By Michal Horowitz
Mosaica Press
Beit Shemesh, Israel, 2025
256 pages
Reviewed by Rachelly Eisenberger
I have spent most of my life making sure you wouldn’t know.
My cochlear implant sits behind my right ear, and my hair covers it. I sit myself at the left side of every table so my implanted ear hears to the right of the room. At weddings, when the music is blasting, and everyone around me is straining to hear, I discreetly tap on a setting called Forward Focus on my phone, and suddenly I can hear the people around me better than they can hear themselves.
Most people I meet have no idea. That has always been the goal.
I was born in 2001 and declared profoundly deaf in both ears at birth. I got my cochlear implant at nine months old—the youngest recipient of the device at the time. I have spent the better part of my life perfecting the art of blending in. So when Michal Horowitz’s Abled: Living With a Disability, A Torah View landed in my hands, I almost didn’t want to read it. The subject of disabilities in general wasn’t the problem. I was afraid of what the book might bring up. There are feelings you learn to file away when you grow up different. You get very good at not acknowledging these feelings. I wasn’t sure I was ready for a book that might force me to confront them. I was right: the book did just that.
Horowitz is a Torah educator and speaker based in Woodmere, New York, who developed severe bilateral hearing loss in her mid-twenties—ironic given that she has a master’s degree in audiology. But the irony runs deeper. Horowitz is a well-known Torah teacher catering to frum women, delivering weekly lectures on topics ranging from parashah to tefillah to emunah, lecturing in schools and communities across the United States, and amassing over 2,000 shiurim on YUTorah and OUTorah. Most recently, she was the opening speaker at the OU Women’s Initiative third Nach Yomi siyum in February. She does all this while being profoundly deaf (with the help of hearing aids).
The woman who cannot fully hear has spent fifteen years helping thousands of others listen more carefully. What could have derailed her life became, instead, the lens through which she built an entire Torah framework for understanding human dignity, limitation and self-worth. Abled reflects years of teaching and hard-won experience in living a life with a disability, and it shows.
The book’s central argument lives in its title. We use the words “abled” and “disabled” as though ability is something fixed, something you either have in full or lack entirely. Horowitz goes after that assumption directly, drawing on classical Torah sources to make the case that human worth is not dependent on what a person can do. As she writes: “My hearing loss is one part of me, but I am so much more than my hearing loss. I am a mother, wife, daughter, teacher, friend, servant of Hashem, and Jew. My hearing impairment should not, and does not, define what I can accomplish in my life.”
This is not a self-help book telling you to feel better about your limitations. It is a serious Torah argument showing that we sometimes measure ourselves and others by the wrong criteria entirely.
Disabled people are, in many cases, among the strongest and most capable people you will ever meet. We have spent our lives navigating a world we can’t fully enjoy naturally, developing reserves of resilience, adaptability and self-awareness that are genuinely extraordinary.
One of the most powerful examples Horowitz brings is from Parashas Emor. The Torah lists kohanim with various types of mumim (physical blemishes) who are prohibited from performing the avodah in the Beis Hamikdash. This is a startling and seemingly offensive verse in the Torah. But Horowitz explains the true meaning: The Torah goes out of its way to state that a kohen with a mum still eats from the holiest offerings, still receives his share, still holds his full status as a kohen because the mum is not a defect in the kohen’s personality and does not change who he is. The restriction speaks to a specific role in a specific context. As Horowitz explains, “in exempting—not excluding—Kohanim who are blemished from serving, the Torah is teaching us that we must be sensitive to their condition and take great care not to burden them with tasks that would be impossible to fulfill, for that would be embarrassing or demeaning to them and their dignity.”
The restriction says nothing about the person’s worth, identity or place in the community. The Torah itself, Horowitz argues, is teaching us not to confuse one with his or her disability.
For anyone who has internalized the quiet shame of needing accommodations, who has fielded “you’d never know” as though it were a compliment, Horowitz’s book moves the conversation beyond social inclusion and into the realm of Torah principles.
The memoir sections of the book are where Horowitz is at her best. She is a gifted storyteller, and her account of navigating daily life with hearing loss (the social calculations, the strategic positioning, the exhausting mental labor of following a conversation) is the most precise description of that experience I have encountered in print. I read certain paragraphs and had to put the book away. It hit too close to home emotionally.
One passage that stayed with me describes Horowitz’s reluctance to get a cochlear implant, choosing instead to rely on hearing aids. She writes about wanting to hold on to the last remaining natural hearing she has, feeling that the implant would mean giving up something irreplaceable. [Traditional implantation often entails forfeiting remaining hearing.] She is honest about the trade-off: “While I do struggle, and I miss a lot of information in everyday conversations and communications, I am adept at functioning as I do with my bilateral hearing aids. Is it ideal? Far from it. But for the past twenty-five years it is all I know.”
I wish I could show Horowitz what a life with a cochlear implant is like. With all the hearing aid options that are out there, the cochlear implant, in my view, is by far the best. Living with just one cochlear implant (some people have two) is far less limiting than the world assumes it to be. There is nothing I cannot enjoy sound-wise with one implant. The purity and richness of what I hear is something no amount of residual, struggling hearing could have given me. While Horowitz’s feelings are certainly valid, I feel it’s important to express my view for readers who may be facing that same decision or watching someone they love face it.
This book addresses a significant shortcoming within the Orthodox world: our collective unease regarding disability in the shidduch system.
The Torah scholarship throughout the book is genuinely impressive. Horowitz draws on a wide range of sources across Chazal and the major commentators, and her ability to bring those sources to bear on contemporary questions of disability, inclusion and human dignity gives the book a seriousness that sets it apart from more popular inspirational writing on the subject. This is not just chizuk, though there is plenty of that! This is actual learning, much of which has stuck with me long after I completed the book.
What Abled ultimately does really well is give the Orthodox community a Torah-grounded conversation about disability. Horowitz is not asking for admiration. She is asking all of us, disabled or not, to examine the assumptions with which we walk into shul, into school, into our own homes, about what a full human life looks like and who gets to have one.
There is one area where I hope this book finds its way into a very important and very specific conversation: shidduchim.
When a suggestion is presented with a potential match who has a disability, the conversation often ends before it begins. The word “disabled” alone is treated as a verdict. What Horowitz’s book makes impossible to ignore is how deeply that reaction contradicts everything the Torah actually teaches about human worth and capability. People with disabilities are, in many cases, among the strongest and most capable people you will ever meet. We have spent our lives navigating a world we can’t fully enjoy naturally, developing reserves of resilience, adaptability and self-awareness that are genuinely extraordinary.
This book addresses a significant shortcoming within the Orthodox world: our collective unease regarding disabilities in the shidduch system. By providing a clear Torah framework, the author reminds us that a person with a disability is never a diminished prospect. He or she is a fully realized individual, deserving of the same aspirations for a home and family as anyone else.
I finished this book with a different relationship to the cochlear implant I have spent years hiding. Horowitz gave me a new sense of appreciation for the life I live, giving me a language rooted deep in Torah for understanding that hiding was never really the answer. She also made me realize that wanting to integrate fully into society is a beautiful instinct, but it is not the same thing as believing you belong there as you are.
Disability is not an interruption of a life; as Horowitz illustrates, it is simply the shape of one.
Rachelly Eisenberger is associate digital editor of Jewish Action.