The Jewish Attitude to Handicap¹

footnotes: ¹ Lecture at Finchley Synagogue, 20 May 1992.

Recently I spent a weekend with the Jewish community in Leeds. Among the institutions I visited was a project run by the Leeds Jewish Welfare Board for people with severe mental handicaps: a sheltered housing complex and a day care centre. I spent some time with the individuals there, and I was moved by the care and compassion that the project’s carers devote on a daily basis to these adults, some of whom have a mental age of three or four.

I was also moved by the residents of the home. Most of them can hardly speak, in some cases not at all. One took several minutes to explain to me in a halting way what he was working on. I understood from the project workers that he had spent two years making a little rug. It was a simple thing, but it had given him a feeling of pride and fulfilment that shone from his eyes. His sense of achievement was no less than if he had been a great artist.

There was one woman to whom it had been explained that a rabbi was coming to visit. She understood, and although she could not speak, she wanted to let me know that she was pleased I had come. The only way she could do this was by holding out her hand and having me hold it, which I did. Then something further happened. She wanted to tell me that she was very pleased that I had come. She made various gestures, tried to articulate a word but was unable to do so, and in the end she gave up. Instead she gave me an enormous kiss! That does not often happen to Chief Rabbis. This was a powerful moment of what Martin Buber would have described as an I-Thou encounter. Two human beings met, and disability and the absence of language fell away. Somehow we touched spiritually, and it made a deep impact on me. We must never forget the mandate given to us to care, and above all to recognise – even in those individuals who are most severely handicapped – the spark of humanity that transcends all disability.

I feel reticent in speaking about handicap. I have not suffered the problem in my family. I have, though, had the opportunity of speaking to many who have. From them I have gained a sense of some of the tensions involved in caring for those with severe disabilities. This includes psychological problems which are sometimes no less acute than the practical ones: the anger, perplexity, shock, trauma and sometimes even a sense of guilt that having a handicapped child creates. There are the stresses which naturally emerge when one member of the family is so demanding of attention and so restrictive of the activities of others. And there is the social issue of being integrated into a Jewish community which does not always know how to relate to individuals with a handicap.

I am acutely aware of these problems. So my aim in this chapter is, first, to signal my support. As a community, we must care for the carers. Secondly, I wish to bring to public attention some of the problems of which many of us know all too little. There are needs for which the Jewish community must find provision. Our rabbis must become conscious of the special pastoral problems in families with a handicapped child or member. Thirdly, I want to examine what a Jewish attitude to handicap might be.

The History of Awareness Turning to our classic sources for guidance, we find a surprising lack of explicit teaching in the Bible and the rabbinic literature about handicap. Even in the rabbinic responsa, there is little direct reference until recently.

It is important to understand why. The answer is simple and in some ways heartening. We believe that God reveals Himself in Torah, in the form of commands that do not change over time. God also reveals Himself in history, and history is change over time. One of the great propositions set out in the first chapter of Genesis is that history evolves according to a Divine plan, namely the first command given to humanity, “Be fruitful and multiply, fill the earth and subdue it.”

In the last of these phrases, “and subdue it,” we receive our mandate to be masters of our environment. Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in The Lonely Man of Faith, says that the more we are active and not passive, the more we can shape our circumstances rather than be shaped by them, the more dignified is our existence. As a result of developments over time – in knowledge, control, medical technology, education and our range of resources and facilities – we are able to address problems in ways that previous generations were simply unable to do.

It is not only handicap that early sources do not discuss. In The Invention of Childhood, the French writer Philip Ariès suggests that it was only in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that children were seen as a distinctive group and not just as miniature adults. Our understanding of the needs of the elderly has undergone a similar development. It was only in the nineteenth century that Jewish communities established special homes for the elderly. Ziknah, old age, is certainly discussed in the classic Judaic sources, along with the special attention and respect it deserves. But for many centuries the care of the elderly belonged within the domain of the family. Only in modern times was special provision seen as a communal responsibility.

Handicap is not unique in being a peculiarly modern focus of attention. Nonetheless it does mean that we must search less for explicit statements than for implicit hints in the Torah as to what our general attitude should be.

