Responding to Difference

by Mati Boulakia-Bortnick

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This week’s double parasha Tazria–Metzora is often read as a piece of about disease. It describes a condition, tzaarat, typically translated as leprosy, though it clearly does not correspond to any known medical diagnosis. The Torah outlines how it appears on the skin, how it is examined, how it spreads, and how it is eventually resolved. It’s heavily detailed, procedural, almost clinical. For many modern readers, it feels distant - an artifact of a pre-scientific world, concerned with categories that no longer hold meaning for us. On the surface, it’s not an interesting piece of text or one filled with deep spiritual meaning.

But this reading misses something essential and a Disability reading can open up new possibilities.

Our parasha isn’t primarily concerned with disease at all, but with concepts of belonging and the boundaries of community. The question at its heart isn’t simply what’s happening in or to the bodymind, but what happens to a person whose bodymind is perceived as different. The Torah constructs a system in which difference is identified, interpreted, and acted upon. The kohenexamines the individual, names the condition, and determines their status. The person themselves has no authority in this process. They don’t define their experience. They are seen, assessed, and categorised by someone else. Something all too familiar to so many of us reading this. As disabled people we are constantly having our autonomy taken away under similar circumstances.

The loss of autonomy is a key piece of the text. If declared impure, the person with tzaarat is removed from the camp. They’re physically separated from the life of the community. They must live outside it until they are deemed fit to return by the kohen. This procedure isn’t simply about managing illness, but about maintaining a particular vision of communal order. The camp represents a space of coherence, of shared structure, of recognisable norms. Tzaarat disrupts that coherence and introduces something that can’t be easily categorised or controlled. And so the response is exclusion.

The Torah, in other words, is showing us a system for managing difference through boundary-making. What’s most troubling and striking isn’t only the existence of this system, but how familiar it feels, even now. And not in a good way.

The logic of conditional belonging runs deeply through the parasha and indeed much of the Book of Leviticus. The person with tzaarat isn’t excluded permanently from the community. They may return, but only once their condition changes and they’re allowed permission from someone else. This happens only once their body appears “acceptable” again. Only once they are no longer disruptive to the visual and social order of the community. Belonging isn’t inherent here, but rather  contingent. It’s something that’s  suspended and later restored, depending on whether the individual meets the conditions set by the community.

That dynamic has, sadly, not disappeared in 5786.

This type of thinking is deeply embedded in the way many of our communities still operate. Disabled people are often welcomed only when their needs can be minimised. Autistic people are accepted so long as they mask. Those in wheel chairs only entitled to an Aliyah if a ramp exists or they allow themselves to be carried. People experiencing chronic dysregulation are embraced only when they appear stable, regulated, and easy to be around. Those who cannot perform that version of acceptability often find themselves, if not formally excluded, then gradually pushed to the margins.

No, we don’t call it impurity - but the end result is exactly the same.

Our communities often call us disruptive. Inappropriate. Not the right fit. Not conducive to the space.

The language has changed. The structure has not.

The second half of this week’s combined reading, intensifies this dynamic by focusing not on exclusion but on return. The process of reintegration is elaborate and involves rituals with birds, wood, thread, water, offerings, shaving, waiting periods. It’s not something immediate nor is it simple. The person must pass through a carefully structured process before they are allowed back into the camp.

What’s most revealing about this process is where the transformation takes place.

It takes place entirely within the individual. The entire thing is pathological and puts not responsibility onto the community.

The person who is excluded must be the one change for the Torah. They must move through the various stages. They must demonstrate, through ritual and through appearance, that they are ready to return. The community, meanwhile, remains exactly as it was. Its structures, its expectations, its norms - none of these are altered. None of them questioned. The burden of reintegration falls entirely on the excluded person. This too isn’t regulated to the days of the Torah, but remains a very contemporary one.

Much of what passes for inclusion today still operates on this model. The assumption is that disabled people must adapt ourselves in order to participate in communal life. We must regulate in ways that are acceptable. We must communicate in ways that are legible. We must make others feel comfortable. We must put our needs aside. We must behave in ways that don’t disrupt the “flow” of the group. When we are able to do so, we are welcomed, sometimes. Conditionally. When we aren’t not, we are excluded.

Even in spaces that consider themselves progressive, this logic sadly and regrettably persists.

