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The alarm goes off at 6:00. I don’t need to be anywhere until 9:30, but my journeys don’t look like most people’s. There are mornings in Paris when the simple act of crossing the city, a relatively easy commute that most take for granted, reveals more about there nature of my life than I care for it to. It’s hardly romantic as many reading from outside of France may imagine. 

The Paris Métro isn’t designed for people like me. The staircases are narrow and steep ; lifts are rare or broken ; escalators are in repair for weeks at a time while the RATP app says that they work, of course ; platforms fill quickly with the compressed, violent, and impatient movement of my fellow commuters. Fluorescent lights hum overhead in the stations and the train. Announcements echo throughout the space without any clarity because of all the stimuli. The choreography of the space assumes a certain rhythm, a certain stamina, a certain body, a certain mind, a certain level of health, a certain nervous system.

From the time I leave my home until the time I reach the station, my body is already calculating – where to stand, how to brace myself, how to conserve enough energy to arrive intact. Will I be able to study when I arrive at school ? Will I pass out when I get there ? How will I study for 7 hours today ? Will I have a meltdown ? A heart flare‐​up ? The vigilance begins before I even step onto the train, itself a sensory, physical, and emotional nightmare. I’m exhausted already. It’s not even 8AM yet. 

It’s within this landscape that I am training to become a rabbi. If I succeed, I’ll be the first openly autistic rabbi ordained in France. I spend my days studying Jewish texts and developing my pastoral and community organising skills with the same bodymind that just braced itself against the rail of an uneven and steep staircase because of a broken escalator and a crowd that moves as if slowness were a crime, and tells you as much. I enter the beit midrash already depleted, already calculating how long I can sit upright, how much noise I can tolerate, whether my heart will behave or make me pass out.

And yet, the beit midrash is also one of the places outside my own home where I can be myself. One of the places where I feel most alive. The texts of Jewish tradition don’t rush me. The opposite, in fact. They invite me in to stay awhile. I can approach them at my own pace. Apply my own way of thinking. They allow and even demand contradiction. They linger. They argue. They refuse simple answers. It’s one of the only spaces in the world where intensity, debate, and passion coming from a disabled person are not automatically a problem. They are a very real logo of my life. And this is a very Jewish way of learning. In theory, at least. 

This is the place from which I’m writing.

Not from outside traditional Jewish life. Not from outside Torah. Not from some detached conceptual position where disability becomes an interesting ethical category or a theme for communal reflection to make others feel good about their so‐​called “inclusivity.” Nor is this an angry critique. 

I’m writing from both the Métro platform and from the beit midrash. From both the body that has to physically fight against the the city and the mind that comes alive in the margins of the Talmud. Even speaking about the mind and body as a duality is a problem, as they’re united, of course. One influences the other. They are, in fact, the same. I speak from both the experience of being held by Jewish text and harmed by Jewish structures. From the contradiction of loving a tradition that sustains me and giving my life meaning while also belonging to communities that often have no idea how to receive and accept people like me without negating and effacing the most essential parts of ourselves. 

I’m a disabled autistic rabbinical student. I’m also a teacher of Torah, an autism educator, a disability peer‐​support coach, and someone who works with Jewish and non‐​Jewish organisations around the world on disability and neurodivergence. I’m studying full‐​time in rabbinical school and the university while also working what often feels like four full‐​time jobs. I’m Autistic and have ADHD, POTS, dyspraxia, dyscalculia, and the accumulated toll of navigating systems that treat disabled survival as an administrative and personal inconvenience.

I don’t give you this background so you can feel pity for me. It’s also not about creating an identity around it. Nor a game to list off each thing which makes me life hard. It’s simply the terrain and the world in which I live and it’s an essential part of my life and experience. 

The place from where my Torah begins

My disabilities shape how I rest, wake up, and how I travel. They inform how I sit, how I learn, how I teach, how I pray, how I recover, how I relate to the Divine, how I understand community, and how I understand Torah. My disability isn’t an extra layer added on top of my Jewish life. My autistic bodymind isn’t an inconvenient footnote to my rabbinic education. Rather, it’s exactly the place from where my Torah begins.

