The Blemish of God: the Architecture of Exclusion
by Om Green
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In Leviticus 21:17–23, God instructs Moses to deliver a specific and unambiguous message to Aaron: the disabled are barred from the altar.
The text is a bureaucratic inventory enumerating the ailments that profane God.
No man among the offspring of Aaron the priest who has a defect shall approach to offer the Lord's offering by fire; having a defect, he shall not be qualified to offer the food of his God. (Leviticus 21:21)
What that list has become in the centuries of commentary layered on top of it and in the physical architecture of Jewish life built beneath it, is the founding document of a communal practice of exclusion so normalized it has become imperceptibly woven into how we build our communities. We pander to the image of a perfect God, who cannot possibly be present in a disabled body - and relegate disabled Jews to the periphery lest they challenge the hardwon image of perfection that is unattainably inspiring.
The traditional commentators worked hard to explain the blemish laws in terms that preserved both the dignity of the disabled priest and the logic of God. Rambam, whose reasoning trends toward the architecturally rational, argued that to the multitude, an individual is not rendered great by his true form but by the perfection of his limbs and the beauty of his clothes, and that what was aimed at was that the Temple and its servants should be regarded as great by all. The disabled kohen, in this reading, is inconvenient to the image of a perfect God.
This is optics. The disabled priest is removed because he disrupts the visual grammar of perfect holiness. The commentators, to their credit, understood the fragility of this position which is perhaps why they built so many hedges around it. The Torah does not claim that the disabled kohen is a lesser person. He may eat of the food of his God, of the most holy as well as of the holy. He is fed at the table. He simply cannot approach it. That distinction of peripheral presence is one disabled Jews across denominations and centuries know intimately.
Here is the question that Parshat Emor demands we ask in the twenty-first century, and that the Jewish institution has been extraordinarily reluctant to answer directly: if the disabled kohen defiles the altar by approaching it, what does that say about the God in whose image he was made? Impurity in this context is central to the idea of keeping the image of God pristine.
Genesis 1:27 Vayivra Elohim et ha'adam b'tzalmo, b'tzelem Elohim bara oto — God created humankind in the divine image, in the image of God, God created them. The image of God, the tradition insists, is present in every human being, fullstop.
If we take that seriously, and the tradition demands that we do, then the priest with the broken spine carries the image of God in his body, and likewise, God carries the image of the blemished priest. To say that such a body profanes holy space by entering it is not a statement about the human, it is a PR Stunt for God’s power, separating blemishes from Godliness. But if we are honest, It says that God, whose image a blemished body reflects, is a source of profanation. It says the divine image, when it arrives in a blemished form, defiles the altar it approaches through the reminder that God is one, eliciting doubt in power and majesty.This is the argument the Jewish institution has been building for millennia, in wood and stone and steel, every time it constructed a sanctuary without a ramp to the bimah.
Jewish law has never been static. The rabbis and sages have always understood that a legal system governing human life had to metabolize historical change, or it would calcify into irrelevance and lose control of the humans that serve it. The Sages seem to have reacted similarly with several biblical laws — such as the ir hanidachat, the commandment to annihilate an entire Jewish population of a city rampant with idolatry — declaring the law inoperative from the very start. The rebellious son who, according to the Torah, must be executed was declared defective and only seen as a moral allegory. The rabbis looked at commands that human conscience could not absorb and found ways to render them inapplicable.
They did this because they understood that the law's purpose was not its own perpetuation. It was the flourishing of the people who lived under it, and beyond that, the cultivation of a world in which the divine image in every human being was honored. When a law violated that purpose so egregiously that it could not be rehabilitated, the rabbis found another way.
The agunah crisis is one place where this capacity for revision has been exercised inadequately and the suffering has been incalculable — women chained to dead marriages because the institution moved too slowly, prioritizing procedural consistency over the actual human beings trapped inside it. The ordination of women is another. For centuries the institution insisted that female exclusion from religious leadership was simply the nature of things, until enough communities decided that it was not, and built a different architecture.