I recently undertook a project looking at responsa in the Reform and Conservative movements regarding disability inclusion. They often speak about the importance of including disabled people in communal life. But that inclusion is almost always qualified. We are encouraged to participate so long as we aren’t “disruptive to others.” Even disabled rabbis are barred from serving if our “disability is too much for the community.” The framing is subtle, but significant. The issue isn’t whether the community can expand its understanding of participation - it’s simply whether individual disabled people on an ad-hoc basis can conform sufficiently to existing arbitrary expectations.

Similarly, discussions about who may lead services have historically raised concerns about visible disability being a distraction to the congregation.   The focus again is not on the exclusion itself, but on the experience of those who feel “unsettled” by difference. The comfort of the majority becomes the standard against which participation of the minority is measured.

Even more stark are responsa that entertain the possibility of sterilisation for people described as intellectually disabled, raising questions about their capacity to parent and the desirability of their having children at all.   These texts may ultimately limit or reject such proposals, but the very fact that they are considered reveals how deeply assumptions about disabled lives continue to shape Jewish legal and ethical discourse in progressive Jewish communities.

What these examples make clear is that the system described in our parasha isn’t simply a relic of the past, but a pattern that continues to manifest. The authority over disabled bodyminds remains externalised and in the power of the abled. Experts interpret. Institutions decide. Communities enforce. Those of us most affected are rarely, if ever, treated as the primary authority on our own experience. I work as a disability educator for synagogues and the wider Jewish communities. All too often my work is rejected by community leaders for the reason that as I am disabled myself, I couldn’t possibly be a true expert.

This dilemma can partially helped with the sage work of Rabbi Mordecai Kaplan. Kaplan understood Judaism not as a fixed system of laws, but as an evolving civilisation. Its practices, institutions, and norms are shaped by the communities that live them. They’re not static. They must be continually reconstructed in response to new knowledge, new experiences, new ethical insights.

If we take that seriously, then the purpose of engaging with our parasha isn’t to defend its system, nor to dismiss it as outdated. It’s to recognise what it reveals about how communities respond to difference, and to ask how we might build differently.

In my own theological framework, revelation doesn’t come from the outside. It emerges through us, through our lived experiences, through the ways we encounter one another and the world. If that’s true, then the experiences of disabled and neurodivergent people are not marginal to Torah. They are Torah. They reveal where our communities fracture. They expose the gap between our stated values and our actual practices.

The Torah becomes, in this sense, a mirror.

It shows us a system in which belonging is conditional, authority is externalised, and the burden of adaptation falls on those who are already most vulnerable. It allows us to see that these dynamics aren’t new. But it also challenges us to ask whether we as a community are willing to move beyond them.

The question the parasha seems to ask is how a person who has been excluded can return to the camp.

But perhaps that’s no longer the right question.

Perhaps the question for us is why our communities are structured in ways that require people to leave in the first place.

A reconstructed Jewish community would not be organised around the management of difference. It wouldn’t require people to become less visible, less complex, less themselves in order to belong. It wouldn’t treat disruption as a failure, but as information - a sign that the system itself may need to change.

Such a community would recognise that difference isn’t a problem to be solved, but a reality through which the Divine continues to emerge. If the Divine is, as Kaplan suggests, the power that makes for human flourishing, then any structure that systematically excludes certain kinds of bodies and minds cannot fully reflect the Divine.

The work, then, is not simply to welcome people back once they are deemed ready.

It’s to rebuild the camp itself.

To create communities in which belonging isn’t conditional on conformity. In which participation isn’t limited by the comfort of the majority. In which those who have historically been placed outside are not only included, but recognised as shaping the very definition of what community is.

Our parasha, sadly, does not give us that model.

But it shows us why we need one.

Mati Boulakia-Bortnick (he/they) is a student rabbi at the École Rabbinique de Paris and the Educational Director of the Jewish Autism Network. An autistic and multi-disabled activist, Mati works as an autism and disability educator. Through his consulting work, Mati supports individuals and organizations in creating inclusive spaces and developing practical tools to empower disabled communities and community members. He serves on the Board of Directors of SVARA, as the rabbinic intern at Beth Hillel in Brussels, and is the co-editor of the forthcoming Neurodivergent Torah (Ben Yehuda Press, 2026).