Thanking God for "Opening the Eyes of the Blind" When I'm Disabled - Transcript for Episode 114

Rav Avi: We have a question about something that I think about a lot and have thought about a lot, which is about the intersection of disability and the way we practice Judaism. The questioner writes, how should a person with a disability interact with the corpus of Jewish ritual that presumes abilities? So it's a big, big question. When I'm looking at Jewish ritual, and I'm looking at whatever disability I have, and it feels like they don't line up, where does that leave me? What am I meant to do? And I'm curious whether you think this is a particularly modern question, or maybe this is not a modern question, right? Disabilities are not new. So I'm curious, what, what do our ancient texts have to say about this?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, I think it's a great way to ask the question, because I think there's a part of this that's completely not modern and a part of it that's completely modern. The part that's not modern at all is, as you said, people have always had disabilities or have had, you know, parts of their bodies that didn't function, or God forbid, you know, things that befell them during life that deprived them of abilities they might have had earlier.

And that's as old as being human. The piece that's new is I think the terminology and the category, if you will, that is to say, talking about a person with a disability, where all kinds of different disabilities and abilities are kind of grouped under that same category. That's not the way earlier texts mostly spoke, they would much more be likely to talk about a specific disability: this person cannot see, this person cannot hear, this person had an arm amputated, and specific rituals that might involve that, putting on tefillin, but you don't have the arm you would put it on, or reading from a Torah scroll, but you don't have the visual capacity to see the scroll, etc, etc. Rather than the formulation here, which is broadly talking about disability, and Jewish ritual.

Rav Avi: So both teasing apart, what do we mean by disability? And, are those different abilities different and distinct and unique each in their own way? And then also teasing apart the rituals, okay, is putting on tefillin different from reading from a Torah different from hearing a shofar?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, and that the question, actually, I think of whether any given ability or disability intersects with a specific ritual is always a question about what is the ritual about? Or what are the concerns about it being done this way or that way?

Rav Avi: I would also say there's a way in which this feels totally universal, right? One of the main things we try to talk about on this show is that halakhah is not this abstract idea. Jewish ritual doesn't live sort of in the ether, but it lives in our lives, which is why we can have, you know, 25 different episodes about how to celebrate Shabbat, because Shabbat is always interacting with whatever the particularities are of our lived experience. And this question, actually, I think, raises just one manifestation of that, which is, okay, if the particularity of my life is that I don't have an arm to put the tefillin on, then where does that leave me? It's sort of within the same kind of framework as all of the questions we encounter, which are, how does halacha, or how do these rituals speak directly to whatever my particular experience is of the world?

Rav Eitan: Yeah. So maybe in the spirit of this opening framing, I think what might make sense is actually to just zero in on a couple of very specific examples, but maybe we'll even have the chance to do future episodes where we explore other dimensions of this question, as applied to a wider range of abilities, disabilities, and specific rituals.

So actually, it turns out I've been doing some in-depth learning with our summer fellowship students at Yeshivat Hadar. It happens to be this year, we're focusing really in-depth on the question of birkhot ha-shachar, the blessings that are said right in the morning, that go through, maybe familiar to many of our listeners, certain basic actions that you kind of do every morning, like getting dressed, putting your feet on the ground, putting your shoes, taking your first steps, things like that. And they go kind of just in a whole line, and often in the siddur, you just sort of rattle them off, like saying them one after another. But there's an interesting history there in that when you go back to the way that Talmud first formulates the obligation to say these blessings each morning, they're actually very specifically pegged to specific experiences, or at least it sounds that way. So one of the first blessings in this list, asher natan la-sechvi vina l'havchin bein yom u'vein laila, who has given, either translated as the rooster or the heart, the ability to differentiate between day and night.

Rav Avi: It’s the ancient alarm clock.

Rav Eitan: The ancient alarm clock.

Rav Avi: When your alarm clock goes off.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. So this will be actually part of the question, and related in a way to whether the word la-sechvi in that blessing, does it mean rooster? Or does it mean the heart or the mind in some way?

