This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been sponsored by Alan Gotthelf in memory of William Freund.
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אַתֶּ֨ם נִצָּבִ֤ים הַיּוֹם֙ כֻּלְּכֶ֔ם לִפְנֵ֖י יְ־הֹ־וָ֣־ה אֱ־לֹהֵיכֶ֑ם
You stand this day, all of you, before the Lord. (Deuteronomy 29:9.)
The Covenant that opens Parashat Nitzavim initially appears to discriminate—addressing only those who are “standing” (נִצָּבִ֤ים, nitzavim) upright. Our reading could have begun with the word “כֻּלְּכֶם” (kullekhem, “all of you”); in fact, it goes on to enumerate chiefs, elders, men, women, children, strangers, and even woodchoppers and water drawers. Evidently, to speak of the collective risked invisibilizing the margins, making it necessary to name those whom the dominant discourse is so eager to make disappear.
An early medieval rabbinic work understands that, when our reading explicitly names the persons on the margins, the Torah is correcting the hierarchy that had been in place—as if God is saying, although Israel has leaders, judges, elders, and officers, “כֻּלְּכֶם שָׁוִין לְפָנַי” (“you are all equal before Me”) (Tanchuma Devarim, Nitzavim 2). The formula is powerful, but the verse still bears the traces of the social world it passes through. Women appear after men; the most subordinate workers close the list.
Dr. Dalit Rom-Shiloni, in her commentary on Nitzavim in The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, notes that the covenant in Moab explicitly includes women among its recipients while continuing to order the assembly according to the social hierarchies of ancient Israel. Equality before God does not erase relations of power. It makes them contestable.
This tension erupts in Parashat Vayyelekh, in its commandment of ‘הַקְהֵל’ (Hak’hel, literally meaning “gather!”):
הַקְהֵ֣ל אֶת־הָעָ֗ם הָֽאֲנָשִׁ֤ים וְהַנָּשִׁים֙ וְהַטַּ֔ף וְגֵרְךָ֖… לְמַ֨עַן יִשְׁמְע֜וּ וּלְמַ֣עַן יִלְמְד֗וּ
Gather the people, the men, the women, the children, and the stranger… that they may hear and that they may learn… (Deuteronomy 31:12.)
The Babylonian Talmud, Chagigah 3a, records the opinion of Rabbi El’azar ben Azaryah (c. 2nd century C.E.) attempting to assign roles for each demographic: men would come to learn, women only to hear, and children so that those who bring them may receive reward. But the tradition preserves within itself its own contestation. Refusing to reduce women to passive listening, Nachmanides cuts straight to the point: “כִּי גַם הֵן שׁוֹמְעוֹת וְלוֹמְדוֹת” (“for they too hear and learn”). Women are acting subjects, capable of learning and studying.
This same page of the Talmud becomes even more unsettling when it uses “hear” and “learn” to discuss the exemption of people who are Deaf or who do not speak. The Talmud tells the story of two non-speaking men who regularly attend the beit midrash (‘house of study’), follow the teaching of Rabbi Yehuda HaNasi, and are eventually discovered to know halakhah (‘Jewish law’), the Sifra commentary on Leviticus, the Sifrei commentaries on Numbers and Deuteronomy, and “the entire Talmud.” The text thus undoes the very association it had just been establishing between speech, hearing, and the capacity to learn. The categories through which the Talmud assigns obligation do not exhaust the capacities of the people boxed inside them. Those whose mode of communication seemed to place them outside the norm had nonetheless studied, understood, and remembered. The inability to speak in the expected way does not mean an inability to understand, learn, remember, or teach.
A halakhic exemption is not supposed to be synonymous with expulsion. Yet, communities can turn it into a banishment when they treat exemption as proof that access is unnecessary. The decisive question is therefore not only who is formally obligated, but who the community expects to be present, whose way of communicating it recognizes, whose bodies its buildings accommodate, and whose learning it is prepared to take seriously. Ableist exclusion infiltrates precisely through this. Not through an explicit declaration of rejection, but through the construction of a religious world where only certain bodies can belong without having to ask for modifications. It is this refusal of the ableist norm that gives its political meaning to the famous adage of Deuteronomy 30:12, regarding the Torah: “לֹ֥א בַשָּׁמַ֖יִם הִ֑וא” (“It is not in Heaven”). A Torah that we render materially inaccessible becomes, through our own doing, distant and heavenly.
This necessary acceptance of bodily reality culminates with Moses. Deuteronomy 31:2 opens with a brutal admission: “בֶּן־מֵאָה וְעֶשְׂרִים שָׁנָה אָנֹכִי הַיּוֹם, לֹא־אוּכַל עוֹד לָצֵאת וְלָבוֹא” (“I am now one hundred and twenty years old; I can no longer go out and come in”). Classical exegesis, discomforted by physical failure, attempts to spiritualize it. Rashi insists that his strength had not left him; he was simply stripped of the authorization to govern. But why should a leader’s dignity demand an intact body? What would Moses lose of his greatness by physically aging? Vayyelekh forces us to unlearn the idea that the covenant is made with the strongest bodies, the most audible voices, the forms of intelligence we immediately recognize, or with men charged with representing everyone else. The Covenant is sealed with kullekhem—with “all of you”—our real, vulnerable, aging, atypical, or marginalized by gender and flesh. “All of you” is not a reassuring observation about our synagogues; it is a prophetic demand that summons us to tear down the walls to make space.
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