stir the waters of the deep? “Like a dove,” Rashi says, “hovering over a nest she made.”
That’s the image I think of, whenever I have Torah in my embrace: That I am the nest. That the Holy stirs and shimmers through my body and my breath. That I can feel the riffle of g*d’s wings and the shelter of her breast.
A nest is an extraordinary thing: an ephemeral creation, both fragile and durable, intricately woven and utterly impermanent, a shelter for a moment. To recognize myself as nest is to know my own bodymind as bricolage, as a beautiful cobbled-together creation, fashioned of fierce love and necessity. It is to say: I am not the builder, but the built. Woven together from stick and string and spider web.
There are a thousand kinds of nests in this world; each one is its own particular creation. But the nest I’m thinking of, the nest that’s formed like a little bowl? A mother bird often builds the cup of her nest from the inside out. She sits at the center, bending the twigs around herself. She uses her own body to form the cavity, pressing her chest against the interior wall, using her breastbone to shape and smooth the inner surface of the nest.
These days, that’s how I think of my own making: That g*d wove me from within.
Yet as intricate as a nest is, as lovingly as it is made, it is no guarantee of safety. If you’ve kept watch over a backyard nest, you know: The eggs themselves are vulnerable to the threat of weather or to another creature’s hunger. Baby birds live always on the verge of tragedy. To nest is to place one’s hope in possibility, to trust, to dare, to dream of life.
But it is also to know risk.
On Simchat Torah, we too find ourselves poised at a perilous edge. While this day marks the conclusion of the annual cycle of reading the Torah, the custom is to never simply finish reading, but to always immediately begin again. Many communities celebrate by unrolling the entire scroll, unfurling the whole expanse of Torah, bringing one end around to touch the other. The readings for the holiday likewise stitch together the last chapters of the Torah with the first. Through ritual, we bridge the gap between the close of Deuteronomy and the opening of Genesis.
I’ve told you already about the Torah that I love, the Genesis torah, the torah of the nest. May I tell you the Torah that I fear?
It’s the Torah that unfolds in Deuteronomy 34, as Moses climbs Mount Nebo and looks out onto the land he has been journeying toward for forty years. If you know this story, you know that Moses will not enter the place of promise. But in this moment, just as the Torah draws to a close, God allows him a long sweeping look at the land:
Here is how Deuteronomy 34:1-4 unfolds:
Moses went up from the steppes of Moab to Mount Nebo,
to the summit of Pisgah, opposite Jericho.
The Lord showed him the whole land:
from Gilead as far as Dan,
all Naphtali, the land of Ephraim and Manasseh,
the whole land of Judah, as far as the Western Sea,
the Negev and the Plain—the Valley of Jericho, the city of palm trees—
as far as Zoar.
The Lord said to him:
“This is the land of which I swore to Abraham, to Isaac, and to Jacob,
‘I will give it to your descendants.’
I have let you see it with your own eyes,
but you shall not cross there.”
In my book Loving Our Own Bones, I write about these verses as a potent site of disability Torah, the way this moment when Moses looks out upon a land he cannot enter can illuminate our own complex landscapes of disabled grief and loss.
But today, I want to turn this Torah differently. I want to name a different kind of pain.
Moses does not enter the land, but the rest of the people do. In the haftarah for Simchat Torah, God speaks to Joshua, Moses’ successor, and gives him instructions to seize and claim this territory:
Prepare to cross the Jordan,
together with all this people,
into the land that I am giving to the Israelites.
Every spot on which your foot treads I give to you,
as I promised Moses. (Joshua 1:2b-3)
The rest of the book of Joshua is filled with annihilation. The Canaanites, the Hittites, and many other peoples are driven from the land or destroyed. Every year, I am grateful that the Torah stops before we come to this point. Before we read verses that are drenched in conquest. Before we see the violence laid bare.
In the past, I’ve let myself gloss over the dispossession in this story. I’ve allowed myself to flip the page, rewind the scroll, circle safely back to the beginning. But this year?
This year, I feel like one who looks into the abyss.
As I write these words, bombs still shatter Gaza. The hostages are still not home. Hunger hollows Palestinian bodies; people are shot when they come seeking food. Settler violence rages in the West Bank; families are driven from their homes. Israel’s security cabinet vows to intensify the assault and annex Gaza City. And in the interminable tunnels, a captive is forced to dig his own grave.
I want to be clear: There is no straight line between the mythic story of our people and the contemporary moment. I don’t believe the verses I have quoted are responsible for violence. It is too simple to say they are its cause. They are not responsible for expansionist ideology or the tangles of competing nationalisms, for regimes of terror or the rise of bellicose authoritarianism. None of this is prophesied or preordained.
But I fear these verses now. I fear the way they can become a tool in the zealot’s hand. I fear the way these words give fuel to a political vision that is anathema to everything I hold sacred, the way they can be used to legitimate settler violence and land seizure, to buttress domination and erasure and annihilation. I fear how they feed the fantasies of warmongers, the way they license conquest in the name of God.
This is not the God I honor. This is not the Torah I embrace.
I do not know what brings a good life for all the people who call this land home. But I know it will not come from a bomb or a bullet or the barrel of a gun.
As we mark Simchat Torah, as we come once more to the brink, I want to offer a question: Is this year we turn to face this tangle? Is this the year we commit to the long, deep work of restitution and repair?
Of course it’s tempting to brush past the knives that live within our own tradition’s story. When I first began to craft this piece, I wanted only to tell you the story of my arms around the Torah, about how it feels to know within my body the Torah of the dove.
But this is one thing that disability Torah has taught me: It matters to confront the harm that lives within our sacred texts. If we simply paper over violence? If we only turn to words of affirmation and do not contend with the verses that wound? Then we leave poison to fester at the heart of what is holy. We forsake our obligation to teach a Torah that is luminous and true.
Simchat Torah is a bridge between the precipice of Deuteronomy and the promise of Genesis. This sacred day stands as a stark reminder: that we face a consequential choice. We could continue with the story we are telling. We could barrel headlong into the brutality of Joshua.
Or we could take the path laid down by the rituals of our tradition. We could turn back to the beginning. We could choose to hold and to be held by the Torah of the nest, by the g*d who hovers like a bird over the deep, who knows the elemental touch of wind and water. Who owns nothing and risks everything. Who has never made a wall. Whose wildness is antithetical to capture. Who knows how to weave shelter out of twig and tremble, out of the thinnest filaments of possibility. Whose voice calls like a haunting—even now, even still—in fierce fidelity to life.
Rabbi Julia Watts Belser (she/her) is a spiritual teacher, scholar, and 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. Her latest book, Loving Our Own Bones: Disability Wisdom and the Spiritual Subversiveness of Knowing Ourselves Whole, won a National Jewish Book Award and the Grawemeyer Award for Religion. She’s also an avid wheelchair hiker, a devoted gardener, and a lover of wild places.
