What Are They Here For?: The Chabad-Lubavitch Rebbe on Exceptional Children, Exceptional People, and the Lives Built Around Them

For the parent who heard "your child will never." For the sibling who carries thirty years of guilt. For the spouse, the adult child, the professional, the friend. For anyone whose life has been shaped by someone the world calls limited.In August of 1979, a social worker at a Brooklyn hospital wrote a letter to a Hasidic rabbi he had never met. He asked a simple question: how should we think about people the world calls retarded? The reply came back six days later. It was several pages long. It contained, among other things, the first published use of the word "special" in the sense we now use it for this population.The correspondence that followed lasted two and a half years. It is one of the most consequential exchanges any major religious figure produced on the subject of disability anywhere in the twentieth century. It is also almost unknown outside a small circle.This book brings that exchange out of the archive and into the kitchen table at three in the morning, where parents and siblings and spouses sit with the question the conference mother asked the rabbi at the end of 1980: what are they here for?The Rebbe's answer rested on three claims held in tension. The limitation is real but localized. The door to growth is never closed. The dignity of the disabled person is not contingent on either of the first two. Most cultures hold only one of these at a time. The book argues that holding all three is what made the rabbi useful.This is not a Jewish book in the sense of requiring a Jewish reader. The Rebbe wrote to non-observant parents, to non-Jewish professionals, to academics across denominations. The Israeli developmental psychologist Reuven Feuerstein, who won the Israel Prize in 1992 and whose theory of cognitive modifiability is now taught in universities around the world, attributed his clinical courage to this man.The book walks readers through the six guidelines the Rebbe articulated in 1979, the three case studies that show the framework applied to real families, and the closing letter from January of 1981 that contains his deepest single answer to the deepest question a parent of a disabled child can ask.It is going to ask you to consider some things that may not be what you have been told. It is going to do this gently, and from sources whose authority it will defend. But it is going to sit honestly with the difficulty before offering the reframe. The Rebbe never sentimentalized this subject. This book does not either.What's insideThe full story of the Wilkes-Rebbe correspondence, the most extensive sustained exchange on disability in the Rebbe's archiveThe encounter with Cantor Joseph Malovany and his autistic son, including the Rebbe's now-famous "they're busy with God" framingThe Feuerstein relationship, in which a mainstream Israeli academic credited his career to a Hasidic rabbi he had never lived nearThe 1964 Sharfstein audience, in which a mother who had been told to forget her daughter was given permission to remain her motherThe January 1981 letter "No One Cannot Achieve," with its three-movement answer to the purpose question that still hangs over every family with a profoundly disabled memberFor the family member or professional whose life is shaped by someone exceptional. No prior knowledge of Judaism or Chabad is assumed. Read more