Rav Avi: I'm always confusing my rooster and my heart.

Rav Eitan: The Talmud says, when you hear a rooster crow in the morning, you say that blessing.When you open your eyes, you say the blessing, pokeach ivrim, one who gives sight to the blind. You start to get dressed, you say malbish arumim, one who clothes the naked, you put on a belt, you say ozer Yisrael b'gvura, who girds Israel with strength, the word ozer being like an ezor, which is a belt. So you have this sort of narrative, actually very powerful ritual practice, which seems like you take the mundane tasks that you do every single morning and infuse them with awareness, gratitude, appreciation of what's happening. And it seems like a plain reading of the Talmud that you are supposed to do it as you're doing the action.

Rav Avi: Yeah, I will just say, if we go back to the question, which sort of says, Jewish ritual assumes abilities. It's so interesting that you're bringing these blessings as the example, because actually, the purpose of these blessings is that Jewish ritual doesn't assume abilities, right? That every single morning, you would say, wow, I can open my eyes. Wow, I can get dressed. Wow, I can hear the rooster crowing. It's almost like the essence of these blessings are to prevent you from assuming abilities. Then the question is, can I participate in this practice of appreciating an ability if I don't have that ability? But just interesting to note that more broadly, it may be actually that the purpose of Jewish ritual is not to assume those abilities, but to remind us that they are not a given.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, don't take them for granted, right? Each day, another blessing that we say, hamachazir neshamot lifgarim metim, that God returns souls to literally to dead corpses. And you're talking about yourself that way each morning when you say, I basically died last night. I had no right to assume I would wake up again this morning. Here I am animated with life again. Nothing's taken for granted. So that framing of, yeah, this thing happened to you, or you were able to do this thing.

Now you say a blessing. Praise God, take note of this incredible gift. But if you didn't experience those things, you don't say the blessing. That seems to be a plain reading of the Talmud. And that is the way Maimonides codifies it, where he says, if for some reason, one of these things did not happen to you, for instance, you slept in your clothes, and you did not get dressed in the morning, you would not say malbish arumim, the one who clothes the naked, because he didn't do that. Or let's say you never put on shoes. And one of the blessings sha'asali kol tzorki, who has done all my needs for me, is said according to the Talmud, when you put on your shoes, then you don't say that blessing.

Rav Avi: Do you think Maimonides is saying this is about whether you own shoes and ever put on shoes? Or is this like, if I didn't put on shoes on Thursday, because I was working from home, then I didn't say that blessing on Thursday. But on Friday morning, when I left the house, I did put them on.

Rav Eitan: The second one, day by day, you kind of say, did I have this experience? And if I didn't, I don't say the blessing. The same way, if you eat a bowl of pasta, you say boreh minei mezonot, the blessing over grains before you eat it. But if you don't, you don't say that blessing. It's literally like the blessings over food. Are you having this experience? Do you need to express gratitude for this? Then you do. If not, you do not.

And in fact, one piece that's derivative of that Maimonidean approach, which gets codified by Rav Yosef Karo and the Shulchan Aruch practiced in many communities, is there will be people who on Yom Kippur, if they're not wearing shoes, don't say the blessing associated with shoes. And at the end of Yom Kippur, when they put their shoes on again, then they say the blessing sha'asali kol tzorki. But they won't actually say anything that they're not experiencing.

Rav Avi: So there are Jewish rituals that tell us how to behave.

These sound like they are a different kind of Jewish ritual, which is responsive to how we are behaving, right? If I didn't do this, that ritual doesn't apply to me.

Rav Eitan: That's right. At least the way the Rambam, the way Maimonides reads it. There's another branch of the tradition.

Rav Avi: I knew this was coming. This is always coming.

