Jewish Disability Awareness, Acceptance
and Inclusion Month

These poems are offered free for your enjoyment. If you use them as part of an event, meeting, educational or liturgical setting, please consider tipping the author.

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Jewish

When God made people in God’s image
it was understood that that image had variations.
No matter the number of functional limbs
or whether one’s eyes saw things differently
than another’s, it still counted as that image.
Everyone entitled to make their own way, in their own way
into the house of prayer for all people.
That’s the kind of people we are.


Disability

God only wants the heart so, let’s say
you need a special chair, or you had to
learn a language with your hands, or
like a documentary I saw when I was a child
you write checks with your feet, as long as you
do these things heart forward, then your dis
will fade away and all the ability you can imagine
will reap the rewards.


Awareness

Not everyone thinks like this, there are
people who will insult the deaf or
place a stumbling block before the blind
even though it clearly states in the Text
not to do this. These are the actions of
the spiritually disable – The unaware.
We must teach them how good and pleasant it is
when all people live together as one.


Acceptance

When Larry David shimmied around the
slow walker to get into the elevator in
one of his episodes, he landed on the
wrong side of acceptance. The differently abled
are not our hinderance, but our reminder –
Everyone has their moment. Everyone
is diamonds and gold and everything precious.
Everyone deserves a champion


Inclusion

Even if it takes a contractor, build the ramp
make the text larger, turn up the volume.
Make the aisles as wide as they need to be.
Let all who are able in the regular way
Let all who are able in their own way
Let them all into our house.


Month

A month is good, but why not two?
Can we extend this half a year?
Can that turn into the length of a pandemic?
How about a lifetime? How about
a generation or two? How about this
becomes part of a future ancient text?
Pulled out of a mountain so our descendants,
the scholars, can dust it off and say
see, this is why we do this.
This is why we’ve always done this.

These poems are offered free for your enjoyment. If you use them as part of an event, meeting, educational or liturgical setting, please consider tipping the author.

Share this poem: