The Department of Religious Studies welcomes Sarah Imhoff from Indiana University.
This talk considers examples of Jewish legal discussions such as what the obligation to hear the shofar on Rosh Hashanah means for Deaf people, and whether and how a blind person can be called up to the Torah. Can the person read from a Hebrew Braille text, for example, or will only a kosher scroll be sufficient?
These questions are traditionally approached as issues of how a single person relates to the object in question. But when we look at these same questions and discussions through the lens of disability studies, we see that they are not only about a single person's bodily capacities: the fundamental relation is not a dyad of person-object, but a triad of person-community-object.