[MUSIC PLAYING]

[DESCRIPTION] Touro Talks intro displaying photos of students and faculty across the university, fading into the Touro University logo.

[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, Autism and Religion: An International Conversation, December 15, 2022. Touro Talks is sponsored by Robert and Arlene Rosenberg.

[DESCRIPTION] Nahum Twersky, Samuel Levine, Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer, John Elder Robison and Rafi Feuerstein appear in a grid Zoom-like format. The Touro University logo is at the bottom right.


[SAMUEL LEVINE] I'm Sam Levine. I'm a Professor of Law and Director of the Jewish Law Institute at Touro Law Center. It's such a pleasure and an honor for me to open tonight's program, to moderate tonight's program, and to introduce our very distinguished speakers for tonight's event. Touro University has established a number of initiatives dedicated to promoting autism awareness, acceptance, and inclusion.

Likewise, Touro Law School, Touro Law Center has initiated the disability rights and inclusion program as well as the Special Education Law Clinic, all of which are similarly dedicated to promoting broad disability rights and inclusion, as well as specifically focusing on areas of autism. And I'd like to publicly thank both Dr. Alan Kadish, President of Touro University, and Dean Elena Langan at Touro Law Center, for their ongoing support and leadership in these areas, specifically in the area of autism.

Alongside these efforts, as Nahum mentioned a moment ago, and I'd like to publicly thank Nahum as well for directing Touro Talks. The Touro Talks webinars have focused on a variety of themes over the years. Some of the themes that have emerged throughout these years of producing these webinars include autism. Some of the webinars have focused on areas related to Jewish law, Jewish thought, Jewish history. And a number of webinars have looked at the modern state of Israel.

Tonight's program, Autism and Religion: An International Conversation, in many ways, brings further and builds on the success of these different programs, both through throughout Touro University, at Touro Law Center, and through the Touro Talks. Tonight, we have the opportunity to hear from distinguished, internationally acclaimed speakers who have an expertise in broad areas including autism, religion, as well as the modern state of Israel.

So I'd like to very briefly introduce each of our speakers. And I say briefly, because each of our speakers deserves quite an extensive introduction, each in their own right. But in the interest of time, so that we can move right into the program, I'll just say a few words about each speaker. And as we turn to the initial presentations, I'll ask the speakers to tell us a bit more about themselves.

So the speakers will be in the following order-- Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer, who is the Chief Program Officer at Jewish Learning Venture, where she directs the Whole Community Inclusion Initiative. Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer is well known for her years of leadership in areas of disability rights and inclusion, not limited to autism, but certainly incorporating autism as a major area of her focus. And in recognition of this dedication and leadership, she was awarded just recently the 2022 Covenant Award, a very prestigious award recognizing the leadership that she has provided over the years.

Our second speaker will be John Elder Robison. We've had the pleasure and honor of having Mr. Robison join us before on some of our previous webinars talking about issues related to autism. Mr. Robison is a neurodiversity scholar at the College of William and Mary. And he is the author of several books on autism, including the New York Times best-selling Look Me in the Eye, a groundbreaking book that really brought to many in a very wide audience a better understanding and appreciation of autism, of the autism lived experience. And Mr. Robison has continued in a variety of positions, both governmental and non-governmental, as a leading worldwide speaker and expert on autism.

And finally, last but certainly not least, we have all the way from Israel, adding the international component to our conversation, and I want to particularly thank Rabbi Dr. Rafi Feuerstein for joining us at this very late hour in Israel. Rabbi Feuerstein is the President of the Feuerstein Institute located in Jerusalem. The Feuerstein Institute was founded by Rabbi Feuerstein's father, Professor Reuven Feuerstein. And throughout the years, Rabbi Feuerstein has continued to lead the Institute. Likewise, recognized throughout the world for your and the Institute's broader leadership in a variety of areas, including spearheading new initiatives to improve the quality of education available to children, adolescents, teens, and young adults worldwide.

So, without any further ado, I'd like to turn to each of our panelists to provide a bit more of your own personal background in the areas of autism and religion. If you could tell us a bit more about some of the work you've done, and looking specifically at communal approaches and attitudes toward autism, how religious communities have in some ways embraced and included autistic individuals, but perhaps also to tell us about some of the challenges that you've seen through these efforts of inclusion and maybe some of the strategies of success that you've been able to implement or you've observed in your work over the years. So to begin with, Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer.

