Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

I think quite a few people that you interviewed began to touch on ways that they, the way that their lived experience as a disabled person intersects with their religion, and that that allows them to reframe parts of the Bible or parts of the Torah for themselves, and yeah it feels quite important to talk about the ways that people are carving their own space within a faith and also finding parts of a faith that naturally speak to their identity. Yeah and someone that I feel really spoke to this idea of carving your own space is definitely Julia.

[Interview clip]

Julia: [Chants ‘Nishmat’ – prayer from traditional Jewish morning liturgy. The first line from which the name is taken translates as, ‘the breath of all that lives praises You, God’.]

So, the liturgy just goes on like that for, hours basically, punctuated by moments when individuals are more, in, more actively engaged at certain times, times when they rise, times when they do the silent standing prayer.

One of the things I love about praying in Hebrew and praying with the liturgy that’s very old is that I feel freed from the desire or the demand that every word align perfectly with my own understanding or my own politics. There’s just something about getting beyond myself. And my desire that it all be, exactly the way I would’ve written it. None of it’s the way I would’ve written it. And there’s something so liberating about that.

There’s a point in this section that I just chanted, I didn’t actually chant it, it’s kind of in the middle, that talks about, “to you every knee shall bend”. You know, I could have a, I could have a really rocky relationship with that as somebody who, you know who doesn’t stand and you know like, not sure that my legs always do the right thing according to the normative model, it, but it, I just… you know, I think about it, when I, when I pray those words, I just think about yeah, my, my little quirky, willowy legs, are also, like involved in the project of praising God. I like that. I like that.

It could be a disability text of terror, because it talks about you know how if you have one little, one little vessel or one little piece that doesn’t work the body cannot stand before you. Well my body doesn’t spend a lot of time standing before God. So, there’s a lot of things [sic] that I could really find hard about that passage. But I just don’t feel it that way. I find that often my sense of, my sense of the holy runs at odds with the scriptures. I mean that’s just how it goes for me.
I just can’t imagine being in relationship with a God that didn’t like me.

[Chants – ‘Nishmat’]

There’s a moment on the Jewish holiday of Shavuot where Jews chant from the book of Ezekiel, one of the books of the prophets that Ezekiel has this very wild vision of God in the, seated in the divine chariot, on the divine thrown, it’s a vision of, it’s really a very wild text.

One Shavuot morning I was sitting in Shul and hearing that text chanted, reading along in my own book and I realised… This image of God in the divine chariot, God has wheels. God has wheels! It was such a powerful moment of connection for me as a wheelchair user to think about: this is a whole new level of imagining God made in my image, me made in God’s image, my body reflecting a kind of, my disability experience reflecting a kind of, experience that perhaps God also in some ways knows. So that lead me down a whole thing of imagining, maybe God has an access problem all the time. You know, what, what does it mean to imagine that so much of our world is made inaccessible to God?

I don’t know whether I actually believe or think about God as a wheelchair user in some literal way, but the power of that image for me was that sense of really pushing past the idea that somehow… the normative body was really the body that was made in God’s image. And my body was a kind of misprint; you know, an aberration, a little slip.  And I love it; I love the way it just, it just screws with the idea of what’s at the centre and what’s at the margin. I love the way that, I mean love wheels, I love wheels. I find them beautiful. I find them exquisite so I love the idea of thinking about God as having the luxury of wheeling through the world, because it’s a really beautiful way to get around.

And, I associate my own wheels with a sense of freedom. A wheelchair is for me the thing that has really opened up my sense of, I feel more fully in my body as a wheelchair user than I ever did when I was a walker. So, I like the idea of thinking about God as maximally enabled, via the chariot.

So that’s been a really fun thing, a fun moment, a really, in some ways whimsical in some ways dead serious way of thinking about how an element within Jewish tradition, a piece within the Torah, could be read through disability experience, and imagining a way in which my lived experience of disability could allow me to understand something religiously that might be opaque to folks who’ve never had this experience.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

Jak: One of the things that really stayed with me was this idea, you you both start to talk about a Crip sensibility and Crip tools, and she talks about the way that relates to Judaism for her. But I wanted to talk to you about what you thought your Crip tools might be, and how you see your Crip sensibility, if you feel you have a Crip sensibility where that comes out?

Claire: Yeah I probably have massive lists somewhere of what I think my Crip tools are, but I didn’t bring them today. Yeah and just I guess for people that might not have come across that term, I guess, that Crip is a word that has been re- um, what’s the word?

Jak: Re- appropriated?

Claire: Re-appropriated by… It’s-

Jak: -Reclaimed, maybe.