Rav Eitan: So already back in the Gaonic period, prior to Maimonides, and then in Europe with the tosafot in France, there's a different take on these where there's a kind of a school, broadly speaking, that says, no, the opposite of what you just suggested, which is these are blessings that actually are reflecting on kind of stuff that exists in human society and goes on in the world and is reflecting on gratitude for the way God's world is, roka ha’aretz al hamayim. God lays the foundation of the earth on top of the water.

And ideally, you've got groundwater and other things below, but there's a surface for us to walk on. So when your feet hit the floor, you say roka ha’aretz al hamayim. In the Maimonidean view, if you stayed in bed all day, you would not say that because you would not experience hitting the floor. But this wing of the tradition says, what do you mean? There's still a floor. There's still a ground. There's still an earth. Other people are stepping on it. You're aware that that's the way the world is structured. So you still say that blessing.

You didn't get dressed that morning. Who cares? The blessing is not saying God who dressed me. The blessing is saying, God dresses the naked, which most mornings I will experience that when I'm getting dressed. But actually, these brachot are not about experience.

There may be anchoring in our experience, things we want to notice about the human condition and the world's condition writ large.

Rav Avi: Right. So to translate this back into the language of the question would fit more into the frame of the question, which is like, oh, yeah, the rituals assume that the world looks a certain way, like people can see. Doesn't necessarily mean every individual person can see.

But broadly, we're grateful that people can see. And even a person who can't see might be very grateful for the fact that other people can see because of the things that allows in their life and on and on.

Rav Eitan: That's right. And it's really two different ways.

We haven't yet really refracted it into the case of disability, but it's two different ways of thinking about what is this ritual about? Right. Which is a question we always have to ask in these cases before we've even gotten to the question of whether someone with particular abilities and disabilities can or should say a certain blessing. What's it about? And actually, for the Rambam on the one hand, and the Tosafot on the other hand, actually, this ritual is about something very different. It's either about this notion of my experience and marking it and thanking God for it, or it's kind of an appreciation of the world.

And if you were to open the Shulchan Aruch on this, you would find Rav Yosef Karo, the sort of, you know, Sephardi, posek, and anchor of that text follows the Maimonidean approach. And the Rama of Moshe Isserles, representing the more Ashkenazi voice, follows the Tosafot's approach, which means from a broad perspective, the Shulchan Aruch tells you if you didn't experience the thing, don't say it. And the Ramah says, you say this list no matter what. But there's another medieval precedent here, which was aware of both of these approaches, and was trying to get at a kind of compromised position.

There were a few of these kinds of compromised positions. But this is the one that feels interesting and important for this question. So the Hagahot Maimoniot, who's Rav Meir Hakohen, who writes a commentary on the Rambam, on Maimonides, from an Ashkenazi perspective.

Rav Avi: Okay, so just to remind us, Maimonides is the only, only say it if you did the thing, and the Ashkenazi perspective is there for everyone.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. So the Hagahot Maimoniot says, look, you say the things whether you experienced it or not. But there's two exceptions to that rule. Number one, someone around you has to have experienced the thing you're talking about.

So you didn't hear a rooster, but other people around you heard a rooster, then you still say the blessing. But if you were off in the desert, on a trek, where there are no roosters, neither for you nor for anyone else, he says, then you don't say the blessing. Meaning it's around you means physical proximity.

Rav Avi: Yeah. As opposed to me, I might say, well, like someone somewhere heard a rooster.

Rav Eitan: Right. He won't go that far. He'll say, sure, someone somewhere heard a rooster.

But you need to sort of reflect on your immediate environs. Are you in a place where there are roosters? Okay. Like there's other things in the list that get interrogated that way. For instance, the Talmud says, if you put on a turban, you say, Oter Yisrael B'tifarah, who crowns Israel with glory.

So then the question later, people will come up and say, no one here wears turbans anymore. Are we still supposed to say that blessing? And they'll be like, well, your hat counts or your kippah counts, or your tefillin on your head might count. But they're still sort of saying, you know, is this something that happens in the society, right?