[GABRIELLE KAPLAN-MAYER] Okay, thank you so much. I really want to thank Touro College and all of you who have put this evening together and for this opportunity to get to share about my work. So I think before I do, I just want to share personally a bit about my journey into disability advocacy and inclusion work within the Jewish community. I'm a parent of two children. And my oldest, George, who will be turning 20 next month, is on the autism spectrum and has an intellectual disability. So he's someone with a high level of support needs.

And really, through my parenting journey, I became so much more aware of how much education was needed in Jewish spaces to understand autism and to provide accommodations and support. George is a non-speaking person. He uses a communication device to communicate. And really through his childhood, through his growing up, at every step of the way, I've been learning along with our community. And I wanted to make sure that in my work as a Jewish educator, that every child had the opportunity to access community.

So at Jewish Learning Venture, our mission is to make Jewish life meaningful and relevant to all families raising Jewish children. We're a pluralistic agency working across the Greater Philadelphia area. And I have directed our Whole Community Inclusion Initiative for about 10 years or so now, because we know that autism and other kinds of learning disabilities, cognitive disabilities, certainly physical disabilities can be barriers if accommodations are not there.

So our goal is really to raise awareness and to provide education and hands-on resources so that the people who are working in synagogue schools, who are working in Jewish camps, who are working in Jewish preschools and all Jewish spaces have the tools and resources to understand autism, to begin to put together accommodations that can support children and to support families. So we do a lot of awareness-raising work.

We also do direct support for parents. We do parent education. And we do a lot of family programs. We have recognized that a lot of our Jewish communal programs are not necessarily sensory friendly, and that for people with autism, that can be a huge barrier to participating, especially when you think of some of the holidays that tend to be very noisy, a Purim or Simchat Torah.

And that music and crowds and the festivities can be very joyous, but that there are also ways to be able to put in quiet, calming spaces where people who have sensory sensitivities can go to decompress, to take a break. Those are things that we provide tools to teach synagogue professionals and educators how to create and to just raise that awareness about neurodiversity and that the way that we do education, the way that we do communal programs, that we want to bring that sensitivity and awareness to how we're creating the space.

So I think that we've made a lot of progress. We do training around B'nai Mitzvah, sharing different kinds of modifications and accommodations that can be made for the B'nai Mitzvah service. We've certainly done a lot of outreach to clergy, recognizing that many clergy want to know how to work with families and provide pastoral support and walk along and companion families, but just simply may not have the education and background in autism and in other disabilities.

So that's a little bit of the work that we do. And the challenges are that, frankly, that we are based in a society in which there's still a huge amount of disability stigma. And so all the work that we're doing is in the context of working against that stigma or recognizing that that stigma exists. And as much as people understand autism and neurodiversity much more than they have in previous generations, there's still a lot of work to do. And we're here doing that work, so thank you.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you so much. That was a great way to open the program. And now we'll turn to John Elder Robison to share with us a bit more of your own background and some of your thoughts on connections between religion and religious communities and autism.

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Well, let's see. As you said in the introduction, I'm the neurodiversity scholar at William and Mary and at Landmark College. Landmark has the distinction of being the only neurodiversity college in America led by neurodivergent people for neurodivergent people. William and Mary is one of the oldest, it's the second oldest college in America. And there I'm both a neurodiversity scholar and an Anglican scholar.

The interest that I have in autism and religion stems from my being an autistic person. Autism is an inborn neurological difference. It is part of what we refer to as neurodiversity. Neurodiversity is the idea that there's a broad range of neurological functioning that occurs naturally in humans. And people whose neurological function is close to the mid-range might be described as neurotypical. People whose functioning is more at the edges, we are neurodivergent.

In Gabriel's introduction, she talked about autism and disability. But I'd like to point out that in the context of a webinar like this, you do not see me through this screen as a disabled person. My command of language, my ability to communicate with all of you through this medium is at least as good as anyone else on the call. I'm not disabled in the least. Now, having said that, there are ways in which I am disabled.

I also, as an autistic person, have medical complications which could shorten my lifespan, cause me suffering. But those are not things that have any bearing on my speaking to you tonight or at any other time. So I think that that's a reason that I would say that this is really more about neurodiversity, people who are neurologically diverse, and their issues fitting into society. It is not a matter of disability accommodation. It is a matter of people who are different.