Against the Survival of the Fittest There is no clearer starting point than the proposition with which the Torah itself starts. This was one of Judaism’s greatest moral revolutions, the fundamental statement about human existence, “Let Us make man in Our image, after Our likeness.” In creating mankind, God made something in His own image. That image is inherent in every human being, whatever his or her physical form and mental ability. It is hard to understand how radical this idea was until we examine attitudes in other cultures to disability and handicap, flowing as they do from different perceptions of the relationship between God and the world.

One attitude to be found in the pagan world, in Greece and Rome, and which today still finds echoes in social Darwinism, is that God is to be identified with nature. In nature there is a struggle between the weak and the strong in which the strong survive. Because this is natural, it is normative. Thus the weak, the disabled and the handicapped have no special claim to our attention. They are naturally fated to be excluded and to suffer. The ancient Spartans actually killed handicapped children, and the Romans left them in exposed places to die. Traces of this view still remain. The contemporary Australian philosopher, Peter Singer, argues that if a handicapped child will cause – and will itself experience – more pain than happiness, then we should consider letting it die. Judaism utterly rejects this perspective. Instead it insists that every person carries within him the Divine image, and is thus the subject of an obligation of care and compassion.

One way of understanding the revolutionary character of biblical ethics is this. Until comparatively recently, handicap was conceived in much broader terms than it is now. There was social handicap as well as physical handicap. If you were born to the wrong class or the wrong race you were as effectively disadvantaged as if you were born with a crippled body or an arrested mind. Thus, what the Torah says about handicap in this broader sense is worthy of our attention, even when it does not refer specifically to a physical condition.

In the Torah, God singles out for love, attention and choice, people who in the social categories of their day would have been seen as handicapped. The dominant law in patriarchal times was primogeniture. Generally it was the firstborn who was privileged to receive the family inheritance. Yet God always chooses the younger. He chooses Isaac instead of Ishmael, Jacob instead of Esau.

Another norm of the ancient world was tribalism. You were primarily concerned with the members of your own tribe and not with those of another tribe. The outsider had no standing in society. Yet the man God chose to lead the Jewish people, Moses, was an outsider, raised as an Egyptian, looking, speaking and sounding like an Egyptian. Indeed, the man who above all others in Jewish history was chosen to be the spokesman for God – out of whose mouth God’s words were to be heard – was a man with a speech defect, a stammerer, “slow of speech and tongue.”

No nations were more distrusted by Israel than Ammon and Moab. Their members “may not enter the congregation of the Lord.” But it was from Moab that Ruth and ultimately King David came, and thus from Moab that the Messiah will ultimately trace his descent.

By contrast, the people of Sodom, for whom the natural order was to care only for the members of their own tribe, and the Amalekites who believed that might is right and that therefore it was legitimate to attack those who were “straggling and weak” are for the Torah the embodiments of evil. For the Bible, morality is not to be found in nature, and is often contrary to nature. God gives power to the powerless and strength to those with special needs. Those whom nature has in some way disadvantaged call for our care.

Coming to Terms with Handicap This is not always easy. The Talmud, with great candour, tells us of the difficulty some of the sages had in overcoming their instinctive feelings towards the physically or mentally disabled.

It relates, for example, that Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar was once on a journey when he saw an individual who was deformed. He asked the man, “Are all the people in your town as deformed as you are?” The man replied, “If you do not like the pot, go and complain to the potter (i.e., to God who made me this way).” When they arrived at Rabbi Shimon ben Elazar’s town, his disciples came to greet him. The man who had been insulted said to them, “Is this the person you call a great man? May there not be many more like him in Israel.” When the disciples discovered what their rabbi had said, they agreed that he had done wrong, but added, “Forgive him because he is a great scholar.” The man did so on condition that Rabbi Shimon agreed not to speak likewise in future. The fact that the Talmud records such episodes, critical of the sages, is eloquent of the need to wrestle with prejudice and the difficulty we have in coming to terms with handicap.