Claire: Reclaimed, yeah that’s the word I was searching for thanks, by some disabled people in terms of quite a political relationship to disability identity, that reclaims the word cripple into the word Crip, and is very much I think about an acknowledgement of a cultural identity relating to disability, that values and prizes the qualities and the aspects of life that being disabled offers. That would be my very un-academic, un-Disability Studies summation of what Cripness is.

It was a word that I really struggled with for a long time, and didn’t really identify with and it’s been a gradual journey, my relationship to disability and my acknowledgement of it and then owning of it as an identity has been a gradual journey throughout my life. And yeah I think, for me also that the claiming of that word really only happened within the last five– seven years or so, and I’m 40 now.

[Violin plays]

[Interview clip]

Julia: I think decorum is one of the things that messes us up around disability, right? So often when I move in spaces that feel like they’re fancy spaces, where that strong sense of politeness and decorum and appropriate behaviour reins, that’s when I know that as a Crip I’m not welcome. I’m gonna mess it up. I’m going to in some way mess up either physically or just someone’s notion of who should be in that space.

So I really like a bit of a messy space, I like a messy space to pray in because, and I mean by messy here I mean people are coming and going, people are standing up, a kid is walking through, someone’s talking to their neighbour, you know, because it, it makes me feel that it’s possible to show up with my full self, and not apologise for my body or my presence.

One of the tools is the sense that, bodies and minds are most, that’s it’s worth really valuing the places where bodies get messy.
I think that’s partly a Crip sensibility, I mean a sense that, bodies are worth cherishing even when they’re, especially when they’re dissident, especially when they’re leaking and, messing things up.

[Violin plays]

Claire: I think as an artist as well, in recent years I’ve become really aware of, that I think I’ve focused maybe almost obsessively in a way of what my Crip tools might be in life. And beginning to understand that what I’m interested in is the phenomenology of disability: how being disabled, how I perceive the world because of being disabled, as opposed to how I am perceived as being disabled. The ways in which being disabled shape how I navigate the world, in terms of space and time, and encounters with people, and not just people I guess you know non-human entities within the world.

So in practical terms, my, that comes down to an awareness of, I guess I’m a bit obsessed with noticing what I notice. So the fact that I notice that I have a really honed sense of attention towards the ground because I walk with crutches I’m often looking at the ground, if I’m moving and travelling in space, you know walking, that I’m walking with four legs, and I’m really looking at the ground and I really pay attention to it and I notice gradient and slippyness, and camber, all these things, surface, and so to me those things are also in a way, can also be tools. That knowledge manifests as a tool when I work as an artist, it shapes how I create an environment, you know that attention to space, and attention to how a space is designed or how one might move through a space.

[Interview clip]

Julia: You just sort’ve figure out, ‘okay we have to get it done’. ‘We have to figure out how to do what needs done’. Look, also the willingness to adapt and to create, to innovate because of necessity, this to me is a really, is a place where Crip sensibility is so strong. You sort of figure how to cobble together and make what you need and make it work, and often in unconventional ways.

Claire: I think we talked before as well previously about this notion that actually there are Crip tools of just shear creativity, of a requirement to work out a different way to do things, that are incredibly useful tools that would be useful in lots of different environments if people only [laughs] allowed disabled people in the door to use them or hired them. The ability to know how to navigate across cities that are not designed for you, and to be able to understand how to ration energy or be prepared for a journey, you know, all of these skills are things that people learn.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

[Violin plays]

[Interview clip]

Julia: As a disabled person I spend a lot of time waiting for other people too, waiting for the bus, waiting for the wheelchair man, waiting for appointments, waiting for bureaucracy, just waiting. And the question of how you wait is something that I’ve come to understand differently in part from my religious practice, my spiritual practice. To not think of waiting time as wasted time, but really as an opportunity to pay attention to where I am, to how I feel, to what’s going on, to really the sense that like, this moment can be, can be a really potent moment. Where ever it is you know. I can’t actually make it happen faster, so, as much as often I would like to right? What I can do sometimes is to transform the way I am experiencing the waiting.

Claire: Time, that was something I became really aware of I talked to, when I met an academic called Carrie Sandahl who’s based in Chicago, she introduced me to the concept of Crip Time and that being a recognition that disability shifts your relationship to time and notions of normative time, and that manifests in lots of different ways I guess. That Crip Time begins in some ways from the moment of conception actually because this notion that society tries to put markers on a human body in its development even before it’s born and if it doesn’t hit that marker of the body should’ve developed to do this, or look like this, or have this part of the body at this particular stage, then you are already in Crip Time is how that perspective relates. But yeah, in things that, I take longer to do things.

Also as I have come into Crip identity I own the fact that I take longer to do things. And I’m more comfortable with that than I used to be. If I’m paying for something in a shop you know I used to feel very uncomfortable at the fact that I would hold up a queue of people because I didn’t move out the way as quickly as everyone else because when you use crutches you don’t have your hands free and so there’s a whole sort of very honed [laughs] and very clearly defined process that I know exactly what I’m doing in the order I need to do it in.