With respect to my ideas about autism and religion, one of the things that I'm very interested in is the study of the role that neurodivergent people have played in the establishment and maintenance of theology and organized religions of all faiths as they exist today. It's my belief that we have evidence of the existence of neurodivergent people going back to the earliest foundational writings of any major religious faith.

And I think that it's important to recognize that autistic people were there at the beginning when faiths were established, just as we think it's important that Jewish people were there at the establishment of Judaism, that Catholic people were there for the establishment of Catholicism. We all want to feel that we have been part of a thing from the beginning. And I think that's a very, very important idea.

Another idea that I think is important as we speak about this at a Jewish University is the idea that modern Judaism rejects the idea of original sin, whereas Catholicism strongly embraces the idea of original sin. And if we go back 150 years, when the field of psychiatry as we know it was established, we had Catholic and Jewish thinkers leading those efforts. And there is a significant difference in how Jewish clinicians who believed that we were God's creatures and we were born free of sin.

We were born perfect in that sense, but we were imperfect humans who went out into the world and sinned. That was a very different perspective for a person who was born different than the Catholic idea that we were born as sinners. Because it implies that our different behavior is a result of sin, which we generally think of as a conscious act of misbehavior.

Therefore, I believe that Jewish clinicians approached understanding of people who were born different with a fundamentally different and healthier perspective. And I feel that that has had incredibly far reaching implications for humanity today. Jewish people are a small percentage of the population, but boy, that is a big, big deal for everyone who's grown up different. And that's a thing that we might talk about tonight.

Well, thank you so much. And what a terrific way to continue and to move the conversation forward, which brings us to Rabbi Dr. Rafi Feuerstein. And perhaps you can share with us a bit more about your own background as well, in these areas. And perhaps in the context of this international conversation, and I know that you have worked internationally, perhaps share with us a bit of your observations on what you've seen in Israel, and maybe some of the differences regarding both religion and autism inclusion in that context as well.

[RAFI FEUERSTEIN] Hello, everybody. And thank you, Professor Levine. And thank you, Nahum Twersky and the Touro College. A honor to be with you tonight. I'm coming from, I would say, two backgrounds which meet tonight, and that's nice. I'm an ordained rabbi for the last 30 years of community. I just retired from one of them now. And in the same time, I'm heading a rabbinical organization in Israel, a co-chairman of Tzohar Organization. And in the same time, I'm the President of the Feuerstein Institute International Center in Jerusalem.

Now, tonight, it doesn't happen every panel or every lecture, which I meet, but today it's, for me, very interesting that I meet the two, I would say, aspects of my career or my life. Let's begin with the Feuerstein Institute, which is sitting on a paradigm which was developed basically by my late father, Professor Reuven Feuerstein, which I would say is a very unique theory with a lot of applications, not just about the ASD as we call it today, or autism spectrum, but it has a lot of applications where the main idea is that the main feature of human beings is the fact that they have potential.

In this theory, we are a little bit suspicious about definitions. We think the definitions are there, and definitions help us to classify the world, to organize the world, to understand who should get which treatment. But we refer to them as states and not traits. When you talk about human potential, you describe everyone. Everyone is diverse, I would say, as John just said.

You have neurodiversity, but you have religion diversity, you have IQ diversity, you have behavioral diversity. It means we are very different from each other. And the fact that it's not just that we are very different in so many aspects, we are also modifiable. It means we are not the same from year to year. And many things which defined us yesterday don't necessarily define us tomorrow. We are open systems.

And when you come to the religious aspect of it, when I'm talking, I would say theologically, you can see that the description of humanity as based on the image of God brings the understanding of the humanity as something which is very hard to define. It's very hard to define God. It's very hard to define the image of God. And it links to another very important, I would say, principle in Judaism, which is that, as we say in Hebrew, teshuvah, the idea of repentance, which means that you can change yourself.

John was talking about the sin. Somebody who made something can change it. But it's not just in the moral aspect. You can change the world. And the human, the personality is open. Now, that's something which meets me as a rabbi in many questions, and not necessarily the aspects which Gabrielle mentioned, which are very important in my point of view.