Rav Avi: They're entertaining that the answer might be no. If you don't wear a turban.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. And if no one around you in your society wears a turban, then maybe even for this like more Tosafot view, where you say it no matter what, that's a limit. But here's what's relevant for us. He says, another exception is, if you have a disability, he uses the language of hisaron be-gufo, there's some element of your abilities that is missing from your body.

And he gives an example, for instance, someone who cannot see, or someone who cannot hear. Well, then he says, someone who cannot see, does not say the blessing of Pokeach Ivrim, does not say the blessing of who opens the eyes of the blind. Nor does someone who cannot hear, say the blessing of who gives the heart or the rooster that blessing, the ability to distinguish between day and night, because the Talmud introduces that as when you hear the rooster say this. And if you're someone who's unable to hear, you will never hear a rooster, then you don't say that blessing.

That bracha, as he formulates it is, if I were someone who could see, but I don't open my eyes the whole day. According to the Hagahot Maimoniot, you would say Pokeach Ivrim, because other people around you are opening their eyes, and it's not really about you.

Rav Avi: Right. That's like, I didn't get dressed today, but I could have.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. But if there's no morning, on which you would open your eyes and have the experience of sight, after not having seen while asleep, then you don't say that blessing. Okay, that's his ruling.

Rav Avi: Okay, so it sounds like we have two different approaches, but where do we go from here?

Rav Eitan: Right, so we've got those two big picture approaches. And we've got that kind of compromise view of the Hagahot Maimoniot that's talking about the person who can't see and the person who can't hear. So this creates some confusion among later commentators. Because as we said, if you look in the Shulchan Aruch, you just get, say these based on experience, or the experience is irrelevant.

So it's pretty clear that according to Maimonides and the Shulchan Aruch of Yosef Karo, someone who can't see and someone who can't hear would not say those blessings. They did not have that experience that morning. Like forget about whether they'll have it any other morning. If you didn't have that experience that morning, you don't say the blessing.

Rav Avi: The disability exception, we might call it.

Rav Eitan: Yeah, exactly. So the Magen Avraham is sort of like, I don't know what to make of this. Are we really ignoring that precedent? Are we assuming that precedent is baked into this rule? And he then says something very unusual. He says, so it seems to me that someone who can't see does not say the blessing of Pokeach Ivrim, who gives sight to the blind, but someone who doesn't hear does say the blessing upon hearing a rooster.

Rav Avi: That seems surprising.

Rav Eitan: Yeah. Now, he doesn't explain it. But I think probably...

Rav Avi: He doesn't explain it? e doesn't explain why?

Rav Eitan: He doesn't explain exactly why. The piece that makes the most sense for sustaining that ruling is, well, the blessing, Pokeach Ivrim, is about giving sight to the blind. How could someone who doesn't see say that blessing? But the blessing which the Talmud pegs to hearing the rooster is actually about who gives, whether the rooster or the heart, the ability to discern between day and night. And actually, someone who can't hear can discern between day and night, and they see it getting light, even though the blessing is pegged to the rooster. Still, there's a case to be made, but the blessing itself is not talking about hearing.

Rav Avi: Well, it's like, is it about hearing the rooster, in which case it's about hearing, or is it about waking up in the morning? If it's about understanding that it's time to get up in the morning, then yes, just because you can't hear doesn't mean you don't know it's time to get up in the morning.

Rav Eitan: Right. So, that's probably what the Magen Avraham means and why he makes that distinction, and sort of, it's like a hedge. It's like, that medieval text about disability, I'm not sure if we totally actually canonized that, as it were. So, I'm going to apply it where it seems unavoidably true, and where it seems less obvious, I'm going to go with the Rama's more general principle of everyone says all the blessing. So, a bunch of people follow the Magen Avraham's lead, and that's their ruling. People who can't see shouldn't say, and people who cannot hear, nonetheless, say that blessing.

Rav Avi: And that's today you're saying people follow that?

