נָכוּת – When Liturgy Excludes Us. For an Anti-Ableist Reformulation of the Morning Blessings

Every morning, as a deaf woman living with hydrocephalus, I face a liturgy that tells me my body is a problem to be solved. פּוֹקֵחַ עִוְרִים – “who opens the eyes of the blind,” זוֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים – “who straightens the bent,” הַמֵּכִין מִצְעֲדֵי גָבֶר – “who firms the steps of man.” These Birkhot HaShachar encode a deep ableism as they assume that standing straight, seeing, walking “normally” are divine benefits, while their absence would be curses. My spiritual challenge is not to find my place in these words, it is to denounce their insidious violence and demand their radical transformation.

Ableism Inscribed in Prayer: A Betrayal of Justice

The Hebrew word נָכוּת – disability – invites us to radical questioning. The Torah commands us: צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף (“Justice, justice you shall pursue”, Deuteronomy 16:20). The repetition is not stylistic and urges us to pursue justice with urgency, relentlessly, in all areas. The fight against ableism is not optional. The exclusion of disabled people from our synagogues and rituals constitutes an injustice as grave as any other discrimination we claim to combat. These brachot, recited daily, are not neutral. They perpetuate a theology where the able body is the divine norm and the disabled body, an aberration.

The Babylonian Talmud in Berakhot 60b presents these blessings as corresponding to the “ordinary” sequence of waking: opening the eyes, sitting up, placing feet on the ground. As theologian Judith Z. Abrams analyzes in Judaism and Disability, this sequence erects as universal norm a particular experience of being in the world, that of an able, autonomous, vertical body. This structuring reveals a rabbinic imagination where bodily autonomy is valued because it wards off the fear of dependency, illness, paralysis. The morning blessings function as a daily staging of bodily normalcy, a way of reaffirming that “order” has not been broken during the night, that the body “responds.”

My waking does not resemble this idealized sequence. As a deaf woman, I do not hear the world waking around me. As a person living with hydrocephalus, my mornings involve a different bodily awareness between navigating the pressure in my head, managing particular cognitive fatigue and inhabiting unstable balance. My body carries within it a shunt that is part of me, that accompanies me, that redefines the boundaries between flesh and technology. Yet the liturgy implicitly asks me to celebrate a physical normalcy that I neither have nor desire. When I recite “who firms the steps,” must I think of my sometimes uncertain steps as divine failures? When a blind person recites “who opens the eyes of the blind,” what are we really saying? That their body awaits a correction that never comes?

בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים Revisited: Deconstructing the Normative Body

Tradition teaches us that humanity was created בְּצֶלֶם אֱלֹהִים (in the image of God, Genesis 1:27). This principle has been weaponized to define a “normal” body as the sole true reflection of divinity. Rabbinic sources abound with restrictions concerning מוּמִים (physical “defects”) particularly for priestly service (Leviticus 21:16-23). This exclusion establishes a hierarchy where certain bodies are deemed more fit to mediate the sacred.

Yet the Talmud itself contains tensions on this question. Several narratives valorize the wisdom of “imperfect” rabbis: Nachum Ish Gam Zu, described as paralyzed and entirely dependent (Ta’anit 21a); Rav Sheshet and Rav Yosef, both blind (Shevu’ot 41b, Nedarim 41a). These narratives construct rabbinic authority independent of bodily integrity. In other words, even classical tradition recognizes that holiness is not tied to bodily conformity.

An anti-ableist reading, inspired by Rachel Adler’s Jewish feminism in Engendering Judaism, asks: who benefits from the definition of a body “without defect”? What violence hides behind the ideal of the שָׁלֵם body (whole, complete)? This notion of completeness is not an objective spiritual criterion, but a hierarchization tool that legitimates the exclusion of certain bodies in favor of others.

Midrash offers us a subversive path. In Bereshit Rabbah 8:1, God created Adam as a גֹּלֶם – an unfinished, imperfect form, requiring divine breath. Original humanity was not perfect but dependent on divine breath. This dependency is constitutive of our humanity. We are all incomplete, interdependent.

My body radically embodies this truth. My shunt – this tube that traverses my skull and regulates the cerebrospinal fluid – binds me to technology, to care, to embodied vigilance. I am cyborg and sacred. My brain functions with different pressure, my ears do not hear, and it is precisely in this configuration that I bear the divine image. A crip theology, developed by thinkers like Rabbi Julia Watts Belser in Rabbinic Tales of Destruction, affirms that נָכוּת is not a deviation from the divine image, but its full expression. If God is אֶהְיֶה אֲשֶׁר אֶהְיֶה (“I will be what I will be”, Exodus 3:14), a God of becoming and transformation, then bodies that require technological aids, that inhabit pain and fatigue, that “malfunction”, particularly reflect this divine dimension.

Reformulating the Brakhot: Concrete Proposals

Judaism has always evolved. The Talmud is a monument to dispute, to reformulation. אֵלּוּ וְאֵלּוּ דִּבְרֵי אֱלֹהִים חַיִּים (“These and these are the words of the living God”, Eruvin 13b). If we have adapted halakha to each generation, why should our prayers remain prisoners of an ableist conception?

