Infirmités

The first great infirmity in Israel's Memory is the patriarch himself. At the ford of the Yabbok, Jacob wrestles all night against a mysterious being who, unable to overcome him, touches the joint of his hip and leaves him limping at dawn; it is from this wound that tradition derives the prohibition against eating the sciatic nerve. The limp is not here a degradation but the seal of an election and a new name, Israel. Infirmity, from the very origin, takes on a lasting ambivalence: mark and blessing at once.

Other figures extend this tension. Isaac in his old age becomes blind, and this blindness makes possible the ruse of the stolen blessing. The prophet Ahiya of Shilo, aged, loses his sight but retains prophetic clairvoyance. Moses finally, called at the bush, opposes to God that he is "heavy of mouth and heavy of tongue" — an expression that tradition long read as a speech defect, making the liberator of Israel a man hindered in his own body. The Bible does not idealize these bodies: it makes them the place where the relationship of man to his vocation is played out.

The legislative side is more rigorous. Leviticus forbids the descendant of Aaron afflicted with a bodily defect to approach the altar to offer sacrifices, while recognizing his right to eat offerings reserved for priests. No man of the tribe of the priest Aaron with a bodily defect shall approach to offer to the Eternal the sacrifices passed through fire; he may however eat the food of his God, the holy offerings [Leviticus 21]. Infirmity excludes from service, not from holiness nor from subsistence: a foundational distinction that halakha will work through for centuries.

The biblical category of mum, bodily defect, structures an entire dimension of sacrificial law. It applies first to the animal: a beast that is blind, lame, mutilated, or afflicted with a defect cannot be offered upon the altar, because the offering must be "without blemish." It applies symmetrically to the officiant: the priest bearing an infirmity—blindness, lameness, a deformed limb, abnormal stature—is excluded from service, without being stripped of his rank or his alimentary prerogatives [Leviticus 21].

The Mishna, in the treatise Bekhorot, draws up a meticulous inventory of these defects, distinguishing those that disqualify permanently from those that are temporary, those affecting the animal from those striking the human. This catalogue is not mere casuistry: it reveals a conception in which the sacred demands the integrity of form, while scrupulously preserving the person of the infirm. The priest barred from the altar remains a priest; he teaches, he judges, he receives his portion. The destruction of the Temple in 70 will render these rules theoretical, but they will continue to be studied as a paradigm of the relationship between body, ritual purity, and function.

The decisive turning point occurs in rabbinic literature, which shifts the question from the altar to everyday legal life. The Talmud forges a recurring triad: the cheresh, the shoteh, and the katan. According to commentators, a cheresh is one who is deaf, a shoteh is one who is considered legally incapable — most often for reasons of mental illness or intellectual deficiency — and a katan a minor [Bava Kamma]. These three figures share the same presumption of incapacity to perform legal acts requiring discernment and responsibility.

The scope of this category is considerable. The cheresh, the shoteh, and the katan are categories of persons who are not considered fit to fulfill halakhic obligations; according to the Mishna, anyone may be made a messenger to deliver a bill of divorce, except the cheresh, the shoteh, and the katan [Massekhet Gittin]. These persons are exempted from many obligations, but also deprived of the capacity to testify, to contract, or to convey a document.

Yet the word cheresh designates in the Talmud the deaf-mute — one who can neither hear nor speak — and not every deaf person. Subsequent legal tradition clarified this distinction with remarkable care. A merely deaf person or a merely mute person both count in the minyan and are subject to all the mitzvot [Hevrat Pinto]. Partial deficiency is therefore not enough to exclude: it is the presumed incapacity for communication, not the sensory impairment in itself, that grounds the status of exemption. This subtlety shows that halakha did not reason in terms of stigma but of effective capacity.

The category of cheresh long confined the deaf-mute within a presumption of incapacity that nothing seemed able to lift. Medieval decisors, from Alfassi to Maimonides and then Joseph Caro in the Shulhan Arukh, maintained the distinction between the deaf from birth deprived of language and the one who, having spoken and then lost hearing, retained full capacity. The principle laid down was that the merely deaf and the merely mute remained bound by the commandments.

The eruption, from the nineteenth century onward, of schools for the deaf and structured sign languages upended this presumption. Rabbinic authorities gradually recognized that the educated deaf-mute, capable of communicating and reasoning, no longer fell under talmudic incapacity. According to several decisors, in past generations, persons designated as deaf-mutes were so for lack of accessible instruction, and not from any intrinsic unfitness [Hevrat Pinto]. The body had not changed; it was society's perspective and the means of communication that had changed, bringing the law along with them. This evolution exemplifies the manner in which halakha, apparently frozen, reconfigures itself in contact with new social reality.

