This is a follow up to yesterday’s blog about Judy Heumann’s funeral, which I hope you read, and about Rabbi Gil Steinlauf’s column in the Times of Israel (blogs.timesofisrael.com) of March 9.

Last night, by remarkable coincidence, the Haberman Institute for Jewish Studies, sponsored an on-line talk by Rabbi Lauren Tuchman, titled “The Torah of Human Dignity: Exploring What it Means to be Created in the Image of God”. This illuminating presentation should be on our website (www.habermaninstitute.org) under Program Recordings by early next week, and I recommend you watch it, both for the text of Rabbi Tuchman’s presentation and her responses during the question and answer exchange.

Rabbi Tuchman, who is also a regular at Adas Israel, is to her and our knowledge, the first blind woman to have been ordained as a rabbi (she was ordained by the Jewish Theological Seminary). Like Judy Heumann, she devotes much of her time to dealing with the treatment of persons with disabilities both in Jewish texts and in the contemporary Jewish community.

Rabbi Tuchman says that the ancient texts can be very, very challenging, but that the proper course is not to ignore them, but to grapple with them, and grapple she does. When you consider this rabbinic approach along with the activist approach of Judy Heumann, you learn how much is being done and how much more can be done to ensure that Jews with disabilities are able to reach their potential as part of the Jewish world. And, of course, a similar path could be taken (and probably is being taken) by members of other religious and non-religious communities across the country and world.

Rabbi Steinlauf said Judy Heumann told him that his teaching of Jewish texts on disability was well meaning, but wrongheaded, and changed his entire way of thinking on the subject. Rabbi Tuchman, who was effusive in her speaking of Judy last evening, would agree with that. As would the three current rabbis at Adas Israel (Aaron Alexander, Lauren Holtzblatt, and Sarah Krinsky), who talked at the funeral Wednesday about how Judy constantly rebuked them when she felt they were not approaching the subject appropriately, and how those rebukes were not resented, but welcomed.

It’s a big topic. How to relate to persons with disabilities, how to treat them as equal human beings with talent and potential, what it means when we say someone is created in the image of God.

I recommend to you Judy’s book “Being Heumann” and Rabbi Tuchman’s presentation for the Haberman Institute and would love to know your reactions.