Review of: Toward Inclusion: Perspectives on Disability, Social Responsibility, and Belonging
In the very first chapter of Genesis, the Torah teaches us that the human being is created in the image of G-d. Ever since, tyranny and bigotry have been on notice—any doctrine that reduces other human beings to something less deviates from the nature of Creation.
We take for granted what Jefferson called, “the palpable truth that the mass of mankind has not been born with saddles on their backs, nor a favored few booted and spurred, ready to ride them.” Yet we ought not to do so. As with every mitzva, acting upon truth is not automatic. The spread of political systems which acknowledge human rights is not inevitable and requires steady focus and dedication.
But politics in the larger sense, mediated through abstractions of doctrine and power, often allow us to overlook politics in the immediate sense. In every interaction, we are faced with choices of whether or not to include the Other within the divine spark that makes our lives uniquely valuable to ourselves. This is the immediate politics of everyday life, in which the Torah challenges us to affirm the divine spark in ourselves and in the other at each moment.
Toward Inclusion, a new course produced by the Rohr Jewish Learning Institute for the Ruderman Chabad Inclusion Initiative, uses Genesis’ teaching to challenge our own habits of thinking about and of relating to people with disabilities.
The premise of the course authors is that we often fail to relate to the full humanity of those with disabilities, and that we need to find how to be constantly mindful of their humanity. Powerful exercises based on research at the highest level help acquaint the student of this course with our tendency to turn away from the person and to treat him or her first as someone not like us. A careful progression of readings then allows us to find productive ways to avoid objectification and stereotyping and to find ourselves practicing inclusion.
What is meant by inclusion? On its most basic level, it is to include the humanity of the person with a disability within one’s own. In early times, the disabled person might be seen as being cursed; in more recent times, their disability might be seen as a medical condition. In any case, the approach would often tend to push the humanity of the person to the rear, and only allow the person with a disability into a relation through the mode of the category.
The principle of inclusion rejects this. A person with disability fits into categories, as does any person. The challenge of a good relationship is to relate to the humanity of each person and all people first and only within our common humanity can our differences be meaningful and recognizing them be helpful. No human being is merely a sum of the categories into which he or she may fit, though all those descriptors make the humanity of the other meaningful, vivid and exemplary for our own lives.
Following the logic of this course, inclusion itself has a lesson to unpack. It cannot be a term with which to cement anyone out from his or her full humanity. So we must ask what we mean by “inclusion.” Is the inclusion something we possess exclusively and which only we can extend? To state the question is to answer it, for if only one person can extend it, the other is by implication not possessing humanity to extend. True inclusion is a mutual extension of inclusion, for each life is informed by the image of G-d.
This means that the “disabled person” will have a unique ability to give. The unique experiences of the person with disabilities can be and should be experienced as gifts. This course points to the example of Deaf culture and its proud and militant emphasis on the unique culture of its members. It is only one pointed example of a most important principle enunciated by the Lubavitcher Rebbe to a group of Israeli profoundly injured war veterans—by dint of their experiences, they are in reality metsuyanim, outstanding examples of humanity, who can and must inspire others.
There is a narrow rope to walk. What makes the term “disability” apply is that the people we are talking about are different from us in some ways that we generally do not wish to emulate. It is this very fact that a sighted person dreads the thought of losing sight, a person who runs five miles each day dreads the thought of being unable to walk that conduces to the desire to exclude the thought of disablement and not to imagine himself or herself as one with the person who lacks these abilities that one so values in life.
Yet to surrender to that dread is to be oneself the cause of pain and hurt in that differently-abled human. In ways which are deeply structured into our behaviors, largely unconsciously, we have established modes of thought, feeling and behavior which unnecessarily cause hurt and hindrance to others. Worst of all, those modes exclude us from that which would enhance our humanity in the gift that the metzuyanim could share were we able to be there as a receiver and a student; and they lock the other in disability by making it a barrier to both us and them.
This is the legitimate sense of the social analysis of disability that this course promotes—to recognize the obstacles to wholeness that we create for differently abled others, to recognize our obligation to take responsibility for these thoughts, feelings and actions, and then to take the actions responsibility demands.
The course seeks to address the issues of inclusion from the basis of Jewish law and teaching. The groundbreaking scholarship of Dr. Tzvi Marx in his Disability in Jewish Law masterfully brought together relevant legal and non-legal texts from centuries of Jewish literature to create a broad sense of what Judaism has to say on problems of disability, and his work has spurred further discussion and research. This course follows such research in its own way, seriously delving into the wealth of Jewish sources and teachings to make the case for inclusion.
