Jews and Special Needs
My Son Is Not His Illness
Bradley Shavit Artson
When our son Jacob was about two years old, he began to pull away, to slide into another world, behind some wall that we could not penetrate. We constructed a delusion to fool ourselves into thinking that nothing was wrong, that our boy was just developing differently from his twin sister. The horror [...]
When Four Parents Are Better Than Two
Celia Gartenberg
Moriel Nachum Gartenberg, 12, is severely disabled by autism. He is at the center of his family’s psychological and spirit-ual universe; in fact, his Hebrew name means “God is my teacher.” Yet he lives on the periphery of our daily lives, like an orbiting satellite. When Mori was two years old, his disability began [...]
Acknowledging the Invisible
Sara Rubinow Simon
Mishnah Sanhedrin 4:5 teaches that “A human being mints many coins from the same mold, and they are all identical. But the Holy One, Blessed be God, strikes us all from the mold of the first human, and each one of us is unique.” Each of us is a bearer of the Divine [...]