Instead of perpetuating anxiety about fragility, we must create blessings that celebrate bodily and cognitive diversity. A crip reading inverts this anxiety by affirming that dependency (on others, on technology, on care) is not an anomaly to be erased, but a constitutive dimension of human life. Morning blessings can be reread as an invitation to bless not conformity to a bodily model, but the diversity of gestures, rhythms, modes of awakening.

Rabbi Julia Watts Belser proposes: “Blessed are You who created bodies in their multiplicity”; “Blessed are You who gave us varied senses to experience the world”; “Blessed are You who made us interdependent.” A crip theology transforms liturgy into a space where each body becomes a site of relation and revelation.

Here are my proposals:

Instead of פּוֹקֵחַ עִוְרִים (who opens the eyes of the blind)

Let’s say: נוֹתֵן לָאָדָם בִּינָה (“Who gives understanding to humanity”)

We all perceive the world, each in our own way – through eyes, through hands, through vibration.

Instead of זוֹקֵף כְּפוּפִים (who straightens the bent)

Let’s say: מְכַבֵּד כָּל גּוּף (“Who honors every body”)All bodies are worthy – bent, straight, with assistive devices, moving or still.

Instead of הַמֵּכִין מִצְעֲדֵי גָבֶר (who firms the steps)

Let’s say: פּוֹתֵחַ דְּרָכִים רַבִּים (“Who opens multiple paths”)

For there are a thousand ways to move through the world – walking, rolling, staggering, leaning.

Add: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה‘, בּוֹרֵא אֶת הָאָדָם בְּרִיבּוּיוֹ הַשָּׁלֵם (“Blessed are You who create humanity in its full diversity”)

Add: בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה‘, הַמְחַבֵּר גּוּף וּטֶכְנוֹלוֹגְיָה (“Blessed are You who unite body and technology”)
For those whose lives interweave with shunts, prosthetics, hearing aids, ventilators.

תִּקּוּן עוֹלָם: Repair Ableism, Not Bodies

The concept of תִּקּוּן עוֹלָם (repair of the world) must be reexamined. Too often mobilized to “repair” or “heal” disabled people, as if their existence were a cosmic fracture requiring correction. This reading rests on a misunderstanding of the Kabbalistic concept of שְׁבִירַת הַכֵּלִים (the breaking of the vessels) formulated by Isaac Luria. In Lurianic thought, the breaking is not a defect to eliminate: it is the very condition of diversity and multiplicity of existence, a foundational moment that makes the world’s complexity possible.

An anti-ableist theology affirms that it is not נָכִים bodies that must be repaired, but ableism (discrimination, exclusion, oppression, inaccessibility) that deforms the world and obstructs justice. נָכוּת is not the problem; it is the social, material, and symbolic environment that refuses to accommodate human diversity that requires תִּקּוּן. It is society, not the disabled body, that is truly “broken.”

בְּרִית and Community: The Radically Inclusive Covenant

The concept of בְּרִית (covenant) structures the relationship between God and the Jewish people. An anti-ableist theology must affirm that all bodies, with their variations, their differences, their technological dependencies, are already fully in the covenant. There is no body too “imperfect” to be in relationship with God. The בְּרִית does not demand conformity, but honors diversity.

The Talmud in Shevuot 39a teaches: כָּל יִשְׂרָאֵל עֲרֵבִים זֶה בָּזֶה (“All members of Israel are guarantors for one another”). The term עֲרֵבִים means both “guarantors” and “intertwined.” We are not responsible for each other at a distance, but profoundly enmeshed in mutual existence. This responsibility is not condescending charity but recognition that we need each other to survive and thrive.

Conclusion: נָכוּת as Prophetic Blessing

As Jewish feminists have reclaimed נָשִׁים (women) as a source of pride, we must reclaim נָכוּת as blessing. It teaches us humility and the recognition that we do not control everything, that our brains and ears have their own logics. It teaches us interdependence, that we depend on technology, care, others. It teaches us creativity – the countless ways of being human.

Rabbi Elliot Kukla shows that the Talmud already recognized bodily diversity with the concepts of אַנְדְּרוֹגִינוֹס, טֻמְטוּם, אַיְלוֹנִית. If tradition recognized gender diversity, why would it refuse physical, neurological, sensory diversity?

Bereshit teaches: וַיִּבְרָא אֱלֹהִים אֶת הָאָדָם בְּצַלְמוֹ (“God created humanity in God’s image”, Genesis 1:27). ALL humans. My deaf body, my brain with its shunt, my precarious balance, all of this IS in the divine image. It awaits no repair because it IS creation.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה אֲדֹנָי, שֶׁהֶחֱיָנוּ וְקִיְּמָנוּ וְהִגִּיעָנוּ לַזְּמַן הַזֶּה (Blessed are You who has kept us alive and sustained us and enabled us to reach this moment). This moment when we see that נָכוּת was never a curse, but an invitation to build a more just, more humble, more holy world. A world where every body fully bears the divine image.

בָּרוּךְ אַתָּה ה‘, שֶׁעָשַׂנִי כִּרְצוֹנוֹ (Blessed are You who made me according to Your will).

According to Your will. Not yours.

Deaf. Hydrocephalic. Cyborg. Sacred.

כֵּן יְהִי רָצוֹן – May it be so.