Reimagining Mordecai M. Kaplan through the lens of Disability Justice

by Mati Boulakia-Bortnick

Editor’s Note: This week, we’re featuring two essays by JDIN contributor Mati Boulakia-Bortnick inspired by the influential Jewish thinker of the twentieth century, Rabbi Dr. Mordecai M. Kaplan. Today’s essay focuses on disability justice. You can find Mati’s first essay about Rabbi Kaplan here.

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If Part I was about honoring Mordecai Kaplan’s vision - his theological brilliance, his communal creativity, and his relentless hope for Jewish survival - then in Part II, I am forced to ask what he didn’t yet see. Not as condemnation, but as continuation. Kaplan gave us a framework for evolving Jewish life. And if we take him seriously, we have to evolve that framework in light of the world we live in now.

Kaplan’s central concern was always survival - not just physical survival, but the survival of Jewish meaning, memory, and most important, community. He believed that survival required reconstruction. That Jewish life had to be reshaped - not protected behind walls, but actively adapted to meet the needs of each generation. And he built toward that vision: institutions, ideas, communities, liturgies. All in service of keeping Jewish life alive and vital.

But like all frameworks, his had limits. Kaplan was a pastoral thinker - he cared deeply about people, and he knew that life included illness, grief, vulnerability. While he primarily remembered as an academic and theologian, he served as a congregational rabbi for over 50 years. He did not expect perfection. He made space for doubt, for contradiction, for unevenness. But the frameworks we have today - disability justice, neurodivergence, queer theory, trauma-informed care - didn’t exist in his time. He did not write about madness. He did not engage with sensory or cognitive difference. He did not imagine what community might need to look like for those of us who cannot participate in “normative” ways. Not because he didn’t care - but because he didn’t know what we now know and what we now center.

His language of salvation being a process self-realization is pure brilliance, and inspirational to me. I have no doubt that he would have agreed that everyone’s journey looks different. He did not demand conformity or uniform outcomes. But he also didn’t interrogate who might be excluded from even starting that journey. Who might be too burned out, too unsupported, too traumatized, too structurally marginalized to “realize” anything in a community that wasn’t built to hold them. He wrote about participation, growth, moral development - but not about access, regulation, or mutual care as preconditions for survival.

And his vision of community, while beautiful, lacked an explicit ethics of care. He believed community mattered. That people needed each other. He pushed community over all else. But he didn’t go far enough into the material, emotional, and infrastructural work required to make community sustainable for those with high needs, shifting capacities, or experiences that don’t fit into institutional rhythms. He didn’t write extensively (publicly at least, his journals are filled with his questioning of power dynamics) about how power shows up inside community - how exclusion often happens in the name of cohesion.

Today, the threats to Jewish survival are not just assimilation or disinterest. They are climate catastrophe. They are fascism dressed up as tradition. They are transphobia, toxic masculinity, ableism, neuronormativity, and predatory capitalism. They are Jewish institutions that protect their power by aligning with systems contrary to our values and throwing marginalized Jews under the bus. In this world, survival means something different. It’s not just about continuity - it’s about resistance. It’s about care as defense. Care as refusal. Care as covenant.

Kaplan’s vision got us here. But it isn’t finished.

Neo-Kaplanism begins by asking - what do we need to survive now? And what kind of communities will make that survival not just possible - but liberatory?

If Kaplan gave us the language of reconstruction, disability justice gives us the language of what must be reconstructed.

Where Kaplan spoke of self-realization, disability justice asks - under what conditions can people survive long enough to even begin becoming themselves?

Where Kaplan emphasized the centrality of community, disability justice asks - whose needs shape that community? And who gets left out in the name of cohesion, function, or tradition?

Disability justice begins not with abstract ideals, but with lived experience - especially the experience of those of us pushed to the furthest margins. It is built on a few simple truths.

1. Access is collective, not individual.

2. Interdependence is not failure, but a reality of being human.

3. Care is not charity, and survival is not neutrality.

4. The people most excluded from communal life are often the ones who understand most deeply what community should actually be.

This framework reframes everything. It shifts the conversation from “how do we include the disabled?” to “how do we redesign the structure entirely so no one needs to ask for inclusion in the first place?” It shifts the communal ethic from participation to care, from contribution to access, from normative timelines of development to the rhythms of co-regulation and relationship.

Care is not something communities should do. It is what communities are. Without care, community is a false god.

And care isn’t soft. It’s not just support groups and hand-holding. Care is logistical. It is time-consuming. It is emotional, sensory, financial. It is about building systems that distribute need so no one person or one bodymind gets crushed under the weight of being “too much.”