But coming from not just the theology but from the Jewish law, the question is the ASD individual, ASD, now I'm a little bit opening the umbrella, the Down syndrome individual, are they halachically, legally human beings which can be part of the community? What we say in Hebrew, in Judaism, [SPEAKING HEBREW]. Are they individuals which are really part of the community? Do they have to observe? Do they have to accept the rules and the laws of Judaism?

And here I made a big challenge in Israel, in other places. And I think what John comment about, disabilities, when you say disability, you really look at the individual in a very holistic way. But it's very hard, according to the Jewish law, to say that somebody is disabled, let's say, cognitively, that his intelligence is disabled. Let me share with you and finish by a short situation which was in our clinic in Jerusalem in the Feuerstein Institute.

We have an autistic young woman. She's 21. She doesn't talk. But one of our social workers in the Institute found that whenever she is walking, and she is singing to herself, [HUMMING] very, very silently. And this social worker for one year checked, which songs does she sing in which situation? And she found the language. She found that this young woman who cannot talk tries to talk with us through her little songs.

It means we are much more than we see. And the Feuerstein method, and I think that Judaism tells us, don't just look on the cover. Also, when people are very low function, look for what we call the islands of normality. Look for the strengths. Look for the abilities also when they are covered by issues, which really brings you to think about a disability.

So human beings are more than the package, more than the cover. And yes, one thing is really to find them the silent place during the festival [INAUDIBLE] holiday. But part of it is also to understand that they're a real part of the community also religiously, not just as human beings who have their rights, but also legally and theologically. Thank you.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you so much for those insights. And as we turn and as the conversation develops from questions about the community and makes its way toward more direct theological types of questions, to bring it all together-- and maybe we'll go in the same order and begin with you, Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer.

It's fascinating that you mentioned the challenges that are still there, the challenges of stigma within society generally as well as within religious communities. And yet we have these basic notions and notions within Jewish belief, notions, as John Elder Robison alluded to, universally, I think it's fair to say among just about every religion, about human beings being created in the image of God, notions of everyone counting.

And in fact, there was a comment from the audience. And I'd like to remind our audience-- and thank you so much for joining us once again-- if you'd like to post questions in the chat, we will address them more directly toward the end of the program if there's time. But there was a comment about neurodiversity and giftedness. And doesn't it behoove us?

Isn't it something we would expect of Jewish communities and religious communities more broadly to look for, whether it's a gift or the inherent gift that each individual has as being created in the image of God, as being a human being who has their own worth? And how do we break through that disconnect between those basic theological and religious principles and ideals, and some of what we unfortunately continue to see communally? So it's a lot to ask, but I'm very interested and we're all interested in your thoughts on that.

[GABRIELLE KAPLAN-MAYER] I'm happy to step into this. And my co-panelists here, it's just so stimulating and fascinating to share our different perspectives and the perspectives of everyone who's here. So I think it goes back to what we mean by giftedness and this idea that, as John shared, this very Jewish idea that we come into the world with a pure soul. And I'm very moved by the idea of tikkun olam, which comes from a Kabbalistic idea that there are broken shards in the world, and that part of our meaning and purpose in being here is to do whatever type of repair we're able to do.

And so I think when I hear this idea of giftedness, I think it just applies much more deeply than maybe the notion we've been raised with in an education system, I can't speak to Israel, but in the United States, where you're tested for giftedness and perhaps put in a program for giftedness based solely on an IQ test. And we know now that through multiple intelligence theories, there are people who have all different kinds of intelligences. So I'm someone who's not an extremely academic person. I'm much more of a creative person and an intuitive person.

And that's where I found my strength to do my work. So when I think of people with autism, there's just a huge spectrum. We talk about the autism spectrum in terms of those gifts. And so, as I mentioned, the way my son tests, he has an intellectual disability. And in terms of the gifts he brings as a human being, they're too numerous for me to list here. There's just the gift of his soul, his spark that he shares with us in many ways.

And I think, again, that the more that we can just expand our understanding of, as we heard from Rabbi Feuerstein, the idea of potential. And so certainly there are neurodivergent people who have intellectual gifts and who have very high IQs, and there are people who have other kinds of gifts. So I would just say the more that we're able to expand our understanding of the worth of human beings beyond cognitive testing, we, I think, can understand what giftedness means.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] That's such a great perspective and a great way of bringing together these different themes. John Elder Robison, I want to first, thank you, as always, for bringing to the conversation both your knowledge, your scholarship on areas of autism, as well as your lived experience. We are strong proponents at Touro of the principle of "nothing about us without us." And we always include various perspectives, including the lived experiences of individuals like yourself.