But that recognition that that takes a bit longer, than the person maybe behind me that has their hands free, and how that instantly puts you up against feeling, you know you’re made to feel like you should get out the way and you should move faster, and people try to sort of ‘help’ you, in inverted commas, or indeed people serve you over the top of my head, that used to happen, and whereas now I would, if that starts to happen then I will absolutely be like “excuse me, do you think you can wait a minute?”, whereas before I might have been ‘I’m so sorry, I’m so sorry’ and try to get out the way, and the more you rush the more you drop things.

Those things of like, whether you would see those as tools or not, but certainly an acknowledgment of an understanding of how I need to work in the world and what I need, and sometimes I need more time, and I will hold that time when it’s necessary now in a way that when I was younger I didn’t feel confident to.

[Violin plays]

Jak: I think, I think both times that I have, ‘cause I’ve actually listened to all of Julia’s interviews twice round, because of transcribing them the first time, and both times particularly the conversation around Crip Time and Shabbat, and this idea of like “it takes the time it takes”, and actually that pushes against this capitalist like production line culture that we’re in, and both times that I’ve heard that it’s exactly what I needed to hear.

Claire: Yeah [laughs].

[Interview clip]

Julia: Shabbat begins 18 minutes before sundown on Friday night and it lasts for 25 hours, so it carries on from Friday through Saturday night until the first three stars come out. And, is I think one of the most amazing parts of Jewish tradition for me, it’s a exquisitely beautiful, peaceful time that is for me an antidote to the hectic, busy, rushed, working world in which I spend so much of my life. The understanding of Shabbat is that for six days God laboured to create the Earth and everything that was in it, and on the seventh day God rested. Jewish tradition understands the rest as the thing which completes creation. Without rest you can’t actually have creation.

Jewish tradition I think has a very, interesting relationship with time, and the idea that space is not so much the thing you sanctify, but time. Shabbat is a time that really no matter where you are, no matter, where in the world you are, no matter whether you have a synagogue or if there’s a special place, you, you it’s the time that counts, the sanctification, the, the recognising sacred time.

You know I’ve thought a lot about Crip Time, and Disability Time, and willingness to take the time that something needs, and I’ve not always been good at this. I’ve sometimes really beaten myself for needing more time, for being slow, for being late, for, making other people late… and, I think in many ways it’s through my practice of, my Shabbat practice that I’ve transformed my own sense of relationship with time. It doesn’t matter how long; it takes the time it takes.

[Violin plays]

Shabbat is 25 hours of every week where you’re not allowed to perform work. You’re not allowed to labour. Now what Jewish law means by ‘labour’, and what we, what capitalist America thinks of as labour is not entirely the same thing.

So it’s not exactly about work and the way we define it but it’s such an, it’s such a profound challenge to the notion that people are valued on the basis of their ability to produce, ‘cause no ones producing. It’s a day where the tyranny of production is shut off. You’re just not allowed to make anything, and, that is a really, I think it is really liberatory, in terms of a disability perspective, in terms of a disability politic that says we are not valuable just because of what we can earn, or whether we can work, or whether we can work nine to five. I mean I think of the number of people who have felt their lives to be, who have fought to have their lives recognised as being worth living because they couldn’t hold a job. And that’s, that’s such a desecration of what it means to be alive. The idea that our culture should tell people that, you’re worthless ‘cause you can’t earn a living. What a, what a terrible thing. Yeah, so to the extent that I have come to be able to really, value people in a different way it’s because of, it’s in part because of Shabbat.

Jak: I definitely consider myself someone that like, has needed slowness or what is considered to be slower time, but particularly in the last few months actually going ‘oh no I really might need more time than the normative person’ and that’s so nice to know that there’s people out there that have like got their head round that, and not only accept that they need more time but that that its own form of like rebellion in a great way. Like its own, it’s an act in itself against the dominant narrative. Against valuing people just on what they can produce and how efficient they can be.

[Violin plays]

Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

I wondered if we could talk a bit about, Tikkun Olam because, there’s this really lovely description that Julia has of what that is:

[Interview clip]

Julia: So Tikkun Olam, Tikkun Olam means ‘the repair of the world’, sometimes people say ‘the healing of the world’ and I find it a really beautiful Jewish concept. It’s the idea that, that Jews have the responsibility to do whatever we can to make the world right, like there’s a fracturing in the world that has to be repaired and it’s on us to do that.

The idea of Tikkun Olam is that you have the responsibility to stitch together, to repair and rather than to wound.