Now, this is particularly important to state out loud, because disabled people are constantly asked to translate our lives into language that makes others, particularly the non‐​disabled, comfortable. We’re expected to make our pain legible, but not too disruptive. Honest, but not too angry. Personal, but not too revealing. Urgent, but not too demanding. We are allowed to be moving, perhaps even inspiring, as long as we don’t ask anyone to change the structure of the room or how they’re living their lives.
I’m not even slightly interested in that deal. I reject it. It is, in fact, ableist. It denies my humanity. 

When I say the Métro is inaccessible, I’m not making a metaphor or commenting on how it isn’t well run. I am talking about the fact that my day may be functionally destroyed before it has begun. You may say “I don’t like it either.” An abled preference isn’t the same as a disabled need. If we have something in common, it’s because we’re both human. I’m talking about the way a hostile stare, a staircase, the lights, overcrowding, or the fear of being physically assaulted for using a disabled seat (which has happened to me, multiple times) can accumulate in my body before I ever open a book at school. I’m talking about the fact that by the time others see me in class, they may be seeing only the small visible surface of a much larger calculation.

The calculation never stops.

Disabled life often looks, from the outside, like ordinary life with a few added complications. That isn’t what it feels like from within. From within, it’s a constant risk assessment. It’s deciding whether to save energy by taking the bus, then remembering that traffic might make you late and lateness will create another layer of stress. It’s wondering whether someone will demand that you justify your seat. It’s deciding whether to carry a cane because you need it, while also knowing the cane may make you more visible, more vulnerable, more exposed to strangers’ opinions about your body. Not to mention people telling you that you don’t need one. 
It’s the absurdity of being visibly disabled enough to be stared at but not disabled enough to be believed.

This is one of the daily humiliations disabled people know too well : being asked to perform our disability to the satisfaction of strangers. On the Métro, in classrooms, in synagogues, in administrative offices, in communal spaces, the same question appears in different clothing : Are you really disabled ? Do you really need that ? Is it really so bad ? Can’t you manage without it ? Aren’t you asking for too much ?

These questions never stay where they are asked. They follow me into the beit midrash. They sit beside me when I learn Talmud. They shape how much capacity I have left when I am expected to be reflective, emotionally present, intellectually engaged, generous, patient, grateful.

There’s a particular cruelty in being asked to arrive open‐​hearted after spending the morning defending the basic legitimacy of your body.

Writing from within

This is part of what I mean when I say I’m writing from within. I’m not describing disability as something that happens elsewhere and then becomes relevant when communities decide to have a conversation about inclusion, if they ever do at all. Disability is already there. In the commute. In the classroom. In the synagogue. In the unspoken assumptions about who can sit still, who can tolerate noise, who can climb stairs, who can process speech in an echoing room, who can attend an evening event after a full day, who can smile through pain, who can adapt endlessly without being called difficult.

Jewish communities, if they speak about it at all all, often speak about inclusion as though disabled people are waiting outside the doors to be welcomed in. Like some future initiative. But we’re already inside. We’re already studying, praying, teaching, leading, cooking, raising children, caring for others, serving communities, holding Torah. The problem isn’t that we are absent. The problem is that our presence has not been taken seriously enough to reshape the spaces we are already in. So we are ignored. 

We’re told that we make trouble. That we aren’t grateful. Or worse. 

I don’t hate Jewish communal life. I love it. It’s everything to me. I love Torah. I love my synagogues. My schools. I love the way a line of Talmud can open like a door you didn’t know was there. I love the intimacy of chevruta, the act of sitting with another person and a text and refusing to rush to resolution. I love the strange and beautiful Jewish commitment to argument as a form of devotion. I love that our tradition preserves minority opinions, contradictions, unresolved debates, stories where no one behaves well and yet something sacred still emerges.
I love that Torah doesn’t require my mind to become simple. More than that, I’d say that is absolutely requires people not to think simply. 

In so much of the world, autistic “intensity” is treated as a problem. Too much feeling. Too much precision. Too many questions. Too much noticing. Too much refusal to let things go. Too much insistence that words mean something and structures have consequences. But in the beit midrash, at its best, those same qualities can become tools. The capacity to notice what others skip over. To feel the ethical pressure of a text. To stay with contradiction. To ask why a word appears here and not there. To refuse the easy answer because the easy answer is false.

