Studying Torah in an MRI machine
by Alyssa Scanga
Throughout history, Jews have studied Torah in some unconventional places. Even so— inside an MRI machine feels like a new one.
It’s a Friday night, late enough that the sun has long since gone down, and would have, even if it wasn’t dark at 4pm this time of year. I am almost definitely not going to Shabbat morning Torah study, but that is okay. When you’re finally offered an MRI appointment after months of waiting for one, you don’t ask to reschedule for a different time.
I am very familiar with ultrasounds and x-rays at this point but have never had an MRI before. My first experience is a long one— over an hour for the scan of my whole spine and sacroiliac joints. Without my glasses, the world is out of focus as the technologists help me up and into position. It only adds to the feeling of unreality as the table moves, and the scan starts in a wave of sensory input that is probably overwhelming even to people without sensory issues.
I close my eyes, which makes things a bit better. I can still see the machine’s bright light through my eyelids, and the fan to cool the magnets is blowing air onto my head, and the air is warm, and it is so loud. How long has it been? Oh, not even a minute. Still more than an hour left to stay still in here. Okay, think about something else.
I read the weekly parasha (Torah portion) this morning and followed it up with Re’eh, because I was already thinking ahead. It’s Shabbat evening and I’m going to miss Torah Study. Seems appropriate. Okay, let’s think about Torah.
Re’eh is the continuation of Moses’ final address to the Israelites. Towards the end of the parasha come the instructions to observe Passover, Shavuot, and Sukkot (Deuteronomy 16:1-15). The holiday of Shavuot commonly signifies that awesome (in multiple meanings of the word) revelation of the Torah at Mount Sinai. I’ve sometimes wondered how that experience—dawn breaking as thunder and lightning fill the cloudy sky, smoke covering a shaking mountain, the sounds of the shofar— would feel, physically, in this body. On this MRI table, the bright light and warm air could be lightning, a warm desert morning. My blurred vision, keeping the unperceivable unperceived. This loose blue hospital gown, the traditional clothing of the time. Add in the unrelenting noise scrambling my brain, the pressure of the earplugs underneath the headphones? My soul might have been at Sinai, but my physical body has only its own experiences to speculate with, and studying Torah in an MRI machine feels closest.
Shavuot is not given the significance of the giving of the Torah in the Torah, however. As Moses reminds the Israelites, “You shall count off seven weeks; start to count the seven weeks when the sickle is first put to the standing grain. Then you shall observe the Feast of Weeks for your God, offering your freewill contribution according as your God has blessed you.” (Deuteronomy 16:9-10). Shavuot, the Feast of Weeks, marks the conclusion of the grain harvest in eretz Yisrael(the Holy Land). It is Rabbinic tradition that brought the significance of receiving the Torah to a harvest holiday. I find this comforting.
There is a reason why we repeat the Torah-reading cycle year after year, why the Torah study in my own community continues, even though we have studied each parasha many times before. It is because Jews have never understood the Torah through its literal meaning, but always through interpretation, wherever those insights may come from. Depending on who you are, some of those interpretations might matter more to you than others, and that’s fine. But it is undeniable that the Jewish people have always been thinking and debating and rethinking and reworking. Judaism shapes Jews, but Jews have always shaped Judaism. And Jews have done so despite Deuteronomy 13:1— “Be careful to observe only that which I enjoin upon you: neither add to it nor take away from it.”
Parasha Re’eh is an uncomfortable read for many, including myself. As a believer in religious pluralism, I find it difficult to digest a call for the destruction of sacred sites (Deuteronomy 12:2-3) and murder of individuals and whole towns (Deuteronomy 13:1-19) based on their beliefs, even if they differ from mine. Like many parashot, Re’eh contains favourable views on enslavement, and describes physical disabilities as defects. Nor do I subscribe to the idea that land is something that can be possessed or given, but rather that one must actively build a relationship with land by caring for it, and it will care for you in return.
Something interesting is that Rashi and the Rambam believed that following the letter of the law does not mean a person is right or good. Rather, we must behave lifnim mishuras hadin (above the letter of the law), reading between the lines of the Torah to follow the spirit of the law. My belief is that to avoid being what the Rambam described as a naval birshut hatorah (a degenerate within the confines of the Torah), it is not only possible but necessary to take what doesn’t serve us and use it to find something better.
What if we decided to look at Re’eh’s command to “tear down their altars, smash their pillars, put their sacred posts to the fire, and cut down the images of their gods, obliterating their name from that site” (Deuteronomy 12:3) and warning not to follow these other practices because they “perform for their gods every abhorrent act that God detests; they even offer up their sons and daughters in fire to their gods” (Deuteronomy 12:31) as a directive to dismantle systems that cause pain to the vulnerable?