The course authors helpfully point at one of the places where the approach of Judaism differs from that of most Western legal systems. It has only been in recent years that some American states have encouraged their citizens to help those needing emergency aid by passing “Good Samaritan laws,” to protect people from devastating legal suits if they choose to try to aid someone in a clear case of emergency. Contrast this with the positive obligation in Jewish law to take responsibility for helping others with things they are lacking, whether that means giving first aid when the other is in need of emergency help or whether in accepting social responsibility for making good the lack of the poor and needy. Tsedaka is the paradigmatic mitzva of inclusion, for it teaches us that people must not be isolated in their lack or need, but that we must ourselves include them in the wholeness that we strive to live in ourselves. As pointed out by the Alter Rebbe, R. Schneur Zalman of Liadi, tsedaka is referred to by the Tamud Yerishalmi simply as The Mitzva, for it demonstrates clearly how a mitzva brings wholeness within ourselves and between ourselves and others, and with all of us and G-d.
This idea that we find our own wholeness through loving and inclusive engagement with others might seem to be normative, but our course points out, as we have mentioned, that Western law generally does not even hold individuals responsible for saving other’s lives, that primal need, without which there are no others. Thus this course’s emphasis is very much on establishing in the student’s consciousness a vivid sense of social responsibility, for it feels, with justification, that that is what is most needed.
The course strives against an entrenched attitude that is characterized in one reading as going so far as to say that a roomful of Olympic swimmers would be under no legal obligation to help a someone drowning in a pool right in front of their eyes. To overcome such an extreme, a temporary emphasis on an opposite extreme is useful, as Maimonides writes. Thus we can understand the hyperbole of the course’s definition of disability as being caused by factors entirely external to the individual, and for which people who think of themselves as able are responsible.
What the course does achieve by this is to get us to include ourselves vitally and personally within disability. The wholeness of the other is a part of our own wholeness. This remains beyond the strategic hyperbole, which, if taken literally, would render all disabled, for no one has unlimited resources of any sort with which to overcome all shortfalls. This follows from the law of tsedaka itself, in which the code of Jewish law cautions us not to impoverish ourselves by disregarding our own needs for financial wholeness, and thus make a further problem. In powerful paradox, Hillel states the true tension: If I am not for myself, then who will be? And if I am for myself only, then what am I? We are not wholly defined by the needs of others—that is slavery. But what are we if we do not accept responsibility to others as a cardinal part of what makes me to be me?
Such common sense must be supplied by the student of the course, evidence of the refreshing trust the course authors have in their audience’s intelligence and sensibility. The authors challenge their students to push as far as they can beyond the ingrained selfishness that has too often been the default mindset. Certainly, no individual has the unlimited resources to make quick fixes of all problems. Life is a story of setting priorities and knowing that no person or problem exists in a vacuum. But this course insists that by learning to include and be included within the humanity of the other, whatever the obstacle, we can overcome problems far beyond our isolated expectations. The authors challenge us to accept the responsibility for mastering our own dread of disablement to be one with other human beings whose needs enable us to overcome our own shortcomings—a want and a need which most of his have not even recognized as a need, a true disability.
Inclusion then must mean this—recognizing our common need to be included in each other’s humanity and not to reduce another person in any way to something less, a category, a cause of an unwanted feeling, or anything else. Much as we may find it important to devote time and resources to make the resources of the world accessible, inclusion must not be mistaken to an endless catering to a lack which we do not have. This too reduces the dignity and the humanity of the person with a disability as someone incapable of living a meaningful life without reducing other people to be mere providers of his or her lack.
Rather, as Chassidic thought has commented on the potent phrase final blessing of the Shmoneh Esrei—“Bless us, our Father, all as one, in the light of your face”: When are we blessed? When we are all as one. The one who receives makes possible giving, the one who gives makes possible receiving—each enables the other.
Beautiful as an abstract, spiritual principle, Judaism pushes us to apply it consciously to our entire life, particularly our actions. By focusing on an area in which the results of active, conscious inclusion daily bring extraordinary blessing, this course teaches a lesson of profound Jewish import. By including the other to overcome disability, we overcome the disabling limitations on our own humanity and life.
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Rabbi Dr. Shmuel Klatzkin is an author and a senior editor with The Rohr Jewish Learning Institute. He serves as associate rabbi of Chabad of Greater Dayton and as an adjunct professor at Antioch University Midwest.