The Jewish community knows how to move on. It has done it repeatedly, on questions of enormous consequence, when the moral pressure became impossible to ignore. So, why hasn’t the disabled Jew generated that same pressure, or rather, why hasn’t the institution yet felt it with sufficient urgency to make change?
Before the sin of the Golden Calf, the restrictions of Emor did not exist. All animals were fit for sacrifice, unblemished and blemished alike, and the priestly service was performed by the firstborn, who came from across all the people. (The Lehrhaus) The blemish laws, in other words, are not the original plan. They are a capitulation to the Israelites' need for a God who looked like what they thought power should look like, which is to say, a God who was perfect and whole and physically inscrutable. God responds to the people's idealized body bias by saying, in effect: if you require a corporeal God to worship, I will give you the pageant you want — a palace, a golden throne, priests whose bodies conform to your idea of what a representative of the divine should look like.(The Lehrhaus)
This is a devastating indictment that lives inside the very law being used to justify exclusion. The blemish laws are not a revelation of who God is. They are a record of who the Israelites were, and what God was willing to accommodate in them. The tradition that traces back to Sinai knows this. The tradition that promises a messianic future knows this — the Ohr Ha-Hayyim holds that in messianic times, the original arrangement will be restored, and the firstborn, who came from all bodies, will be returned to service.
We are being told, by the tradition's own internal logic, that the exclusion of disabled people from the altar is a concession to human smallness, not a statement of divine will. We are being told that the world the tradition aspires toward is one where the blemish laws do not exist. And we are asking, implicitly, what we are waiting for?
The data on what the Jewish institution has actually built in response to this question is not ambiguous. Twenty-two percent of Jewish respondents nationally reported that they or a disabled member of their household had been turned away from an activity at a faith community organization because of its inability or unwillingness to make reasonable accommodations. (Disability Belongs) One in five people with a disability connection. Turned away. From their own community. Not in 1950 — in surveys conducted in the twenty-first century, from communities that had already been having conversations about inclusion for decades.
While a Leading Edge survey of over eleven thousand Jewish professionals showed more than eight hundred people with disabilities working for Jewish organizations, only twenty percent of respondents said they knew any clergy or staff with disabilities at their own faith-based institutions. (Disability Belongs) The disabled Jew, in other words, is employed in Jewish life but rarely placed in positions of visible religious authority. They are accommodated somewhere behind the scene while the bimah remains the province of the unblemished.
Rabbi Ruti Regan, a disability advocate and the first openly autistic person ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary, has argued that "inclusion" is the wrong framing entirely, because Jews with disabilities have always been part of the Jewish people. (Times of Israel) The problem is not that they need to be included as though they arrived from outside, it is that the institution has been built, deliberately and repeatedly, as though they don't exist, and then extended a hand of charity to the people it shut out.
Synagogue sanctuaries have been built on the assumption that everyone who belongs on the bimah can walk and stand. The planned stage for the 2017 Jewish Theological Seminary ordination ceremony was not wheelchair accessible. Out of respect for colleagues and future colleagues, a ramp had to be demanded. (Times of Israel) At a seminary ordination. In 2017.
Religious institutions lobbied for, and won, exclusion from the provisions of the Americans with Disabilities Act, on the grounds of the undue cost they would incur. (YCT) And whatever part Jewish institutions had in that lobbying, they certainly haven’t lobbied against the exclusion, and that omission is a structural decision, made by the institution at the level of its governance, to protect itself from the demands of its own stated values. It is the decision of a community that has learned to speak the language of inclusion without bearing the cost of it.
The cost of ramps, hearing loops, large-print siddurim, accessible websites, and sign language interpretation at services are not prohibitively expensive and are able to be structured and absorbed over time. The financial barrier isn’t insurmountable. The cost that the institution is actually protecting itself from is the cost of reordering its priorities and centering the disabled Jew as a full member of the community whose needs shape the institution rather than being accommodated by it. It is the cost of giving up the idea that the community's baseline is the abled body, and that the disabled body is a variation requiring special dispensation. It is the cost of admitting that perhaps the image of God is not perfect.