Care is covenant.

It is responsibility.

It is Jewish.

But this requires a shift in how we define autonomy. In Kaplan’s time - and still today in most Jewish institutional contexts - autonomy is often equated with independence. The ability to make choices, to act freely, to not rely on others. But disability justice teaches us that independence is a myth. No one survives alone. Autonomy isn’t the opposite of dependence - it’s what becomes possible through interdependence. It’s the freedom that emerges when we are supported, held, witnessed, and believed. When we are not shamed for needing, but met in our needs with respect and accommodation.

And this isn’t just about disabled people. These needs are not fringe. They are not special. They are human. They are present in every community. The difference is whether we build systems to meet them - or ignore them until people break. The idea that anyone can live or work independently is a myth promoted by the Protestant Work Ethnic and capitalism.

It is fake.

When Kaplan centered community in his theology, he was naming something essential. But the next step is to ask what that community must be for. Not cohesion. Not continuity. Care. Community must be the structure that sustains life - not in abstraction, but in the dailiness of living. And in a world bent on extraction, productivity, and erasure, that is a sacred act.

If we take Kaplan seriously, then we don’t just preserve his frameworks - we reconstruct them.

Not symbolically.

Not theoretically.

But structurally. Materially. Liturgically. Spiritually.

Kaplan called for a Jewish civilization that evolves. Disability justice shows us how. Because what needs to evolve isn’t just our theology (though this too, should evolve with whatever speaks to Jewish people at any given time) - it’s our assumptions about what kind of lives Jewish community is meant to hold. Kaplan spoke about civilization as the container for Jewish meaning. But what if that container is leaking? What if it was never built to hold us all in the first place?

Self-realization is still the most worthy goal - but it cannot look the same for everyone. For some of us, self-realization looks like finally unmasking our true selves and showing up as we truly are. For others, it looks like being able to stay home without being forgotten. For others, it means rest and not participating in the system whatsoever. It might look like using AAC. Or having a meltdown in a community space and not being punished for it. It might look like not being forced to explain our trauma in order to be believed. It might look like stimming in shul without being made fun of. Or needing subtitle or signing on Zoom. Or needing to leave early. Or needing to not be “fixed.” To not have disabled members of the community looked as those who “need to be accommodated”. Not simply to acknowledge our existence and look at us as a nuisance who need to be “taken care of”, but to be centered. And when we are centered, all people benefit.

A Neo-Kaplanian framework recognizes that community exists not to produce “functional” citizens - but to sustain, liberate, and love its members. That salvation is not about transcendence or transformation - but about being witnessed, accompanied, and held. That the Divine is not located in law, or belief, or performance - but in care. In co-regulation. In interdependence. In the moments where we choose each other not because it’s easy - but because it’s necessary.

Kaplan believed that Judaism must evolve with the needs of each generation. So what are our needs now?

• We need communities that understand dysregulation as a natural state based on living in our broken world - not as failure.

• We need halakhic frameworks that begin with access and primacy, not exception.

• We need leaders who unmask first and bring their authentic selves.

• We need language that doesn’t assume the default Jew is neurotypical, abled, upper middle class, white or male.

• We need prayer and song as co-regulation and intentionally expressed as such.

• We need synagogue buildings with quiet spaces, stim toys, and universal design.

• We need culture that affirms different ways of learning, connecting, remembering, and surviving.

• We need community that does not just accommodate, but builds itself around the wisdom of those once left out.

This isn’t a break from Kaplan. It’s the next step.

Kaplan didn’t give us a creed. He gave us a process. He gave us tools. He gave us permission to adapt - without losing the past. What disability justice offers is not an alternate theology, but a deeper realization of Kaplan’s own. A Jewish civilization that can survive the current moment is one that reconstructs not just for survival - but for justice.

For care.

For joy.

For all of us.

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Mati (he/they) is a student rabbi at the École Rabbinique de Paris and the Educational and Peer Support Director of the Jewish Autism Network. An autistic and multi-disabled educator, peer-support coach, and activist, Mati leads inclusive Jewish learning spaces, supports thousands of autistic humans through peer-led programs, and consults on disability justice and accessibility across Europe and North America. He is the spiritual director of La Shul, a disability and neuro-affirming Neo-Hasidic community, serves on the Board of Directors of SVARA, and is co-editor of the forthcoming Neurodivergent Torah (Ben Yehuda Press, 2026). Reach Mati at m@theautisticrabbi.com.