Mark Oppenheimer, a Westville writer and a member of Beth-El Keser Israel (Bekki) Synagogue, wrote a moving tribute to Richard Kramer, a beloved community member at Chapel Haven Schleifer Center, who passed away Dec. 6, 2024.

Mark, like many from Bekki, attended a memorial service organized by Rich’s family and CHSC on Jan. 5, 2025, at Chapel Haven Schleifer Center. He published an opinion piece in today’s March 7 edition of the Wall Street Journal. You can read his column below:

The Disabled Are a Gift to Judaism

Mark Oppenheimer

Wall Street Journal

3/7/2025

I attended a memorial service this year for my friend Rich, who died of cancer at 72. I didn’t know him well. I had never been to his apartment, and he had never been to my house. I often saw him around the neighborhood. He liked hanging out near the public tennis courts, where he would sometimes see me as I walked to or from a match. “How’d you play today?” he would ask. He broached the same topic at synagogue, where he was a regular. “It’s nice out this week. Think you’ll play some tennis?”

I don’t know what Rich’s disability was. He could read, although with some difficulty. When called for an aliyah, the honor of saying the blessing before the Torah reading, he would chant the transliterated Hebrew, garbling some words, but no more than so many of us do. He had held jobs, including at his late father’s business and, for a time, at the Pez candy factory in nearby Orange, Conn. He had a sense of humor, too. He got jokes, and he made them. He had a driver’s license.

But there was clearly a disability. I doubt he could balance a checkbook. In conversation, he didn’t keep up the easy give-and-take that most adults do. He had to think harder. Mostly, he seemed to move at a slower pace. If you asked me if I would have left my children in his care, I would have said no. Not because he would harm them or because he didn’t have good judgment. One simply got the sense that in an emergency, he wouldn’t have moved quickly enough. He would have been overwhelmed. Too much, too fast.

At Rich’s memorial service—which was held at Chapel Haven, the community for adults with special needs where he lived—the presiding rabbi asked the 100 or so mourners: “Would you please stand up if you knew Rich from synagogue?” At least half did.

Why were we there? He was a fellow congregant, one of four or five Jewish adults from Chapel Haven who regularly worship with us. Our tradition teaches that, like the rest of us, Rich was made b’tselem Elohim, in the image of God. His passage leaves a Rich-size hole in the world, and we can only hope that someday we’ll see him in the world to come.

But I know that we were also paying our respects to Rich because he was, quite simply, a good Jew. He showed up. How many times was Rich the 10th adult, who helped us reach the quorum required for a full prayer service? More than I can count. How often did he stand at the front of the social hall holding his plastic cup of Manischewitz, as somebody chanted the kiddush, the prayer over the wine that begins our Sabbath luncheon as a community? Always.

The Jewish tradition is conflicted about the place of adults with special needs. A shoteh, or one who is mentally ill, isn’t obligated to fulfill commandments. Nor is he counted in a prayer quorum. But some rabbinic authorities, including the great Rabbi Moshe Feinstein (1895-1986), distinguished between a shoteh and a peti, an intellectually disabled person. The latter, he said, should be counted. The idea was that the deranged aren’t capable of communicating with the Divine, while people with limited intellect are.

I’d go further and question the importance of intellect altogether. Judaism runs the risk of employing a form of intellectual snobbery. “Mental incompetence seems to be antithetical to the ideals of halakhic culture,” wrote Tzvi Marx in his book “Disability in Jewish Law” (2002). Jewish legal culture sees as its paragons “the scholar,” “the righteous one” and “the pious one.” For each, “the role of judgment is critical.” Those who lack the capacity for sharp judgment are to be pitied.

But what Rich and some of his fellow adults with special needs proved to me, time and again, is that they are sometimes more capable of understanding religious obligation than fellow congregants with supercharged IQs. Book learning is one part of the world of Jewish obligation and not necessarily the most important. It may be overvalued.

I once tried to persuade a tenured philosophy professor who was returning to Jewish observance that, however nice it was that he had found a study partner and was brushing up on his Hebrew, he might also volunteer to help cook the kiddush meal or open the doors and greet people on Sabbath morning. He chuckled and said, “I don’t think that’s where my gifts are.”

Maybe not. Maybe he and Rich had different gifts. One man was a scholar, the other a mensch. I’ll take Rich’s any day, and not simply because he always inquired about my tennis game.

Mr. Oppenheimer is editor of the online magazine Arc: Religion, Politics, Et Cetera.