My relationship to Jewish text didn’t develop in spite of being autistic. It developed precisely because I am autistic. I study, read, and learn through pattern, intensity, emotional precision, sensory attention, and the refusal to look away from discomfort. This isn’t a “special perspective” that I occasionally bring to Torah. It’s the only way I do Torah. My bodymind isn’t an obstacle between me and the text. It’s the instrument through which I encounter the text. Disabled Torah and Autistic Torah are no less foreign than any other way of engaging with Torah. They’re accessible to all. 

We aren’t an inclusion project

This is why I resist language that treats disabled and neurodivergent Jews as additions or oddities to Jewish life. We aren’t an inclusion project. We aren’t a pastoral concern. We aren’t proof that a community is kind. We are bearers of Torah. Our bodyminds reveal things. Our experiences illuminate what more normative readings often miss. Our questions aren’t interruptions to the tradition or disrespectful to it (something I’m told on an almost daily basis); they’re part of the tradition and it’s future. And they always have been. Even Moses, the giver of Torah, was disabled. 

The tradition knows this, even when our communities forget or ignore. 
A page of Talmud isn’t the smooth surface that many may think. It’s layered, crowded, argumentative, unsettled. It rarely reaches conclusions. It contains voices that disagree across generations. It preserves rejected positions. It returns to problems that should have been solved and insists they aren’t solved. It refuses the fantasy that truth belongs only to the majority, or to the loudest voice, or to the person most comfortable in the room.

And yet, the physical and communal spaces where we study these texts often reproduce the very exclusions the texts can help us challenge. We study disagreement in rooms where disabled people are told to be less “disruptive.” We praise multiplicity in communities where autistic communication is treated as too intense. We teach that every person is created in the Divine Image while building spaces where only certain bodyminds can fully participate. We preserve minority opinions on the page while asking living minorities to be patient, grateful, and quiet.

This contradiction isn’t abstract to me and my disabled friends and colleagues – it’s our everyday lived experience and it needs to stop. 

There are days when I sit in class trying to learn while the lights are physically painful, while the sound in the room scrapes against my nervous system, while my body is still recovering from the commute, while my heart is misbehaving, while I am calculating whether asking for what I need will be worth the social cost. I’m there because I love Torah and the Jewish people. I’m there because I want to become a rabbi and leader in Israel. I’m there because Jewish learning gives me life. But I’m also there inside a structure that often asks me to spend my limited energy proving that my needs are real in order to make others comfortable. 

And then people wonder why disabled people are tired.
We are tired because nothing in this world is neutral. Not the staircase. Not the lighting. Not the timetable. Not the seating. Not the assumption that everyone can stay for the full session without breaks. Not the expectation that learning happens only when bodies are still and quiet. Not the belief that access is a favour rather than a basic condition of communal life. Not the demand that disabled people express our needs politely enough to be heard by those who have already decided that our needs are inconvenient.
We’re tired because the world keeps asking us to be grateful for partial belonging.

And stil…

And still, I keep returning to the beit midrash and the synagogue. 
That “and still” isn’t meant to be sentimental or whimsical. And I don’t want it to serve as some sort of inspiration. Mine isn’t the disability story where hardship becomes beautiful because someone perseveres. I dislike those stories because they usually exist to comfort abled people. They turn disabled survival into a moral lesson while leaving the conditions of survival untouched.

My “and still” is something else. It’s stubborn, maybe. It’s theological. It’s the refusal to let ableist structures have the final word on what my bodymind means. It’s the conviction that the very parts of me that are treated as too much in one room may be the source of Torah in another.

When I teach, I try to build a Jewish space where people don’t have to cancel themselves in order to learn. A space where access isn’t an accommodation reluctantly granted, but a starting principle. A space where chevruta is not only intellectual but relational, even regulating. Two learners sitting with a text, adapting to one another’s pace, silence, confusion, intensity, and need. A space where “I don’t know” is not failure but method. A space where the learner isn’t asked to perform mastery before being allowed to belong.