God's image is inclusive. God's image cannot hear the words of the Amidah without a hearing loop, cannot ascend to the bimah without a ramp, cannot read the words of Torah without accommodation. Admitting that holiness, in its truest form, is not unblemished and that perfection, as a category of the divine, is a human projection, a golden calf, a thing we made to comfort ourselves against the terror of a God who looks like what we fear. Unblemished does not exist, and we all look like this.
We look like the priest with the broken back, the woman who cannot walk without a cane, the child whose brain processes the world differently than the classroom expects, the elder whose hands shake too much to hold the Torah scroll steady. If tzelem Elohim means anything, it means exactly this, we are all a little fucked up, and we have to stop pretending we aren’t.
The miracle of the tradition is that it has always known, even when it refused to say it plainly, that the blemish is not the opposite of holiness. The Talmud in Sotah records that God chose to give the Torah on Sinai — the smallest, most unimpressive mountain — and when the other mountains protested their exclusion, a divine voice issued forth: you are all blemished in comparison to Sinai. The very word for high-peaked — gavnunnim — echoes the word for the hunchback — gibben — who is excluded from priestly service. The mountain God chose for the most sacred act in Jewish history is, by the standards of Leviticus 21, blemished. God chose the blemished mountain. God chose to give the Torah through Moses, a man with a speech impediment, and who argued with God about his own disqualifying imperfection before God refused the argument.
Like humans, God’s image is full of blemish, and humans have worked very, very hard to pretend that God is not something stranger and more demanding than we are comfortable with. God is the image of a woman who arrives on a Saturday morning in a wheelchair and cannot get into the building. It is the image of the person who stays home on the High Holidays because there is no space for them in Shul.
What would it mean to finish the theological project that Parshat Emor, in its brutal honesty about what the ancient Israelites believed about disabled bodies, actually demands of us? It would mean accepting that the disabled Jew is not a guest in Jewish life who must be accommodated. It would mean accepting that every building constructed without access, every service designed without interpretation, every leadership structure that does not reflect the community's actual composition is not a logistical failure but a theological one — a statement, encoded in concrete and wood and institutional practice, that some images of God are more welcome here than others.
It would mean reading Leviticus 21 the way the tradition reads all its most difficult passages: not as the final word, but as the beginning of a conversation about who we want to be, held against the grain of who we actually were. The tradition gave us tools for this. It declared laws inoperative. It invented legal fictions to prevent intolerable outcomes. It looked at commandments that produced cruelty and found ways to honor their intent while refusing their letter. It has done this across its entire history, on questions of enormous consequence, because it understood that the law's purpose was never the perpetuation of ancient arrangements. It was the world to come — the world where the blemished are restored to service, where the firstborn from all bodies return to the altar, where the mountain God chose is recognized not despite its smallness but because of it.
That world to come does not build itself. It is built by communities that decide, in concrete terms, that the disabled Jew belongs at the center as a full bearer of the divine image, whose presence at the altar does not profane it. The world to come is built by honoring the blemished image of God, and the divine image of man within it.
Stadlan, Joshua Z. “Priests and Prejudice: Disability in Parashat Emor.” The Lehrhaus. May 12, 2022. https://thelehrhaus.com/scholarship/priests-and-prejudice-disability-in-parashat-emor-2/.
Disability Belongs. “Jewish Disability Inclusion Toolkit.” Accessed April 17, 2026. https://www.disabilitybelongs.org/jewish-toolkit/.
Dolsten, Josefin. “Jews with Disabilities Explain How Communities Fall Short on Inclusion.” The Times of Israel. February 18, 2019. https://www.timesofisrael.com/jews-with-disabilities-explain-how-communities-fall-short-on-inclusion/.
Linzer, Dov. “Why Are Synagogues Exempt from Accommodating Disability?” Yeshivat Chovevei Torah. December 17, 2020. https://yctorah.org/2020/12/why-are-synagogues-exempt-from-accommodating-disability/
Om Green is a disabled writer, artist, and poet focusing on radical wanting and the eroticism of the human condition through the lenses of disability, feminism, mikveh and art. She resides in the Southeastern, USA with her husband their children. She is the founder of the Pomegranate Tent Collective. She is always happy to connect on the subject of art, writing, mikveh and the erotics of wanting.
