Who is your Whale?
by River Mudgett
Since 2023, I have turned to the same EP when the High Holy Days come around: Why Do We Want What We Want by Karen & The Sorrows, a queer, disabled, Jewish, country musician. An EP that Karen Pittleman said was insisting on being released in time for Yom Kippur that year during an interview I did of her that was for Rainbow Rodeo. This EP shepherds me through a necessary emotional arc through the High Holy Days. When I was struggling to find a new idea for this commentary, I turned to Karen & The Sorrows. Here I found my inspiration in her aptly titled song, “Jonah and the Whale”.
What specifically got my wheels turning were the final verse:
Jonah, don’t fight it
Jonah, just be guided
Jonah, just be broken
Jonah, smashed wide open
I got to thinking about the process of coming to terms with acquiring disabilities later in life. Of being proven wrong, of adjusting, of realizing things about a group of people you might never have given a second thought to.
When you become disabled, even if it’s a ‘minor’ disability, it can turn your world upside down in ways you never even considered preparing for, especially if we’re younger when it happens. Coming into my disabilities happened slightly behind coming into my queerness making them forever intertwined for me. Finding myself in the rough sea of 2018 ending a marriage and coming out as trans to then acquiring a back injury on the job in 2019 that started my disability revelations.
While I’m going to be using Jonah and the Whale as a metaphor going forward I want to be clear that I am in no way, shape, or form calling disabilities something that we’re Divinely given as a punishment or to learn a lesson in life. I’m also focusing strictly on acquired disabilities as that is my personal experience. Disabilities are simply a consequence of cellular reproduction in our world. The variety and differences of all life, human and otherwise, are both beautiful and Divine. Though I don’t subscribe to a deity version of G-d or the Divine, I believe that there is Divinity in everyone and everything. There is Divinity in human difference just as there is Divinity in the constellations in the night sky. We can be b’tzelem Elohim, made in the image of G-d, of the Divine, without being literally made by a deity.
For those of us who acquire our disabilities later in life it can feel like we’re Jonah, running from our disabled brains and bodies like he was running from G-d. That if we run fast enough, we can outrun our changing bodies and our fears. Jonah feared being proven wrong, ruining his credibility, being labeled as a false prophet. As my body became more disabled, I feared losing out on things that brought me joy, a body that was becoming even more unknown to me, more changes in my life. While I was born with the genetics that led to my multiple disabilities, I was unaware of them until my mid-20’s when they made themselves known in ways that I had to acknowledge.
I think of the disability community as the Whale in this story. While I don’t think Jonah got active stewardship from the Whale, he was still held and protected while coming to terms with his task. Sometimes being held and protected is exactly what we need. Community keeps us safe. The act of keeping each other safe is a form of stewardship in its own right. Even if that community is just one person, that community is important and doing sacred acts.
Becoming disabled is a deeply personal process that gets put on public display as we’re forced to put more and more trust in strangers in our home as caregivers, on the bus to make space for our mobility aids, or as we bear intimate details of our lives to providers who are in charge of our access to care. It’s scary and unpredictable. The stakes become much higher if we’re wrong about our brain or our bodies than before we were disabled.
Like Jonah, we don’t necessarily know the consequences of saying the wrong thing but we can take some educated guesses. Instead of ‘false prophet’ we can get labeled ‘drug seeking’ or have all of our health issues assumed to be due to anxiety or our Hormone Replacement Therapy (HRT). Worse, some of us can lose access to care or to housing. What would a loss of status look like for Jonah? Did Jonah have similar fears about not being able to meet his basic needs if people no longer believed he was a true prophet? Maybe he feared losing his community and exile. A fear that is no less terrifying today.
For Yom Kippur 5783/2022, acclaimed poet Phil Kaye shared his interpretation of Jonah and the Whale with Central Synagogue in his poem Hide and Seek. This poem centers around the tension of hiding/being found and safety/not being safe through the vehicle of his Jewish and Japanese family members.
Kaye highlights times that hiding brings safety and others where hiding is what he doesn’t want to do, where safety comes from being recognized, included. “Here I am / I couldn’t hide from you…” is a repeated refrain throughout the poem that gets utilized in multiple contexts.
I was particularly struck by the moment where Kaye repeats phrases his mother did, or might have, to practice letter sounds in English. “Lover, rubber, really / lover, rubber, really”. She used this practice, this ritual, to be able to hide among Americans when she moved to the United States. Hide her Japanese accent, move through the world with a little more protection. I couldn’t help but wonder what rituals I do to keep my disabilities hidden from public view. How I try to pass as able bodied for safety or for more ease in a space. I wonder what Whales, what community, I miss in doing this. Those moments of not needing to hide, to mask my pain or when I feel comfortable enough to stop hiding.
Who are the people I don’t feel like I need to hide from? Who is my Whale that I can be smashed wide open in? When can I put my energy into creating a world, or even a space, where I don’t have to perform some of these rituals? What would my life be like if I could sit in my Whale, my community, and be guided, broken, and say that I’m glad I wasn’t able to hide from them? Turning that disability dreaming into action is a taxing and scary process. And, like with any process, we’re going to have to keep doing it, failing, succeeding, and doing it again.
Much like the Book of Jonah, I can’t tell you what happens next in your own Jonah and the Whale story. What happens next is something for you to try and create. May this commentary and the others of the Disability Torah Project be one of your Whales.
River (they/them) is a queer, disabled, Jew by Choice writer and artist living in central Texas with their partner and cats. They enjoy finding reflections of themself in our traditions, spending time in the river, and finding new art around time.
