It’s a lovely thing to feel proud of your child and I am sure that right now Dan and Natalie are justly very proud of Lily! We all join you. I want to share now one of the reasons that I feel very proud of Nicola and my younger daughter Miriam.
Miriam is a specialist Speech and Language Therapist who lives in Brighton. Her specialty is working with children who are non-verbal, unable to speak. She has done this for years including before she was trained as a SALT. Her mission is to help these children to find a way to communicate, to make their own intentions known in order that they have choices in life. Often the children she works with are severely disabled and unable to make voluntary movement – so unless they can somehow be heard they will spend their life being done to and unable to express what they need.
Miriam has recently been working as Speech and Language Therapist to a girl called Holly who is twelve. Holly is not able to move herself, to dress, eat or drink voluntarily, walk or any of the basic functions of life which we here choose to do with relative ease. Until Miriam began to work with her, Holly had no way of expressing what she liked and didn’t like, what was comfortable or uncomfortable, what gave her joy or what irritated her. Miriam has over a few months succeeded in enabling Holly to find a way to communicate yes and no – the two starting points of expressing will. Now Holly can say that she is uncomfortable with something happening to her. She can express a preference. She can ask for something to continue or to stop. Needless to say it has revolutionised her and her parents’ life. They have said to Miriam that it feels that their daughter has truly come to life. You can understand why I am a proud dad.
These first chapters of the Book of Genesis from which Lily read today remind us of what all human beings share, however able or disabled. Genesis, Bereshit, is not a scientific analysis of humanity. It is not about how humanity came to be in a way that can be proven by science. Rather these chapters are a much more fundamental document.
These chapters are about what it means to be human – whatever your gender, whatever your race, whatever your religion, whatever your bodily or mental ability.
First we are all Adam – we are all a creature made in the image of God. And you do not need to believe in God to get the implications of what Genesis says about this. If we are all in the image of the same source, it means that there is no human being who is not a human being. There is no one whose life is worth less than yours. There is no one who deserves to have no choices, to be under you. Male and female are created together in the Torah account and all races stem from one source. The word Adam comes from the same root as Adamah – earth – we are all the part of this earth, none of us are dispensable.
A second elemental truth comes from the early words of the part of the portion Bereshit that Lily read. God blew into the nostrils of Adam the breath of life, and Adam became a living being (Genesis 2:7). This means that in our Jewish universal understanding everyone who breathes, everyone who is alive is a full human being. No level of disability makes us not human and not entitled to human rights. Nothing can take our humanity away while we are alive. That breath which enables us to exist, and if we are fortunate, to walk and to communicate is the first element of humanity.
The Bereshit portion begins idyllic. Adam and Eve, partners for life made from the same source, live in the Garden of Eden, want for nothing, exist in harmony with nature and each other. By the end of the Bereshit portion, however, disaster has struck. The first murder has taken place – of one of Adam and Eve’s sons, Abel, murdered by his brother Cain. The murder shows just how fragile our life is, how easy it is to take away another’s humanity, snuff out their breath, kill the image of God in them.
When the Rabbis divided the Torah portions thousands of years ago they could have stopped before this murder so that Adam and Eve’s perfect existence remained our experience of the first week of the Torah cycle, but they didn’t. They included the worst of humanity as well as the best so that we would always be aware of the polarities of what we are capable of. Harmony and utter destruction, eating from the tree of life and destroying its produce.
The worst of humanity, in the fourth chapter of Genesis, is the murder of Abel by Cain. Something is not explained in the story of the murder of Abel in the Torah. They do not speak to each other.
The verses which detail the murder read like this. ‘Cain said to his brother Abel……and when they were in the field, Cain set upon his brother Abel and killed him.’ What did they speak about? Classic Midrash attempting to fill in the gap (Geneses Rabbah 22:7) imagines that they argued about who would marry Eve after Adam’s death, or what each of them would inherit or even in whose territory the future Temple might be built – sexual rivalry, economic conflict or a religious quarrel. But the Torah does not tell us – it only says that communication did not happen but murder did.
Rabbi Howard Cooper (What Makes Me Angry, Ed. Jonathan Romain pp 28-31) notes that ‘the bible’s first death occurs when communication fails. The antithesis of dialogue is murder.’ He wrote this is the recent book of Progressive rabbinic thought called ‘What makes me angry’.
That breath of life put into Adam by God – it is wrong for it to be expelled in anger? Rabbi Cooper is convinced that it is not. He continues ‘righteous anger can transform the world.’ When we protest against what we know to be wrong it can start change that benefits all. When we express that we are being hurt or that others are in danger this is good communication. When we tell someone that we need them not to behave in a harmful way we are using our breath well. But ‘rage rooted in personal grievances and disappointments can turn destructive of ourselves and – as we are seeing – destructive to the planet itself.’
When we do not communicate with each other we can undo the work of creation and unleash the powers of destruction.
We were born, we were created to communicate and to hear each other. The failure of dialogue is killing more and more in Israel, Gaza and Lebanon. Surely this year we must get to negotiation to stop this war?
On an individual lever Her previous inability to have a voice meant that Holly was unable to make choices about her life. Now she can. Communication is the key.
The breath of life means that each and every one of us, people we know, people we don’t, the privileged and the oppressed must be heard. And we must hear before, as we hear of God’s reaction to the murder of Abel – ‘the voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to me from the ground’. (Genesis 4:10)
