In Response: A Father's Letter to His Son

My Dearest Jacob,

As I write these words, you stand on the threshold of your eighteenth birthday. For almost your entire life, you have struggled to forge a life of dignity and connection, despite the burden and stigma of autism. And your struggle has become our struggle—to provide you with the support and love you need to formulate your dreams in life and to reach for them, to help you live in community and contribute to its vitality.

I begin with that challenge because my journey of faith is now inseparable from your life. In rabbinical school, any naive, superstitious faith I may have sheltered was already seared under the light of the critical study of Bible and rabbinics, the awareness that different clusters of ancient Israelite sages and prophets gave words to our Scripture and that those messages reflect the various perspectives of kings, priests, and prophets. Somehow we were supposed to absorb a natural history of the Bible's formulation and words, while still accepting God as the King whose will the Torah reflects. But I don't recall being told how to integrate those seeming disparities.

After ordination, as a congregational rabbi, I saw all kinds of life dramas—spousal and child abuse, drownings, illness and death, betrayal and distress. And I also saw remarkable heroism, of the quiet everyday variety—love and loyalty and persistence and refusing to surrender. When you and your sister were born, our blessing was so complete and, then, became so complex. Your diagnosis made it harder for me to clutch my liberal theology, with a Monarch on high who might not manage every detail but who was nonetheless in control of the guaranteed outcome. As a diligent Conservative rabbi, I tried to help our community take on the mitzvot as God's commands and to see the Torah as the verbalization of God's will. But I lost hold of the rudder with your diagnosis.

For some time, I found myself lost and drifting. I still loved God and Torah, but I felt like there was a rift, that I could not stand with you and still mouth those sentiments about King and commands and reward and paradise. For quite some time, I said nothing. I would not be disloyal to what I knew of whom I loved by failing to assert that you did nothing to deserve autism, that it was neither punishment nor judgment, that God is neither arbitrary nor cruel.

Your mother jokes that I started my doctorate to make sense of your autism, and I think there's a lot of truth there. I needed to think this reality through, to make sense of our life-journey together. After all, I spent my professional life serving God and Torah, devoting myself to good deeds and acts of kindness. It wasn't supposed to happen to us.

I knew that the God I loved did not do this to you. I knew that God loved you as persistently and relentlessly as do I and your mother. But I didn't know how to articulate what I intuited. I didn't know how to think about it clearly. For me, liberal Jewish theology fails because it treats God's nature and actions like a sealed, impenetrable box. We know the input—science, philosophy, humanities, scripture, tradition—and we know the output—justice, compassion, mitzvot, love. But concerning what exactly God is doing and how exactly God is doing it, liberal theology has nothing to say, no specifics to offer. The Power that makes for salvation, the ontological presupposition, the irreducible triad with man and world, the partner in dialogue—these are all lovely images, but what is God actually doing? Right now, what is God doing?

While reading books of science and theology—about quantum uncertainty and relativity, of evolution and neurobiology, brains and minds and consciousness, I came into contact with a remarkable group of people who threw me a lifeline. I was able to build on the thoughts of many wise people—Henri Bergson, Alfred North Whitehead, William James, the Pragmatists...