The Sacred Work of Accommodation
by Andrew Evans
In Parashat Naso, the census has concluded and the Israelites begin the slow work of building a society. Numbers are counted, roles are assigned, responsibilities are clarified, and rules begin to emerge that will shape communal life moving forward. There is something really human about this transition. Counting people is one thing, but figuring out how people actually live together is another. Once the camp exists, questions immediately follow, like, What structures will govern us? What expectations will we place upon one another? How do we create order while still making room for the complicated realities of human lives?
As I read these sections, my mind drifts toward accommodations.
As a graduate student, I live within systems shaped by policies, deadlines, attendance expectations, participation requirements, and institutional procedures. There are rules for nearly everything. These rules are not inherently malicious. In many cases, they exist because institutions need structure in order to function, and means by which to uphold academic integrity. A classroom with no expectations at all would quickly become chaotic.
And yet, disability often exposes the limits of systems built around assumptions of sameness.
Because of my disabilities, there are moments where I simply cannot function within the parameters a system expects. Sometimes my body does not cooperate with the timeline an assignment requires. Sometimes cognitive exhaustion changes what participation looks like. Sometimes pain, fatigue, executive dysfunction, or mental overload alter my relationship to work entirely. In those moments, accommodations become the difference between exclusion and participation.
Over the years, I have encountered the full range of accommodations and responses to disability within academic settings. I have encountered professors who treated accommodations almost as an act of suspicion, where every extension felt like a negotiation and every request carried an undercurrent of disbelief. I have encountered systems where disability paperwork itself became exhausting labor, requiring disabled people to continually prove the legitimacy of our needs in ways nondisabled people never have to imagine. There are moments where accommodations are technically available but emotionally costly enough that students hesitate to use them at all.
But I have also encountered something else.
I have encountered professors and administrators who understood accommodations not as charity, but as an ordinary part of building a functional community. People who recognized that equality and fairness are not always the same thing. People who understood that rigid sameness can itself become a form of exclusion. In those spaces, accommodations stopped feeling like special exceptions and instead became part of the collective work of ensuring everyone could meaningfully participate.
I think sometimes about how often religious communities imagine rules as inherently opposed to flexibility. We imagine law on one side and accommodation on the other, as though structure and adaptation are fundamentally incompatible ideas. But Jewish tradition has never really worked that way.
Parashat Naso itself is filled with differentiation. The Levites are assigned different tasks based on their family groups. Certain individuals take on particular obligations while others do not. The camp is structured around distinctions, capacities, and roles. Elsewhere throughout Torah and rabbinic tradition, we repeatedly encounter adjustments made for the realities of human limitation and circumstance. Jewish law contains categories for illness, financial hardship, danger, bodily limitation, emotional distress, and competing obligations. There is an understanding woven throughout the tradition that human beings are not identical machines capable of moving through the world in the same way.
Too often, accommodations are framed as lowering standards. But my experience has usually been the opposite. Accommodations are what make standards accessible in the first place.
An extension does not write a paper for me. Flexible attendance does not eliminate the intellectual labor of a course. Captioning does not magically complete readings. Accommodations do not remove responsibility, instead they remove unnecessary barriers that prevent disabled people from participating fully in the responsibilities already being asked of us.
In that sense, accommodations are not exceptions to communal life. They are part of what makes communal life possible.
I think this is especially important because disabled people are so often asked to absorb the cost of inaccessible systems privately and silently. We are expected to bend ourselves around structures that were never built with us in mind, and when we struggle, the burden frequently becomes individualized. The problem becomes our lack of discipline, our lack of resilience, our inability to “keep up.” But disability often reveals something much larger, that many systems function smoothly only because they quietly rely on the exclusion or exhaustion of people who cannot conform to narrow expectations.
Accommodations challenge that assumption. They force communities and institutions to ask a deeper question, what does participation actually require?
Not identical treatment. Not rigid uniformity. Real participation.
There is something deeply sacred to me in the idea that a community can evolve in response to the needs of its members. That rules are not abandoned, but adapted. That structure exists not for its own sake, but to support human flourishing. In Jewish life, law is meant to sustain community and dignity, not crush people beneath impossible expectations.
I sometimes think about the Israelites in the wilderness as a deeply access-oriented community, though not always successfully so. The wilderness constantly forces adaptation. People become hungry, tired, frightened, overwhelmed, uncertain. Systems have to shift repeatedly in response to human need. New structures emerge because the reality of human embodiment demands it.
Disability does the same thing. It reminds us that human beings are variable, interdependent creatures. It exposes the illusion that there is one “normal” way to move through the world. And accommodations, at their best, are one expression of a community deciding that belonging matters more than rigidity.
In a world that often measures human worth through productivity and compliance, accommodations carry a quiet theological claim, that people deserve access to communal life not only when their bodies and minds conform perfectly to institutional expectations, but precisely as they are.
Andrew Evans is a writer and educator whose work explores questions of meaning, community, and lived experience. Drawing on spiritual tradition, personal reflection, and social analysis, Andrew’s writing attends to the ways people make sense of their lives and responsibilities to one another.