Rav Eitan: No, I'm saying there's later early modern authorities who say that.

Rav Avi: I should never jump to today.

Rav Eitan: But there's others who pounce on him and say, that makes no sense. We have an independent tradition elsewhere that the blessing of Yotzer Or Uvorei Choshech, the one who creates light and darkness, which we say as part of the morning davening, we say it in the lead up to the recitation of the Shema, that, oh, you're confronting it, like it's morning again, and we talk about the sun and the lights and this and that. We have traditions that, even people who can't see, say that blessing. So, how could the Magen Avraham say this? It must be that it's backwards. And he meant to say, people who cannot see, say, Pokeach Ivrim, but people who can't hear, don't say the rooster blessing.

And it must have been wrong, and either there's a printer's error, or he got confused, or he's just wrong, and we're reversing it. And that you'd have to deploy a very different logic, right, to say something like, no, no, no, the rooster blessing is about hearing a rooster. Pokeach Ivrim is generally actually not referring to me or very specifically to, like, who opens someone's eyes, but opening the eyes of the blind, that's happening in the world. All right. And therefore, that's okay.

Rav Avi: So, it's really interesting here. The two different opinions you've brought us are both examples of, they both think that there's a different ruling depending on the disability. Neither case is saying, no, no, no, no, why would you have different rules about being able to see versus being able to hear? Neither case is trying to group them together.

Rav Eitan: So, for that, you got to wait for the Mishnah Berurah, who gives you the final position, which is to say, no, no, no, stop mucking around here. When the Rama said, everyone says all the blessings independent of experience, he meant it. And the Mishnah Berurah rules, you say the blessing on the rooster if you can't hear, and if you're in a desert and it doesn't matter whether there's roosters there, and those who can't see also say Pokeach Ivrim.

So, you end up actually with, kind of, four positions, right? There's the ones that say everything's grounded in experience, and then anyone who has any disability that, you know, makes them unable to access some of these experiences, they won't say that blessing.

Rav Avi: Whether that's always or a day-to-day.

Rav Eitan: Exactly. You've got these middle views that are saying, maybe the seeing blessing is different from the hearing blessing, maybe it goes this way or that way. And then one that just says, you've misunderstood this ritual, it's not about you and your experience at all.

Rav Avi: Yeah, it sounds like there are a lot of pathways in, and then the question is, where do we land, and maybe where do we want to land? Often, when someone's asking a question, a halacha question, right? We have in mind, like, what answer do we think people want? Meaning, sometimes people really don't care. But sometimes when they say, like, can I make coffee on Shabbat morning? They care. They have a particular answer they're hoping you will give.

And just reflecting that that may be very different for different people, right? Someone who can't see may say, I want the answer to be that this blessing is not for me, because I want my practice of the tradition to reflect my experience of the world. And it will be painful for me to be obligated to say a blessing every morning, thanking God that other people can see when I can't. That may be sort of requesting a level of gratitude and, you know, sort of self reflection of the world that is beyond what is appropriate or even possible for a person who's blind, maybe even especially a person who became blind, who used to say that blessing that they might want to say, like, I'm not, I can't say this blessing anymore. I don't want to say this blessing anymore.

And that may be the pastorally better option. That's what they're hoping for. And you could also imagine someone who feels the opposite, right? Someone who feels like, yeah, I have this disability, whatever it is, I can't see. But I want to say as many blessings as possible, because blessings are what connect us to God, and they are what connect me to Judaism and the idea that I've spent my whole life saying this blessing and now that I've lost my sight, I also lost this bracha. This blessing could be extremely demoralizing and feel like you're really taking something away.

So just you want to offer sort of both of those, as you know, we may have listeners who fee l inclined one way or the other and just sort of to offer that there's no easy like, well, if we want to be generous to the person, there's an obvious answer.

