I will never forget an extremely kind and generous neighbor while growing up. Each year, he would invite individuals with a wide range of developmental and very complex learning challenges from various residential and day centers to his home for Thanksgiving dinner. His children once politely asked their father, “Why can’t we ever invite regular people?” The father responded, “Regular people will always be invited by others, but we will invite these people with special needs.”
While chesed, kindness, is one of our most revered virtues – applicable in all times and places – today’s attitudes toward disabilities and handicaps have broadened to include other ways to respond to those who have them. We are taught in Pirkei Avot (2:5), “Do not separate yourself from the community.” Accordingly, Jewish tradition supports the idea of not allowing anyone to be separated from the community against his or her will. Rather, we should provide equal access to all and facilitate the full participation of individuals with disabilities in religious and public life.
Years ago, I worked with such children and adults, whom “educationese” has termed the “special needs” population, those categorized as intellectually, emotionally, and/or physically impaired – and I got to know them well. My intention here is to praise their contributions as well as to present a different paradigm of disability.
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Let me begin with the story of the late esteemed writer and scholar, Jacob Twersky, who happened to be blind. Over the years I have kept and savored an article he wrote for Redbook magazine, entitled “How My Daughter Sees Me.” Twersky’s condition was caused by scarlet fever in childhood. Yet, despite his blindness, he published his works in many journals over a long lifespan. He wrote a number of books and taught at colleges in New York, where he lived and labored comfortably and rarely left. Although he was “handicapped,” he was familiar with the territory and traversed it as well as any sighted person might.
Because I was deeply moved by Jacob Twersky’s article, and because it touches my subject so closely, I want to briefly offer some insights. Deafness and blindness are difficult issues for people blessed with problem-free vision and hearing to comprehend, and they can serve as a metaphor for other handicapping conditions. The article, five decades old, was way ahead of its time. It was written in an era when those with alleged limitations were “warehoused” instead of credited with skills and talents. Twersky’s all-too-brief plea, especially on behalf of the blind and vision impaired, was an important contribution to better acceptance and understanding of his limitation (although he refused to accept it as such) as well as the limitations of the entire population of disabled individuals. In Baltimore and surrounding environs, last I saw the statistics, that population has reached some 40,000.
In this article, Jacob Twersky explained how his two-year-old daughter and he had a perfectly “normal” relationship. She never had a clue that he was blind. She knew only that her father read with his hands, while her mother read with her eyes. And the little girl would dutifully hand her father his briefcase when, like other dads, he went off to the nearby subway and work.
Twersky’s wish was that every person with this particular limitation not to be overly praised when performing “normal” tasks (like fatherhood). They should not to be treated like “trained seals” but be regarded like everyone else.
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In Jacob Twersky’s day, special education did not exist. What would he say about our situation today, when an estimated 20,000 children among the approximately 100,000 students attending public schools are deemed to have “special needs”? The breakthrough came in the 1970s with the passing of Public Law 94-142, which mandated equal accommodations for anyone determined to have a handicapping condition. No more “warehousing.” It became Individualized Educational Plans (IEPs) for all. The Public Law championed inclusion and paved the way for more targeted education.
In our school district, during one of the many weeks when “special education” was celebrated, the theme became, “The greatest handicap a child can have is your lack of understanding.” Jacob Twersky, whose life was a struggle to be “seen as normal as the next person,” would have hated this slogan. However, I do feel he would have supported educating those with disabilities to the maximum possible and allowing such individuals to take their places in our society.
Take autism, for example. Formerly a “low-incidence” category, autism has become a catch-all label for any and all difficult learning limitations. (Most probably, the government-mandated services allowed for autism have increased the frequency of its diagnosis.) Of course, there are those who are severely limited, but new information is coming out about what autistic individuals are capable of. The Israeli army assigns autistic individuals to decipher aerial intelligence photos because of their intense focus and their ability to find patterns and meaning in the smallest of visual details. And there is the story I heard about a military recruit, Germano, originally from Brazil. He became a military policeman. His handicapping condition – his “gift” – was a memory that could recall and repeat an entire phone book’s worth of names if he heard or read the list once – in reverse order.
While none of us would choose to have a condition that is termed a disability, we should realize that no one is perfect. And we could conclude from the fact of our universal imperfections that everyone is to some extent handicapped. As legendary actress, Teri Ann Garr, National Ambassador for Multiple Sclerosis Society, once said, “Whenever you hear the word ‘disabled’ people, you immediately think about people who can’t walk or talk or do anything that people take for granted. Now, I take nothing for granted. But I find the real disability is people who can’t find joy in life and are bitter.”
Avrum Samuel Shavrick, Ph.D., is former Director of Education, Maryland Department of Health and Mental Hygiene, and former principal for students with severe and multiple disabilities. asshavrick@gmail.com
