Accessibility and Inclusion

Psalm 102

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“May this be recorded for a later generation.” (102:19)

I do most of my writing on a laptop and the content of my thoughts is saved as a series of electric impulses, magnetic bits of data, on a Solid State Drive. Those bits are backed up to an external spinning hard drive and also to several data centers located at various points around the United States. Your ability to read my reflections depends on the ability of my website to translate those bits into text or speech. In contrast, one hundred years ago, the scribe who wrote the Torah from which we read used a feather and some ink on animal skin. Sometimes I wonder … whose technology is more likely to be read by a later generation?

Psalm 88

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“I stretch out my hands to You.” (88:10)

Human beings are social animals. We need contact with others. In particular, God created us in pairs, to be in relationship with another. To reach out to another person is either to show our vulnerability and admit that we need help, or to notice that the other is in need and offer assistance. The image in this Psalm is particularly poignant. The seeker of aid needs to stretch, reach beyond his or her comfort zone, to plead for assistance.

James Madison and Disability

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In “James Madison: A Life Reconsidered,” author Lynne Cheney demonstrates that Mr. Madison’s epilepsy fundamentally affected who he was as a politician. What specifically caught my attention was the connection between his condition and the first amendment to the Constitution.

The “people first” language of the disability rights movement asserts that we are not “handicapped, epileptics,or wheelchair-bound,” but rather a person with a handicap, a person with epilepsy, or a person in a wheelchair. The difference is that first they are people just like any other. Their condition doesn’t define them, but rather gets integrated into their personhood just like a person’s height, hair color, or temperament.

James Madison read widely on the subject of epilepsy, seeking a cause for and hoping to prevent his “sudden attacks.” Christian sources suggested that they a person who exhibited symptoms of seizures was a lunatic, possessed by the devil or a dumb spirit, or sinful. He struggled with this explanation, which didn’t ring true. He found in other books suggestions that regular exercise and sufficient sleep could prevent seizures.

It is likely that Madison used the same investigative logic with which he researched his physical condition to also examine his spiritual condition. Just as he cast aside the notion that Satan was the cause of his epilepsy, he also began to move away from other ideas of traditional religion.

He began to understand that religion, like science and medicine, needs to be tested. In order to test religion, society needs free and open discourse on religion. When government and religion are connected, it is not possible to openly question religious precepts. Thus, there is a direct line from Madison’s epilepsy to his questioning of religious texts to his belief in the separation of church and state as expressed in the Bill of Rights:

Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.

Next up in the presidential biography series: “The Last Founding Father: James Monroe and a Nation’s Call to Greatness.”

Psalm 66

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O peoples, bless our God, celebrate God’s praises; the One who has granted us life, and has not let our feet slip. (66:8-9)

Several years ago I met Rabbi Ronnie Cahana while visiting Camp Ramah in Canada. He serves a congregation in Montreal. Our paths crossed because his daughter was in the same age group as my sons. He was warm and friendly. I enjoyed the few days I spent getting to know him, and remembered the encounter. Just a couple years after that meeting, in 2011, he had a stroke. He was paralyzed from just below his eyes down. His mental faculties were intact – a condition known as “locked-in syndrome.” His daughter Kitra recently gave a very powerful TED talk describing how she and the rest of his family transcribed his communication through blinks, which allowed him to continue to share his Torah and his poetry with his congregation and on his web site, rabbicahana.com.

I watched the video of Kitra’s talk . The next day, I received an email from Pam, a college friend whose mother suffered a major stroke early in October. She wrote that she was away from home with her mother for nearly five weeks, taking care of her throughout her recovery and the search for a facility that will be able to take care of her after Pam returned home to her family. Her mom is mostly cognitively intact and cannot move the right side of body, but because she suffered the stroke about 36 hours before she was found and treatment could begin, she will not recover fully.

“Bless God … who has not let our feet slip.” From the first moment that he could communicate, Rabbi Cahana comforted his family and his congregation, assuring them that his experience was a blessing, that he found God within the silence of his body. He continued to teach Torah, he continued to counsel members of his congregation, while in a condition that most of us would have found intolerable.

“Bless God … who has not let our feet slip.” Pam found spiritual comfort in some of my Psalm reflections and other blog posts, but I find spiritual comfort in hearing about the love and strength she exhibits in the face of tremendous hardship. Away from her husband and children, she was willingly taking on the task of caring for the mother who embraced her and cared for her.

I have long disliked the aphorism, “God doesn’t give you more than you can handle.” Most of us handle whatever we need to handle, but some of us, overwhelmed, do not handle things well at all. For me, a theology that suggests that God “piles it on” for those who can handle it is perverse. Rabbi Cahana is standing firm and my friend Pam is standing firm; both under very trying circumstances. “Thank God … they have kept their footing.”

Psalm 42

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Like a hind crying for water, my soul cries for You, O God; my soul thirsts for God, the living God; O when will I come to appear before God! (42:2-3)

The human desire to form a relationship with a creator is natural, although the new generation of atheists, such as Richard Dawkins, see it as a delusion. We are constantly trying to make sense of the complicated world in which we live by using the scientific method of identifying cause and effect. Every object was created through some process, and if we trace the creation of the object back far enough, we can discover how the object functions. We identify the rules by which the object was created and continues to operate in the world. We might even identify the original purpose of the object, and its original creator or designer.

By understanding the world, we think we can improve it. The desire to understand, to fix, to improve, is part of the same internal soul-inclination that directs so many of us to want to be in a relationship with God, or that directs some of us to loudly and angrily deny that such a relationship can ever exist.

My support of same sex relationships is based on the idea that the desire to be in relationship is a fundamental human need. We need parents and teachers to nurture us as children, we need siblings or friends to teach us about peer relationships, and for many, the desire to marry and possibly produce a new generation of children is our ultimate goal in forming relationships.

I affirm the possibility of reading Leviticus 18 either as a limited prohibition on same sex sexuality or as no longer halakhically applicable, based on a paper by Rabbis Elliot Dorff, Daniel Nevins, and Avram Reisner; or as argued in a paper by Rabbi David Greenstein, or in a book by Rabbi Steven Greenberg. The powerful image of a soul thirsting for the presence of God is no less true with respect to a human relationship. To deny a gay or lesbian individual the opportunity to have intimate partnership is to sentence him or her to live without the fulfillment of a fundamental human need.