Our current systems are failing disabled people. Even in Canada, the land of so-called socialised medicine… If you are ‘sick’ and dare to name it, if you cannot work, if you ask for support, you are cast out to the margins. The system will make you jump through hoop after hoop, legislate you into poverty, make it impossible to find accessible housing, force you to fundraise to fund your assistive devices and support needs. They will expand MAID (medical assistance in dying) before they give disabled people the support needed to live the full, vibrant lives we are capable of, and richly deserve. That is not a free choice, it is coercion. This system doesn’t need to put you to the sword to doom you to destruction.
In 2016, disabled Korean-American writer Johanna Hedva published Sick Woman Theory, which explains that “the body and mind are sensitive and reactive to regimes of oppression—particularly our current regime of neoliberal, white-supremacist, imperial-capitalist, cis-hetero-patriarchy.” According to Hedva, it is the world itself that makes and keeps us sick because it is built upon a logic of exploitation that perpetuates itself by requiring that some of us die. They write:
“What is so destructive about this conception of wellness as the default, as the standard mode of existence, is that it invents illness as temporary. When being sick is an abhorrence to the norm, it allows us to conceive of care and support in the same way. Care and support, in this configuration, are only required sometimes. When sickness is temporary, care and support are not normal.”
Sounds like an altar we should tear down, a pillar we should smash.
Who is cut down and dispossessed by our current systems? It would be faster to answer the people who aren’t. But disabled people are very good at tearing down altars to systems that harm us. When I travelled down to Toronto to attend the Disability Pride March this July, I realised that I have never been to a more radically accessible event than this one, organised by a bunch of disabled queers with no staff and no corporate funding. When I had an asthma attack towards the end of the march, a marshal appeared immediately with ice, water, and Gatorade to help deal with the heat and asked me what I needed. Another marshal said their wife was a doctor, and she materialised in front of me like magic to help monitor my breathing. A third marshal brought me a cooling towel. When I could breathe more easily, a fourth found someone able-bodied to push my mobility aid, while a fifth found me a space in the accessible van until we reached the gathering at the end of the march. There were ASL interpreters, PSWs, sighted guides, volunteers (myself included) handing out N95s, a sensory tent, and so much more.
Through actions, the Toronto Disability Pride March said that if we exist in a world determined to leave us behind, then we will build a world in which we leave no one behind. If our access needs are treated as optional, then we will make accessibility a requirement. I feel this is an answer to the question I always ask reading Re’eh: if God promises that “there shall be no needy among you” (Deuteronomy 15:4), why is there a contradiction six lines later with “there will never cease to be needy ones in your land”? If the understanding is that giving care is expected and receiving care is not even a question, then is anyone ever ‘needy’ at all? Even further: what if the command to sweep out evil from our midst so that such evil things will not be done again means refusing to tolerate eugenics, no matter who tries to convince you it is right?
Maybe this makes you uncomfortable. Maybe it should. Maybe you think I am asking you to chart a radical new path, to disregard a sacred text.
A question: is that not exactly what Jews have always done? Do you think agreeing to form a Covenant, without knowing the details of what instructions Moses would receive while on Mount Sinai for forty days and forty nights, is not radical? Does Jacob not get the name Israel by wrestling with the divine?
A second question: are you not doing this already, with other parts of the text? Are you redistributing your wealth to those without the same advantages as you? How are you ensuring that those without the same hereditary portion as you, the stranger, the fatherless, and the widow, can all eat their fill? Do you practice remission of debts, or “open your hand and lend whatever is sufficient to meet the need” (Deuteronomy 15:8)? Do you accept help when you need it, or do you still believe the system that tells you that you should be able to do everything without outside support? While it is understandably comforting to those who have been oppressed to hear they will dominate others and not be dominated, will be the loaner and not the recipient, this is no way to build community.
A third question: Why does it seem to be so much more common to cite the first half of the parasha as justification for violence, than the second half as a reason to fight for economic justice?
Re’eh finds the Israelites on the verge of a radical shift. They are arriving somewhere important. They are given a choice between blessing and curse. Thousands of years later, I have the feeling that we remain on the cusp of something different and new.
Of what, I don’t know. I just hope whatever notes I manage to scribble down, before I forget everything I’ve ever thought, are at least somewhat coherent, once I finally, finally get out of this MRI machine.
Alyssa Scanga (she/they) is a queer disabled person living in Nogojiwanong ("the place at the end of the rapids"), also known as Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. They are a member of Congregation Beth Israel, a small, unaffiliated synagogue serving Peterborough and the Kawarthas, where they are notorious for posing five thousand questions and generating wild rabbit holes during Torah study (and also for bringing chocolate chip banana loaf to kiddush).
Alyssa is a Sick Woman who is also a writer, a climate justice organiser, and a graduate student whose research focuses on extreme heat adaptation, disability justice, and the climate crisis. When she isn't doing those things, she can probably be found reading down by the river, befriending your cat, pointing out every fungus she sees, or yelling at Windows voice access. Spoons permitting, of course.