And of course, as I mentioned previously, your book was so groundbreaking in bringing those experiences to a broad public. And your initial book, Look Me in the Eye, and the other books, certainly, as well, continuing your experiences. You mentioned the notion of neurodiversity and defined for us very helpfully the idea that people are different, that there are these diversities.

And I think that's really what gave rise to the comment from the audience that Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer built upon, the notion that everyone has gifts, everyone brings something to our human experience. I'm wondering if you'd like to add some more of your own thoughts of connecting all of that with your insights, with your study of areas of religion and theology and how those principles might come together?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Sure. As an autistic person, I imagine you'd find it's natural for me to wonder, how does another person that I'm dealing with or interacting with feel about autism? And more specifically, how do they feel about people like me with autism? That's the very same thing that a person of color talking to somebody might feel. They might ask themselves, how does this white person feel about people like me?

A Muslim person faced with many people in America might feel, how is this person here in America going to feel about me as a Muslim? Are they going to respect me as a person? Are they going to have these preconceived notions that will make it hard for me to interact with them or be treated fairly by them? I think that concept is the whole root of movements like Black Lives Matter. So it's a big, big deal to people.

In my service now, I've spent 15 years with our National Institutes of Health, our CDC, in helping formulate autism policy for research, for treatment and support of individuals with autism. And I've served a number of years on World Health Organization committees seeking to define how we understand autism for the world. And in doing that, I've interacted with many, many clinicians. And I've seen people who are very accepting and indeed welcoming of people who are different me, and people who have rather closed minds about how people with the autism diagnosis are.

So when I look back in history, I see some striking differences. I spoke earlier about how the difference in some foundational concepts of Judaism and Catholicism made a huge difference in how we autistic people are received in different corners of the world. I'd like to give you a more specific example, if we can move back to the dark days of 1942. So in 1942, in Austria, which was then Greater Germany, we had a doctor-- today we would call him a psychiatrist, although psychiatry was a very young profession then-- named Hans Asperger.

Dr. Asperger is the person for whom Asperger syndrome is named. He was widely regarded as a great champion of people with Asperger's, which was my original diagnosis. Then, in the United States, we had Leo Kanner. Leo Kanner in this country is widely seen as the father of the autism diagnosis. And when we say Dr. Kanner was the father of the autism diagnosis in this country, we tend to talk about the more obviously disabling manifestations of autism that come with intellectual disability and significant language disability.

Whereas people with Asperger's syndrome in recent times are commonly imagined as people without any language impairments and with good or above average IQ. Now, those aren't necessarily the definitions that the two men intended, but that's the popular perception. So when I look back in 1942, at how Dr. Asperger wrote about his patients in his clinic at the University of Vienna Medical Center, if we read those writings in the original German, as an autistic person, they are chilling.

Dr. Asperger, a devout Catholic, wrote that little so and so is profoundly disabled and has no conceivable chance for growth or worth. And she should be sent for prompt Akhilleus treatment. You may wonder, what is Akhilleus treatment? It's one of those Nazi-era euphemisms. Akhilleus was one of Asperger's colleagues who ran the Spiegelgrund child euthanasia center, a notorious establishment that any student of the Holocaust knows.

So Dr. Asperger wrote that this child with autism had no conceivable value and should be exterminated. When I read Dr. Kanner's writings from the same years about children with seemingly similar levels of disability, Dr. Kanner's writings are kind. Dr. Kanner writes about our hidden potential. And he writes specifically about our right to life and our belonging in a family situation.

Dr. Kanner is a person of Jewish faith who welcomed people like me into the world. Dr. Asperger sent people like me for extermination if we couldn't speak clearly and pass certain tests of his making. And I would suggest to you that you would have a very hard time finding a Jewish clinician who felt his faith or her faith strongly, who would ever advocate to euthanize people like me.

And I saw that in my work in public health. I saw Dr. Asperger's thinking, which was essentially that autism was a willful misbehavior. We wouldn't change. We couldn't change. Better just be done with us. I saw that reflected in the thinking of so many clinicians in Europe, which was, in recent years, largely free of Jewish influence.