The Torah teaches us to have special sensitivity to those who are disabled, and to treat them as we would anyone else. The locus classicus is Leviticus 19:14, “Do not curse the deaf or put a stumbling block in front of the blind, but fear your God: I am the Lord.” These are two very different commands. The prohibition against putting a stumbling block before the blind is readily understandable. It warns us against taking advantage of the disabled to cause them harm. The moral offence here is self-evident. But the other command, “Do not curse the deaf,” is far more far-reaching. On the face of it, cursing the deaf harms no one because the person you are insulting cannot hear what you are saying. Nonetheless it is morally wrong. If we treat disrespectfully those who are deaf or disabled, even if they are unaware of it, we diminish their humanity and thereby our humanity.

It follows that there is an ethical duty to treat the handicapped with respect. A cheresh (deaf mute) or a shoteh (mentally handicapped) may be regarded in Jewish law as lacking the necessary competence to be held responsible for their actions and deemed to be free of religious obligations. But we are not free of obligations towards them. They too are part of the community of concern. Their dignity makes legitimate claims upon us.

This idea was so strong that the rabbis deliberately and consistently refrained from using words signifying handicap, preferring instead to use euphemisms such as sagi nahor, “clear sighted,” instead of suma, “blind.” This etiquette of circumlocution, so striking a feature of rabbinic language, flows from the imperative not to offend someone by referring to a condition that may cause embarrassment or shame.

Blindness was a severe disability in the time of the Talmud. Several sages of the Mishnaic era took the view that a blind person, like a deaf mute or one who is mentally retarded, is exempt from the commandments. Nonetheless, Rabbi Eliezer ben Yaakov would seat a blind person in the seat of honour at his table to show the respect in which he must be held. Rabbi Hoshaya specifically did not invite a blind teacher to come to a meal with other guests in case people were disrespectful to him. In the twentieth century, Rabbi Avraham Karelitz (known as the Chazon Ish) would stand in the presence of anyone disabled on the grounds that they were pure souls who were exempt from the commandments. The Almighty, he used to say, found in their souls a purity that did not need the perfection and arduous discipline of the commands.

Some types of physical blemish rendered a priest unfit for service in the Temple. We might assume that this implied that someone who had such a disability was less than perfect, and thus debarred from high religious office. But Maimonides, in The Guide for the Perplexed (3:44), gives a quite different explanation. It was, he says, a concession to ill-informed sentiment. People wrongly judge an individual by his physical appearance rather than by his true form. God looks to the heart, but people judge by external appearances. Thus the Torah excluded the handicapped priest from Temple service to avoid public disrespect. Maimonides himself makes it clear that the priest with a physical disability is pleasing before God. The legislation surrounding the Temple, however, involves concessions to human prejudice.

It is important for us to take these messages to heart. Often we do not know what to do when faced by someone with a severe handicap. To avoid our own awkwardness we may shun the family with a handicapped child, or on the other hand try too hard. Through our own embarrassment, we may create embarrassment in others. Against this, the Torah suggests that we must strive to integrate the handicapped and their families into the community.

The behavioural model here is aveilut, mourning. When faced with grief, the natural reaction is what halakhah defines as aninut (the period of mourning before the burial). This is a time of trauma, in which we are emotionally isolated by distress. The whole thrust of the Jewish laws of mourning and of comforting the bereaved is to lead the mourner back from isolation to re-integration into the community.

If this applies to the bereaved, all the more so does it apply to those who are concerned with the living. We must reach out to those who have a handicapped member in their family and make them feel that they are full participants in the community. We should visit them if they are in effect house-bound on Shabbat. We should encourage our children to play with children with a handicap and to feel natural and normal in their company.

The principle of integration played a part in a sixteenth-century responsum of Rabbi Aaron Slonik. He had been asked whether a blind man may be called to the reading of the Torah. After citing the authorities who rule affirmatively on the question, he adds the following consideration: “We must allow the blind…to be called to the Torah and to utter blessings, in order to include them in the acceptance of God’s dominion and to give them spiritual satisfaction.” Inclusion of the handicapped within the faith community was, for him, a significant halakhic factor.

Community Responsibility To what extent in Jewish law is care for the handicapped child a responsibility of the community, or only a responsibility of the parents? Part of the history of halakhah is that, in general, as society has become more developed and we become more capable of organising facilities and services on a community basis, obligations in Jewish law have been extended from the individual to the community.