This comes from my lived experience as a disabled person. It comes from the teachers and communities that have helped me trust my own way of learning. It comes from many beloved teachers and from the wider radical Torah that has formed me. But it also comes from mornings on the Métro. From being forced to notice what decided structures do to humans who don’t fit into it. From understanding that no learning space is disembodied, no matter how much it pretends to be.

A community always has architecture, pacing, sound, lighting, hierarchy, norms, and assumptions. The question isn’t whether these things exist. The question is whom they serve.

That is why my pedagogy begins with the individual. Not because I want to make Torah less serious, but because I take Torah too seriously to pretend that learning happens above the body and mind. People arrive with exhaustion, grief, sensory needs, trauma, joy, shame, longing, hunger, pain, curiosity, fear. They arrive with all of it. The fantasy that a student can leave these things outside the room is one of the ways exclusion disguises itself as rigour.

I don’t want that kind of rigour.
I want a Torah that can survive contact with real life.
I want Jewish communities where disabled and neurodivergent Jews aren’t told, implicitly or explicitly, that we can participate only if our needs remain invisible. I want a Jewish life where autistic intensity isn’t mistaken for aggression, where sensory needs are not treated as preferences, where fatigue is not moralised, where access is not dependent on whether someone likes us, understands us, or finds us sufficiently respectable.

And I want this not only because disabled Jews deserve better, though we do. I want it because Jewish life becomes smaller when it excludes us. Torah becomes thinner when only certain bodyminds are treated as legitimate interpreters. Communities become less truthful when they mistake comfort for peace.

The Divine reveals through difference, not despite it. 

I don’t encounter the Divine by escaping the particularity of my bodymind. I encounter the Divine through the very textures of perception, need, limitation, intensity, and relation that make me who I am. My autistic, disabled bodymind is not something to be overcome on the way to Torah. It’s one the place where Torah happens.

This is why the question of disability in Jewish life cannot and must not be reduced to ramps and captions, even though we absolutely need ramps and captions. It’s also about imagination. Who is imagined as a rabbi ? Who is imagined as a teacher ? Who is imagined as a source of Torah ? Who is imagined as someone the community must be built around, not merely someone the community might make room for if there is time, money, patience, and goodwill ?

At the moment, too much of French Jewish life doesn’t imagine disabled Jews. It may pity us. It may admire us when we are useful. It may make exceptions for some of us, especially if we are known, liked, or persistent enough. But imagining us as central, as leaders, as scholars, as rabbis, as builders of the Jewish future – that remains rare.

And yet I am here. That is the fact behind this whole piece.
I am here. In France. In rabbinical school. In the synagogue. In the beit midrash. On the Métro. In the classroom. On the bimah. In the doctor’s waiting room logging into class because the schedule doesn’t stop for the body. In the moments when I am too tired to speak and in the moments when Torah pours out of me because something in the text has opened. In the communities that sustain me and in the ones that exhaust me. In the contradiction.

I’m here not as an exception to be explained, but as a Jew. As a disabled Jew. As an autistic Jew. As a rabbinical student. As a teacher. As a friend. As someone whose Torah is inseparable from the life that produces it.

This is why I need readers to understand from where I am speaking before anything else. Before the policy arguments. Before the communal critique. Before the broader vision of disability inclusion. Before the theology can be heard properly, this has to be clear : my reflection is not conceptual. It’s lived. It comes from within.

It comes from the 6:00 alarm.
It comes from the route planning and the broken escalator.
It comes from the disabled seat and the fear of being challenged.
It comes from the fluorescent light and the halogen glare.
It comes from the body calculating how much it can endure.
It comes from the beit midrash where the text waits without rushing me.
It comes from the synagogue where the sounds of prayer ground me. 
It comes from the love of Torah and the grief of partial belonging.
It comes from the refusal to lie about either.

I don’t become less disabled when I enter Jewish space. I don’t become less autistic when I open a volume of Talmud. I Dom’t become more worthy of Torah by masking the bodymind through which my Torah comes.

If I become a rabbi in France, it won’t be in spite of who I am. It will be because of who I am. Because this bodymind has taught me to notice what others are trained to ignore. Because it has taught me that access is not charity, but truth. Because it has taught me that a community that cannot hold disabled Jews cannot fully know itself. Because it has taught me that Torah is not diminished when read through autistic and disabled life. 
It’s revealed there.