When I look in America where there's very strong Jewish influence in the development of how we think of and understand autism and the conditions that we refer to as neurodivergent, I see the idea that we are-- and it's not expressed as God's creatures because these clinicians now write in a secular way-- but I see the idea of God's creatures deserving of life and respect come through very clearly in a way that did not happen until very recent times in Europe. So that, to me, is a very big deal that speaks to, in our secular world, the powerful, powerful role that religion has played in shaping how people like me are perceived.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you so much. And once again last, and once again, certainly not least, Rabbi Dr. Feuerstein. And Rabbi Feuerstein, you mentioned that the conversation has touched upon so many of your areas of interest and expertise. So I don't want to limit you in any way or prescribe to you. What are your thoughts on some of the different ideas that have been raised by your co-panelists?

[RAFI FEUERSTEIN] Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Levine. I agree very much on, I would say, the spirit of this discussion, which also shaped the DSM, when they changed the definition of autism to autistic spectrum. The fact that we talk about spectrum, it makes it, I would say, less rigid. It's less rigid definitions. We are afraid very much from definitions. We think that definitions, which are many times, a human being, it's a social entity, those definitions. We need to define.

But for example, when you talk about autism, there is not yet a gene which can be correlated directly to autism. It could be that there are hundreds of them. And it's a spectrum, as the DSM, the current, the last version of the DSM is telling us about. And here I would like to say that I'm not ignoring facts. I'm not ignoring facts, which happens, and which John or Gabrielle described.

And I can see in my day-to-day with my wonderful team in our clinic in Israel, in many clinics which are affiliated to us in 40 countries. Yes, there are sure issues, there are sure symptoms. The question is, what do you do with them? And here, let me share with you a short anecdote which helped me to understand my father's, Professor Feuerstein, ideas. Around 30 years ago, we were sitting in New York. It was an international conference.

And a group of around 20 or 30 parents for children, which were described as autistic children, came to meet him and to ask him questions. I won't forget a mother, which raised up and said, look, I have an autistic child. He is low functioning. I have a list of 45 or 50 things which the child can do. But whenever I'm going to the psychiatrist or to the neurologist of my child, they tell me, it's very nice that you have 50 behaviors that your child can do.

But we will give you a list of hundreds of functions, of behaviors which your child cannot do. It's nice that he has 50 things. But what can you do with just 50 things which your child can do? And first, Professor Feuerstein gave a very interesting and deep answer. He said, I disagree with those psychiatrists and neurologists. Because I think that those 50 or 45 things which are really, really very minor that your child can do, he learned how to do them.

John, you were talking about Judaism. And let me add another thing which I find in Judaism very important, and that's the belief in education, what we call talmud torah, the learning, the role of education. And the role of education, according to the Feuerstein understanding, and to the Vygotsky and some other scholars in the 20 or 21st century is that intelligence and skills and abilities are learned. And Professor Feuerstein said, if your child has 45 things he can do, I believe he said that he learned how to do them.

If you learn how to do 45 things, if he takes your hand to the fridge and says, [VOCALIZING] when he's 30, he cannot talk. He brings the mother to the fridge and he wants water. How does he know that when he is thirsty he has to drink water? How does he know that the water is in the fridge? How does he know that his mother will give him water? He learned it.

If he learned 45 things, he has a learning mechanism. If he has a learning mechanism, and if we find and discover the learning mechanism, why shouldn't he learn 2,000 things? So all the Feuerstein method is directed to understand the learning mechanism, chinukh, as we say in Hebrew, or education. Education is more than giving the individual knowledge. We call it mediated learning.

We can teach also individual on the autistic spectrum how to communicate. We are not an ABA type. And it was not raised here. But I'm very against the ABA way of educating individuals who are on the autistic spectrum. I think it is not humanistic, although it can show very immediate results. I believe in education, in thinking. And we can teach. And we can teach everybody. And we can teach also those individuals on the autistic spectrum.

Let me finish going back to the religion. Maimonides, the great philosopher, the great halakhic legal, I would say could be the top legalist in Jewish law in the Jewish history. He was also a doctor 800 years ago. And he said, and he was a philosopher, which we still continue to try to research to understand his thoughts.