For example, education was originally the duty of parents. But from the days of Rabbi Joshua ben Gamla, in the first century of the Common Era, when the first Jewish day school system was established, it became a communal responsibility. Charity, tzedakah, is conceived in the Bible as an individual responsibility. In the rabbinic literature, however, it becomes a feature of organised community life. Care of the elderly, too, was initially a family responsibility. But from the middle of the nineteenth century we find Jewish communities organising homes for the aged.

The same pattern appears in the case of handicap. In the early nineteenth century, Rabbi Moses Sofer (known as the Chatam Sofer) wrote in one of his responsa that care for those with handicap is not simply a responsibility of the parents but one in which, according to the halakhah, the whole community must share. The late Rabbi Moses Feinstein ruled that though a community could not be compelled to make special educational provisions for such children, charity funds should be made available wherever possible.

Judaism embodies a distinctive approach to welfare, namely that care within the family and community is the most supportive environment. Hitherto, care in Western societies has developed in a different direction: in institutions apart from the family and community. Significantly the Judaic insight is beginning to gain ground in medical and welfare policy, as we come to realise that large institutions are actually less effective for delivering care and encouraging personal growth and recovery.

The health and welfare system in the United Kingdom is moving towards Community Care. We recognise, however, that certain needs are so specialised that they cannot be provided by the family, or even in some cases by the Jewish community as a whole. There is therefore a need for special facilities which in some cases may mean – if the resources are not available within the community – that a child is removed from the kind of environment we would wish for. But it is clear that, as far as possible, we must provide resources for special needs and facilities within the Jewish community itself.

The rabbinate has a significant pastoral role to play in families with handicapped children. Rabbis must develop an understanding of the problem, and communicate it to their congregations. Each of us has to undergo the exercise of imagining what it is like to be part of a family with a child with special needs. Only when we begin to understand the stresses from within can we develop an adequate support network as a community.

There can be no hiding the pain that such families go through. There is the anger, denial and sometimes a feeling of guilt that parents can feel when they begin to realise that their child is not like other children and that it and they will have a lifetime of difficulty ahead of them. There is a sense of frustration and burden and deep unhappiness. It is natural to ask, “Why has this happened to me?”

Anger is a difficult emotion. Maimonides rules in his Mishneh Torah that we should never get angry. Abraham, faced with the prospect of losing his child, said nothing and remained calm. Job, having lost his children, did get angry and cursed the day he was born. Yet, says the book of Job, he was a righteous man. There is no simple answer to the question, “Why me?” Cathartic anger may enable us to live through stress. But destructive anger can harm the family and the child itself.

Against Despair There is one issue which as religious Jews we must fight against, namely pretending that the problem does not exist. If we are religious Jews, faith gives us the courage to see things as they are. It is not a way of wishing they were otherwise. No one is helped by denial. As people of faith, we believe that the Almighty gives us the strength to cope with reality as it is. He does not spare us pain, but He rescues us from despair.

Equally in these circumstances, one should never feel guilty. Feelings of guilt are based on a misunderstanding of the Jewish sources. The Talmud says that “When sufferings come upon a person, he should examine his deeds.” This seems to suggest that suffering is a sign of our having done something wrong and that we are being punished. But that is not what the Talmud means.

Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik, in his essay Kol Dodi Dofek, writes that when the Talmud sets out the halakhic approach to suffering, it is not seeking to answer the question, “Why did this happen?” but rather, “Given that this has happened, what then shall I do?” When it instructs us to examine our lives and undergo repentance, it does not mean that suffering is punishment. It means that suffering is a source of personal challenge and spiritual growth which we would never have experienced otherwise. The pain is not diminished by this realisation. But through it we find a way of living through pain without endless, fruitless thoughts of what might have been.

We must never allow ourselves to be paralysed by guilt. That is not the Jewish way. We should not say, “I am to blame,” but rather, “How can I see this as something sent by God to create something that could not have happened otherwise.” The rabbis were perplexed as to why God tested Abraham by asking him to give up his child. They answered by way of a metaphor. When a potter completes his vessels, he tests them by hitting them. But he only hits those that are sound, never those that are cracked. God never sends trials to those who lack the strength to live through them.