Rav Eitan: I think that's such a beautiful formulation. I couldn't put it better myself in terms of the ways in which it can be either counterintuitive, or we just have to be very careful to distinguish between what are the pathways that different sources, some of which we've just talked about at length, point us to in terms of a practical conclusion, and how does that land with someone and what is their experience, right? The very same ruling of say this bracha or don't say this bracha can have a dramatically different impact on a person, depending on their orientation and their experience exactly as you just laid out. That's a general point I think is important with halacha and some of what draws us to some of the kind of multi-vocality in our discourse on this show. We really want people to appreciate the ways that different poschim, different authorities have talked about cases in different ways, because in different contexts and for different individuals, those can land so differently. You just don't have the full picture of halacha without also having the full picture of human experience.

Rav Avi: So maybe we'll just come back to what do you advise people to actually do? Again, we took this very broad question and we narrowed it, I would say, to these two examples of these two blessings in the morning. When somebody comes to you and asks you as their rabbi for advice on this, which of these pathways do you offer or do you present them all and actually let people find their own practice?

Rav Eitan: Yeah, that really depends on the context. When I'm teaching a halacha class, my agenda there is just to get them to understand all the views and to try to offer some reflection like the one you offered about what's at stake, right, when you consider each of these and how might they be received. I think if I'm getting a personal question, I a little bit do want to hear more about the departure point of the person.

Is this someone who is feeling potentially burdened about being told they have to say a blessing they don't want to say? Is this someone anxious about having a blessing taken away from them? And not that that internal feeling automatically produces the answer, but it's very important for how you communicate. So, for instance, someone who's in a position where they really want to say this bracha, even though they can't see. Well, I would say to them, yeah, that's the ruling of the Mishnah Berurah and that makes perfect sense and that's what you should do. Someone who was feeling like this feels really wrong, like I don't want to say it.

So, there I might say, well, you know, the Mishnah Berurah does come out that way. And if you were to open a standard guidebook and halacha, that's probably what it would guide you to do. You should know the Magein Avraham, the Machatzit Hashekel, the Yad Efraim came out differently on this. To be honest, you know, there's a good argument in that direction.

And I think if you adopted that as your practice to not say this blessing, you know, you wouldn't be violating something severe under anyone's frame. It'd be like maybe you're missing an opportunity to say a blessing that's appropriate for you to say. But if that really feels wrong, you have a lot of good precedent going back to the Middle Ages. Now, it happens to be that question breaks down that way, where on some level there's a clear sort of almost leader voice in the conversation that's like, go ahead and say it, and some hesitant voices earlier.

So, you're never telling someone to say God's name and a blessing against the sort of leader authority. And if it were flipped, you might have to formulate things differently. But I'm always trying when I'm giving people guidance to deliver the information in a way that is, you know, sort of wrapped in a tone and a discourse that is responsive to where they're coming from.

Rav Avi: Yeah, and I think it shows incredible respect to the person to hear from their experience first, and then respect to the tradition that the answer is not, yeah, say it, don't say it, whatever. The answer is there is precedent to say it. There's real reasons of people who really believe you should. And there's precedent to not say it with real reasons of people who really believe that you shouldn't. And we can bring both of those for you to navigate together, which is so different than a, doesn't matter. Yeah, we'll go either way.

I just want to end by sort of saying, this broad question of how disability intersects and interacts with our ritual has maybe, you know, hundreds of possible iterations of combination of what's the disability and what's the ritual. I know we did a version of this question through the lens of, if I'm leaving, if it's painful for me to stand with my feet together during the Amidah blessing, you know, do I have to do that? And how do I do that? That's another iteration of this question.

And just to sort of reaffirm what I said earlier, that I really believe that each of these questions, each of these different life experiences that we all have, can be fruitful for pushing all of our learning forward. So, sort of extend an invitation to all of our listeners to say, if there's an element of this question that you think, ah, this is my version of this question, just to invite you to send that to us, and potentially we'll be able to all benefit from hearing the sort of deeper answer on a couple more iterations of this framework. Thanks.

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