And he said, in his legal book Mishneh Torah, when I have to define the disabled person, I cannot write it. Because intelligence is something which is immeasurable. I cannot identify it. I cannot give you very direct scale or IQ test-- it doesn't mention the IQ test-- to describe what does it mean, a normative intelligence or not normative intelligence? He says in Hebrew, [SPEAKING HEBREW].

You have to bring the child to the judge or to the rabbi, and he has to see if he understands. So all the idea of intelligence as measured, as predicted, as a closed system, I think, is against the Jewish understanding of the power of education and the ability of education to make changes in the functioning, in the level of understanding and communicating of the ASD individual or some other people with disabilities. Thank you.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you so much. Well, the hour has really flown by. And we all appreciate your thoughtful presentations and ideas. I wonder if we still have time. And here I will have to limit you, please, if you'd each like to provide maybe a minute at most, some closing thoughts based on our conversation, any further ideas you'd like to carry forward as we all continue to think about these important issues. So starting once again, Gabrielle Kaplan-Mayer.

[GABRIELLE KAPLAN-MAYER] Absolutely. Well, I think first off, we need to keep having these conversations. And it's an honor to be here with people who are experts in this field and doing this work and to know and to acknowledge that there are many people working in Jewish education and in different camps, youth groups, other settings who may not have read about, learned about autism. And so we've got to keep spreading the message and doing this kind of work.

I'm also involved in a lot of interfaith and interspiritual groups. I saw someone put in the chat something about really understanding different faith traditions, perspectives. And that work is very important to me. And I have really, really enjoyed learning from religious leaders of all faith traditions and some awesome, awesome, wonderful ways that they are really practicing inclusion and belonging in their faith houses of worship.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you. John Elder Robison, any final thoughts for us?

[JOHN ELDER ROBISON] Yes. Here in the United States, almost a half our population, according to a recent studies, say that they are neither spiritual nor religious. And less than 40% say they are religious, even though 60 some percent say they believe in God. When people grow up, even in a non-religious household, foundational religious ideas like the embrace or the rejection of an original sin doctrine will significantly shape how a person sees other folks in the world as they go through life.

And I am not suggesting here that there's a right and wrong. You can pick aspects of any religion's foundation of knowledge that could shape how we deal with other people in a way that could be advantageous or disadvantageous. But I'd just like to be clear that religion has a very, very large effect, and the effect is one of a hidden hand, as it were.

We don't really consciously attribute it to religion, but it's absolutely there. And to me, that is one reason why theological study in the context like this, why that's very, very important and has relevance to all of us, whether individuals among us believe in God, religion, or not, it's still important.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you so much. And maybe 30 seconds in the wee hours out there in Israel, Rabbi Dr. Feuerstein, if you'd like to share some final thoughts.

[RAFI FEUERSTEIN] Yeah, I will share just a final experience. Today is a very important day for me. Because my son with Down syndrome, Elhanan, has a birthday. He has Down syndrome. He is our second child. And, Nahum, you know him.

[NAHUM TWERSKY] Yes.

[RAFI FEUERSTEIN] And I have to tell you that we had a wonderful event yesterday night. Elhanan is dating with a young woman, Efrat, with Down syndrome. And yesterday night, both parents from both sides, the parents of the young woman with Down syndrome Efrat and my son, we met to discuss a little bit the future. And that's part of something which we do in the Feuerstein Institute when we created the Marital Center for People with Disabilities.

And if I summarize, I think, it is wonderful. For me, it was a nice experience. It's now 3 o'clock AM in Israel. But I would say I think it's very much connected to things which John and Gabrielle were saying. Don't predict. Parents, don't predict-- fight, change. Gabrielle mentioned the tikkun olam. I think if we think about Judaism and religion, we cannot predict the abilities of the future.

We have to behave as if there are not limitations. There are limitations, but don't let the limitations direct your activities to make your child better, to make the society better. And let's hope for really, together with Touro College, with the wonderful initiative of bringing those thoughts inside the Jewish world and the American world and the international world, I hope we can succeed together to make a change. Thank you.

[SAMUEL LEVINE] Thank you, Happy Birthday, Yom Huledet Sameach. And with that, I just want to thank, once again, all the speakers and to thank Nahum for your leadership in the Touro Talks.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

[TEXT] Touro Talks, Touro University, touro.edu/tourotalks

[MUSIC FADES]