We face here the greatest mystery of the religious life. No prophet or philosopher was ever granted the answer to the question, Why do bad things happen to good people? Instead we have faith that God gives us the strength to deal with all the sufferings that befall us. We believe, with the Zohar (the greatest text of Jewish mysticism), that God has a special love for souls who never tasted sin, who never reached that stage of maturity that brings with it temptation and corruption. Thus He leaves some people at the mental age of children because they are precious to Him. These are mysteries and however much we speculate they will remain so. But their light, dim though it is, is enough to deliver us from guilt, shame and denial.

There is one final Jewish insight we should recall. Against the ideas of fate and determinism that have been embraced by many other cultures, we insist that there is no such thing as a decree that cannot be changed. “Even if the blade of a sharp sword is resting on your neck,” says the Talmud, “do not lose hope.” As Jews, therefore, we welcome the change in attitude to handicap in the United Kingdom since 1971, from placing it in the context of health to locating it within the framework of education. That marks a move from seeing handicap less, as a condition that cannot be cured than as a disability that to some extent can be overcome.

Indeed this fact has halakhic implications. The great nineteenth-century scholar, Rabbi Esriel Hildesheimer, was asked whether deaf-mutes were eligible to serve as witnesses in Jewish law. After considering the various halakhic positions, Hildesheimer cited the evidence of Rabbi Joel Deutsch, head of the Institute for the Deaf-Mute in Vienna. Deutsch’s view was that current pedagogic techniques made it possible for deaf-mutes to become mentally capable. Hildesheimer, taking issue with the distinguished Hungarian halakhist, Maharam Schick, argued that the disqualification of deaf-mutes as witnesses was not universal. It rested on the assumption that they were mentally incompetent. New methods of teaching meant that this no longer applied. Jewish law allowed for the possibility that scientific advance might affect legal status. Hildesheimer was an enthusiastic supporter of such special education, and gave it significant endorsement.

There is an important passage in the Talmud about a certain Rabbi Preda. He had a student with profound learning disabilities. Four hundred times he tried to teach him a simple law, but the student, unable to concentrate or focus, could not learn. So Rabbi Preda said, “I will teach you another four hundred times.” The Talmud then relates that a voice was heard from heaven saying, “Do you prefer that four hundred years be added to your life, or that you and your generation be privileged to have a share in the world to come?” The rabbi who continued to care for his pupil even though others would have given up in frustration became a model for Jewish behaviour.

Commenting on the passage, Rabbi Samuel Edels says that anyone who fails to take this degree of care is depriving that individual of his share in the Jewish heritage. Where possible we must be prepared to devote disproportionate resources of time and patience to children with learning disabilities even if their achievements will remain limited. Such care has unique religious merit and reward.

In a different context, the Talmud relates that King Hezekiah, one of the most righteous of kings, was visited by the prophet Isaiah when he was ill. Isaiah told him, “You are going to die.” Hezekiah protested and asked why he had been condemned to lose his share in the world to come. Isaiah replied that it was because he had chosen not to have children. Hezekiah replied that he had been given prophetic foreknowledge that if he had a child, he would be handicapped (in this case, a moral handicap not a physical one). His son – he had foreseen – would bring Israel to the brink of moral ruin. Therefore he had decided not to have a child.

Isaiah categorically rejected Hezekiah’s choice. He declared that it is not our role to question the secrets of God. All we can do is what is commanded of us – to try to have children – and we must leave to God the mysteries of existence. That is what is meant by faith, and faith brings with it immense inner strength.

Maimonides asks why bad things happen to good people. His answer is this. God gives us one good thing, life itself. Existence is the one thing which is good in itself. But because our existence takes place in a physical world, it is subject to the accidents of matter: illness, disability and mortality. It could not be otherwise. To believe in God is to cherish existence as his gift. And the existence of a child with a handicap or disability is no less the gift of God.

In whatever body and whatever disabled mind, there is a soul cast in the image of God. It was that soul which I recognised when I was kissed by the lady in Leeds. It is that soul to which we as Jews must respond.