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September 18, 2009
All of us have special needs
Federation campaign opener stresses the need for community.
CYNTHIA RAMSAY
“Living with disabilities can be exhausting, painful and lonely," Dori Jaffe told the crowd gathered at Schara Tzedeck Synagogue last week. "We're often treated with impatience and disdain. In the Bagel Club, I can be with people who share some of my experiences and still be seen as a complete, unique and valuable individual."
The Bagel Club is a social group for Jewish adults with special needs. It meets at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver and is one of the agencies that receives funding from the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver's annual campaign. Jaffe was speaking at the campaign's opening night event, which took place Sept. 10.
A young performer, David Urist, began the evening with the national anthems of Canada and Israel. Federation board chair Michael Fugman, campaign chair Judi Korbin and campaign chair of women's philanthropy Karen James all addressed the audience briefly. They each thanked campaign volunteers and stressed the need for community cohesiveness. Korbin also read a letter from Prime Minister Stephen Harper, in which he recognized and praised the work of Federation, saying, "I commend the Jewish Federation of Greater Vancouver for fostering this wonderful network of giving. This year's campaign extends an impressive legacy of lending a hand to those in need, as they struggle through difficult times."
Korbin said, "The history of our Jewish community in this country and in Vancouver that dates back to the beginning of the last century, when our grandfathers and grandmothers were new immigrants to this country, is that we look after each other. To continue that heritage, each year here in Vancouver, we go through a process of looking at our particular community needs, the unmet requests of our constituent agencies and the environment around us."
The theme of this year's campaign asks that people imagine themselves "in the shoes of the people in our community who need our help," explained Korbin. "We are not showing many faces this year and that is because, given the economic situation of the last year, it could be any of us with the face that is in need."
Jaffe spoke after the screening of a video about the campaign.
"I am one of the many people who have fallen through the cracks of our government and community special needs resources," she said. "I also had not been connected to the Jewish community for years. The Bagel Club provides me with a place to go three times a week at the JCC, where I can feel safe and get some of the support I need. To me, it's not just a program – it is a lifeline."
Programming at the Jewish Community Centre of Greater Vancouver for people with special needs has increased, said Jaffe. She noted the particular importance of the Community Kitchen to her, then explained that the Bagel Club is starting a new enterprise: a catering program. The club prepared the desserts and refreshments that followed the launch event and they hope to do more such work in the future.
In his first few remarks, keynote speaker Rabbi Bradley Artson, dean of the Ziegler School of Rabbinic Studies and vice-president of American Jewish University in Los Angeles, shared with those gathered the fact that his son, Jacob, is autistic. This is one reason why Artson does a lot of advocating for people with special needs, but he said that his son pointed out to him one day that, "So long as you are speaking for us, you're part of the problem. The world needs to learn to ask us to speak for ourselves."
In addition to other lessons learned from this exchange, Artson said, "What Jacob told me was that there is a culture of genteel charity, in which we, the perfect, deign to be sweet to the broken and that's a world of us and them, the worthy and the unworthy, and that's the problem. There are no perfect and there are no unworthy, there's just us."
Artson said, we are, "all of us, God's children; all of us broken and hurting in our own unique ways. If you don't think you [have] special needs, there are one of two possibilities: either you're not paying attention or you haven't been diagnosed," he joked.
Changing to a more serious tone, Artson then gave two Torah lessons. "The Torah opens up with a story about God doing something God doesn't need to do on one level, except the only way for God to be loving is to have an object to love," so God creates the Cosmos and human beings, which God created in God's image. "We are so constructed," explained Artson, "that we have a need to bestow love. We, all of us, have a need to care for others, to reach out and lift someone up, all of us, and a human being who's not given the opportunity to show love begins to shrivel up and become dry and small and less than they would otherwise be."
The second lesson came from the story of the Hebrew slaves rising up against Pharaoh and the Exodus. "When given a choice, what we perceive as divinity and holiness comes down to take the side of the oppressed and the despised and the outcast," said Artson. In hearing the voice of God amid their suffering and taking their freedom, the Semitic slaves changed world history, he said: "Everywhere in the world that freedom stands up, it is speaking Hebrew."
He encouraged people to give to tzedekah, not to help someone else, but "because you will suffocate if you don't. You will drown in your isolation.... This campaign is your most effective way to stand up and say, 'I will not live in a hate-filled world. I will not create a gate around my house and my heart that shuts out my brothers and sisters.'
He concluded with another Torah story.
"Why is it, the rabbis asked, that God chose the gathering around the foot of Mount Sinai as the moment to explode into the world with Revelation? Close readers of Torah that they are, they noted that the verb used for encamped is in the singular: Israel encamped as a singularity.... That unity that we offered up invited God's unity to descend upon us. That's when Torah happens.... When you look out and you see radiant rainbows of oneness, diversity that still celebrates unity, then you are seeing through God's goggles."
Before the event ended, a few audience members asked questions. One was about the credo Artson wrote for himself while in rabbinical school; he encouraged everyone to take the time to "put into writing what are your core convictions, who are you uniquely meant to be in the world, and then use it to remind yourself when the pressures of life try to push you away from that."
The second question was about the tension within the community that arises from the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.
"We have forgotten how to engage in civil discourse," said Artson, "and that is true for virtually every significant issue people talk about.... We have forgotten how to disagree with people and stick to the arguments without instead making them invisible by casting aspersions on their character.... I think it is impossible to advance if we're not willing to learn from each other, so we all need in our personal lives to start working a little bit harder to listen to people who think differently than we do on important questions. And instead of insulting them as a way of not having to take their ideas seriously, we need to have our first reaction be thinking thoughtfully about why would a reasonable person not think the way I do and what could I learn from their different way of seeing the world.
"And you may still agree to disagree at the end," he continued, "but the bigger reality is nobody has a crystal ball and nobody knows with a matter of certainty what policy would bring peace in the Middle East ... what will the future bring. We don't know for sure, we give it our best shot and, in such a world, I think the model remains the Talmud.
"The talmudic model is of rabbis who vehemently disagree with each other, who argue about the logic, without compromise, and then they go to lunch after the argument's over. We need to start to become a more talmudic culture."
The final questioner asked the rabbi to expand on his earlier comments on the Exodus and the slaves rising up against Pharaoh.
"The risk about enemies is they are a lot like us," said Artson, "but Jewish tradition is very clear that there are values that we have to oppose, so on the issue of including or excluding, there is a right answer and a wrong answer, not just two different views. And in the discussion of more tzedakah or more greed, there is right answer and a wrong answer.
"The challenge is: to label everybody as a Pharaoh makes it impossible to share humanity, but to never label anyone as a Pharaoh means you never know where the battle has to happen." There are times, said Artson, when, regretfully, war is necessary, but he added that the Chassidic tradition reads the Torah internally, "So it's not the Pharaoh out there you have to worry about, it's the Pharaoh in here that we need to be battling. And that all the characters of the Torah are ways of looking at different aspects of our own inner life and what we need to be rooting out in ourselves.... Instead of just pointing fingers at the Pharaohs out there, I need to be owning the Pharaoh in here and I need to be getting that Pharaoh under control."
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