Alongside statutory law, Jewish tradition developed an ethics of protecting the vulnerable body. The verse "you shall not curse the deaf, nor put a stumbling block before the blind" (Leviticus 19) was read by the Sages in a double sense: literally, as a prohibition against harming people with disabilities, and figuratively, as a prohibition against leading others into transgression. The infirm thus becomes the very measure of moral obligation.

The Talmud multiplies recommendations for respect. According to a received reading of the tractate Haguiga, the formula that might seem to devalue the deaf should instead be understood as a warning: "You must not take the deaf lightly" [Didier Long, on Haguiga 2b]. This insistence on the respect owed to the diminished person balances the rigor of exemptions: if the infirm is sometimes excluded from the legal act, he is never stripped of dignity. Contemporary Jewish thought, notably in debates on the inclusion of people with disabilities in synagogal life, claims this double root — ethical protection and recognition of capacity whenever it is real.

Beyond law, disability has nourished Jewish spiritual imagination. An ancient tradition, taken up in popular piety and moral literature, reverses the relationship between body and soul: bodily deficiency can coexist with a superior inner elevation. According to a current of thought transmitted by preaching, the infirm are victims only of accidents of nature and can possess hearts as alive as those of the supposedly healthy [Groupe Moakada]. Blindness, deafness, disability then become figures of true sight and true hearing—those of the heart.

This spiritualizing reinterpretation extends the biblical motif of the blind prophet who sees better than the sighted, and of Moses "heavy of mouth" chosen precisely to speak in God's name. It permeates mysticism, where apparent imperfection becomes a sign of a hidden order, and the popular wisdom of communities, which has often surrounded its infirm with compassion mingled with respect. This memory, transmitted more than documented, forms the inner counterpoint to the great edifice of law: where halakha measures capacities, spiritual tradition affirms the equal dignity of souls.

This Great Book addresses a theme rather than a lineage: the "great figures" are not bearers of a family name but the characters whom tradition has associated with the experience of infirmity, as biblical and rabbinic sources attest to it.

Jacob / Yaakov (patriarch, traditional dating indeterminate) — Third patriarch of Israel, he emerges wounded at the hip from his nocturnal combat at the ford of the Yabbok and remains lame. His claudication becomes, in the memory of Israel, the seal of an election and the origin of the prohibition against the sciatic nerve. He embodies the founding ambivalence of biblical infirmity: wound and blessing, diminishment of the body and greatness of the new name received, Israel. No precise date is established for this figure.

Isaac / Yitzhak (patriarch, traditional dating indeterminate) — Son of Abraham and father of Jacob, he becomes blind in his old age. This blindness, far from being a mere detail, makes possible the decisive episode of the blessing stolen by Jacob from Esau. His figure associates the loss of sight with a pivotal moment in the history of the patriarchs, making infirmity a spring of the sacred narrative.

Moses / Moshé (traditional dating indeterminate) — Liberator of Israel and lawgiver, he opposes to his calling, at the burning bush, that he is "slow of mouth and slow of tongue" (Exodus 4). Tradition has read in this formula a defect of speech, making the greatest prophet a man hindered in his speech and assisted by Aaron. He shows that infirmity does not preclude the highest mission.

Ahijah of Shiloh / Ahiya ha-Shiloni (era of Jeroboam I, 10th century BCE according to biblical chronology) — Prophet of the Northern Kingdom, he becomes blind with age while retaining his prophetic lucidity, discerning visitors he cannot see. He extends the motif of the blind seer, whose inner sight compensates for lost sight, and nourishes the spiritual reinterpretation of infirmity.

From lame patriarchs and blind ones to contemporary debates on the inclusion of the deaf in the minyan, the Jewish history of infirmities traces a constant movement: that of a law which measures capacities without ever confusing the person with their disability. The Bible poses the ambivalence — mark and blessing, exclusion from the altar and maintenance in holiness. The Talmud elaborates the triad of the cheresh, the shoteh and the katan, a category of presumed incapacity, immediately tempered by the recognition that the mere deaf and the mere mute remain full members of the community.

The most revealing thread is perhaps that of the deaf-mute: from Talmudic incapacity to full modern recognition, it illustrates how halakha reconfigures itself when education and society transform the possible. The afflicted body has not changed; the gaze cast upon it has. To the requirement of integrity of the sacred thus responds, throughout the tradition, the equally strong requirement of dignity of the infirm — "you shall not take the deaf lightly" — down to that conviction, transmitted by piety, that the heart can see where the eye has grown dark.