Special needs, special rewards

God chose Moses — not for his record but for his potential

Editor’s note: Look for a sermon or lesson from Houston’s diverse faiths every week in Belief.

Some years ago, I devoted all my Kol Nidrei talks to Moses.

I talked about why Moses continues to be Moshe Rabbenu, our teacher, for the 21st century and why Moses has something to say to us on Yom Kippur, to teach us how to live the rest of this year.

I talked about Moses being will- ing to get involved when something is wrong, regardless of the cost and of who is involved — Israelite or Egyptian or Midianite, doesn’t matter. Fighting to undo an injustice is not politics, even though it certainly touches on politics.

I talked about Moses paying attention. How most people would never have noticed that the bush was burning but not consumed. And I discussed the fact that Moses was chosen, not for his record but for his potential. This year, it struck me that there is yet another reason why God chose Moses. It’s one I should have seen sooner, but for whatever reason, I saw it, and I think it is a powerful lesson. I believe that God chose Moses as an act of illusion. We all know that Moses has a disability. He has a speech impediment; that’s why he tells God at the burning bush, “lo ish devarim anokhi,” or, “I’m not a man of words. I am slow of speech and slow of tongue.” Later, he tells God: “ani aral sefatayikh,” or, “I have impeded speech.” And so, as if Moses were a student with a disability that makes it difficult for him to participate in public life, God provides him with an accommodation. He says, your brother Aaron will meet you on the way, and he will be your voice. You will lead the Israelites out of slavery, but he will be your aide.

I wonder what it was like for

Moses growing up in the Pharoah’s court with his disability. I imagine that the Egyptians were not so enlightened and saw Moses as flawed, unworthy of support, someone to be kept apart from any positions of importance.

God didn’t say: Moses, you have to be restricted from public life because of your disability. You have to be included, and I will make that happen. And God did. Does the Torah mention this at every turn, that Aaron spoke for Moses every time they went to the Pharaoh? No! When the Torah tells the story, it generally says that it is Moses who presents himself to Pharaoh and speaks to Pharaoh. It’s clear that Aaron is the spokesman, but Moses is the man of God.

Moses has gifts, Moses is a prophet, Moses is a leader. All he needed in order to bring those gifts to the forefront was an accommodation. God did not give Moses an aide as a mitzvah project; He gave him the help he needed in order to use his talents and to make the immense difference he made in our history, in human history.

Yes, God performs the plagues and the miracles to free the Israelites, but without Moses going there as God’s partner, who knows when that miracle would have happened?

In 1847 a baby boy was born to middle-class parents in Ohio. He was a curious and outgoing boy who loved to explore the world around him. Unfortunately, like many children, that did not translate into success in a normal classroom.

At age 7, he was sent to a noisy one-room schoolhouse with 38 other students of all ages. He lasted exactly 12 weeks before his exhausted, overworked teacher lost patience with his constant questions and threw the boy out of school for good.

At that time, people didn’t know how to help a child who today might have been diagnosed with ADHD. Luckily for him, and for us, his mother was in a position to home-school him, and while things didn’t always go smoothly, in the end, Thomas Edison grew up to make a difference.

If you’ve been reading the recent Chronicle stories about education of children with special needs, you might wonder: What would have happened to such a child in a school in Texas?

If you haven’t read these stories, in brief, the Texas Education Agency decided 11 years ago that they would set a benchmark for school districts that no more than 8.5 percent of students should receive services for special needs, services which federal law says public schools must provide. And they have forced school districts to comply with this percentage by strictly auditing those who are serving too many kids. And that makes their budget much cleaner, much more manageable.

The problem with this is that nationally, the normal percentage of children who are defined as requiring such services is 13 percent. And that means that tens of thousands of children in Texas, of every race and class, are denied services to which they are entitled, simply because school districts refuse to define them as actually having special needs.

That includes children with autism, dyslexia, epilepsy, mental health issues, even blindness and deafness — and, oh yes, speech impediments. And how many parents have the means to sue a school district in order to force them to provide what the law requires? This all started because, in 2003, state lawmakers cut education funding by over a billion dollars.

According to the Chronicle, Texas is the only state that has ever set a target for special education enrollment. They punish school districts that do well at meeting the needs of children with the greatest needs. And the TEA has responded to the Chronicle’s investigation by saying that maybe their policy needs tweaking. Tweaking is what you do when your policies are off by a fraction. When your policies are wrong, you don’t tweak them, you fix them.

This is a contemporary parallel to what we read in the message of Isaiah, where God says: “I dwell on high, in holiness, yet with the contrite and the lowly in spirit.” God says: “Do not ignore your own flesh.” These are our own children, who have needs. And we are ignoring them.

Some of us are proud Texans. But are we proud to live in a state that treats children so shamefully? Perhaps, one day, the state of Texas will rise to its responsibility to serve all of its children. Perhaps one day, we will demand better of the people who lead us. Moses at least had a passion for justice. What about us? What will it take to get us fired up?