Jak: And I’d heard of that concept before growing up, but I hadn’t heard it relate to inner repair or inner work, because that’s something that really speaks to me within my practice, and it links to an empowered Crip and queer identity but the way that Julia articulates it: for her the inner work is that, there are parts of her faith where she is excluded and she could feel excluded actually she chooses to go, ‘well actually I believe in a God that likes me, and I choose to not constantly worry about getting approval from other people for the way I am’ and that that is Tikkun Olam is like, that really deeply moved me and was a big shift in my thinking of the way that a religious practice of Judaism could actually relate to me and my life, not just as an ethnic heritage.

[Harmonium plays]

[Interview clip]

Julia: And what other people think I mean I don’t really… I don’t really give it that much thought. I’m not looking for them to, to authorise or approve of my life or my body. I guess that’s where my sense of myself as a feminist also really dovetails with my sense of myself as a disabled person. They’re very mutually reinforcing for me, and queer identity as well. I got used to pretty early on having something that was a cherished, deep part of myself be despised by a lot of folks. So, I built a kind of strategy for saying well, ‘screw you’. I’m not looking to you to authorise who I am or how I love or how I move through this world. I’d like to be in relationship with you. But my first condition is to, be… well, what, what is it really? I guess it’s a sense of, I have a responsibility to be true and kind to myself. To not just be cruel. I mean that is something that, that that desire to bring and build more kindness, to make kindness, that connects to what we were talking about with Tikkun Olam.

I think if you think about the Tikkun Olam, the healing of the world out there, there’s a very close relationship as I see it between the world out there and the world in here.

So I do see a kind’ve relationship between that commitment to mending, and repair, and in the outta world, and then the inner work of doing right also by myself.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

Jak: Welcome to the Guide Gods Digital Collection, I’m Jak Soroka in conversation with Claire Cunningham. You’re listening to a series of podcasts created from the interview material collected as part of Claire’s show, Guide Gods.

It’s funny because the way I first was introduced to the raw interview material was by transcribing.

Claire: That’s right, yeah.

Jak: And that was, I was trying to be very clinical/ and just like type as fast as I could, and not listen, and it actually, that was the section of interviews from Manchester so all Jewish faith and I grew up in a secular Jewish family with very religious grandparents. So I maybe should’ve seen that coming but it totally pulled me in. Without even, I hadn’t seen the show, I hadn’t really spoken to you about it, but just the interview material on its own has genuinely changed my relationship to faith and to thinking about myself as potentially a religious or spiritual Jewish person and not just Jewish by ethnicity. Which is kind of quite huge [laughter], /particularly as a queer, particularly as a non-binary person. Yeah for you to have spoken to someone like Julia Watts Belser who is occupying a space, you know like a queer, feminist, Crip space within Jewish faith, that was like such a massive deal to listen to and yeah has really connected me to a community that I didn’t think I was part of actually. So thanks. [Laughter]

Claire: /[laughs]
/Yeah.
My first convert. Brilliant. [Laughter]

Jak: [Laughs] Yeah.

[Interview clip]

Julia: One of the things that really drew me to Judaism was the tradition of asking questions. Nothing is ever set. Nothing is ever finished. There’s an obligation to be a part of the conversation, but also to ask questions, to interrupt, to, to challenge. There’s space to protest and remain a part of the tradition. And that tradition, I mean that idea of building the tradition through loving argument and generous but real debate and disagreement, that felt to me like a place where I could live.

[Harmonium plays]

There’s a tradition that authorises even talking back to God. I find it a very powerful story in the Torah where, God tells Abraham that God is about to destroy the city of Sodom and Abraham protests. Abraham talks God down, and bargains with God basically to say, but you know, you shouldn’t do it. He says, “Should not the, should not the judge of all the Earth act justly?” That was quite a bold thing to say to God actually. And the amazing thing to me is God actually agrees. Abraham talks God down to say, if, you know, if a certain number of righteous people can be found then he won’t destroy the city. Well it turns out I mean the story doesn’t go well for the people of Sodom. But leaving that, leaving that aside, [laughs] if we can leave that aside, there’s something so amazing to me about a tradition that authorises saying ‘God I don’t think that was a just thing, that doesn’t strike me as a good, right decision, it’s not really in keeping with your nature, is it?’ I love that. I love that.

That authorisation to protest as an expression of love and fidelity feels to me to be a really important piece, and it very much shapes the way I think of myself as a queer feminist disabled Jew. I need that space, because for me religion will always be, my place within the tradition, will always be a blend of love and pain. And a blend of wanting to be shaped by tradition and also needing to reshape it.

[Violin plays]

Jak: Thanks for listening to this conversation as part of the Guide Gods Digital Collection. If you’ve enjoyed this podcast, please listen to our other conversations via the website.

Julia: [Sings Shalom Aleichem]