While much of the recent engagement with disability studies in Jewish studies has focused on “visible” physical disabilities, this panel brings together three papers which address forms of disability which diverge from this more standard model, exploring how disability frameworks can help us read Jewish texts that treat neurodivergence, speech impairments, and infertility. Working transhistorically to bring together rabbinic, medieval, and modern Jewish texts, this panel suggests that Jewish texts can offer useful challenges to contemporary moral assumptions about how these “invisible” disabilities work.
This paper argues that the Bavli’s derivation of liturgical norms from Hannah’s emotional dysregulation in B. Berakhot 30B-33A offers a tantalizing counterexample to regnant accounts of neurodivergent emotional dysregulation as morally defective. A vast body of literature, popular and academic alike, portrays explicitly or implicitly neurodivergent-coded traits–including differences of emotional intensity, regulation, and focus, as moral defects, a phenomenon this paper calls “moral neuroableism.” In Berakhot 31A-B, however, Hannah’s emotional dysregulation–her swaying as though drunk in public prayer space, her impassioned and impeccably reasoned confrontation with God, and her sharp and screaming rebukes of ritual authority–as she prays for a child, and later defends his life, is not only tolerated but becomes the source for norms about how all Jews should pray. This paper will compare Hannah’s actions and emotions to stigmatized neurodivergent emotional expressions, and use their normative power within the text to argue for a reevaluation of the moral worth of neurodivergent patterns of mind.
The second paper examines how Jewish interpretations of Moses’s speech difficulty articulate shifting models of disability. Drawing on disability studies and biblical scholarship, it distinguishes between impairment as bodily difference and disability as the social and theological meanings attached to that difference. Reading Exodus alongside rabbinic midrash and medieval biblical commentary, the paper traces how Moses’s description of himself as “heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue” (Exod 4:10) becomes a recurring problem of interpretation. The biblical narrative responds by restructuring prophetic authority around Moses’s impairment, modeling accommodation rather than cure through designating Aaron as Moses’s mouth. Later interpreters—including Rashi, Rashbam, Bekhor Shor, and Gersonides—reframe Moses’s speech through sociolinguistic, spiritual, and theological explanations that relocate or diminish impairment. This pattern, which the paper terms “disappearing disability,” reveals how rabbinic and medieval interpretations of this passage have negotiated the sometimes-difficult relationship between embodiment and prophetic authority.
This paper offers an analysis of “infertility time,” arguing that infertility’s distinctive forms of temporality shares key features with “crip time.” While recent scholarship in Jewish thought has devoted significant attention to the ethical significance of maternal experience, it has devoted much less attention to infertility. The paper thus argues that taking account of “infertility time” changes the way that experiences of childbearing and childrearing ought to be analyzed and used philosophically. To do this, the paper first analyzes the ways that “infertility time” appears in rabbinic texts, including the Bavli’s discussion of the Mishnah’s ruling that couples who do not have children after ten years together should divorce (B. Yevamot 62a-b). The paper then uses this analysis to re-read recent work in modern Jewish thought on maternal experience.