The address of Dr. Jamal Karam Harfush at the celebration of the orphan
It is natural to you as a human being, and it sets you apart from what stands below you in the animal kingdom; for among the animals are those whose brooding tenderness lasted weeks, those who suckled their young for days, those who ate their young while small, and those who fought them and turned enemy when they were grown.
As for you, the span of your sheltering as an unborn child is long; science counts you a child until the end of your second year, and the law considers you a minor until the twenty-first year of your life. The reason for this elastic dependency in you is the slowness of your mental and bodily growth, whose completion demands a quarter century of time, during which you need tenderness and affection, encouragement and reproach — all of which refine the animal in you, all of which shape the human possibilities within you, all of which are necessary sustenance nourishing your living being, making of you a thinking human creature, a refined and elevated person who lives to give and to produce. It is for your desperate need of these things, and for the deprivation of their taste in the stripping from you of what is necessary, that you weep, O orphan; and you are wept for by everyone who has known his world as a virtuous mother, and his highest example as a father overflowing with noble character, pouring forth production and strength.
You have against your world, as you have against your society, the right of complaint — this society that wrongs you with every whisper of orphanhood it casts toward your hearing, as it wrongs the one deprived of seeing the light by telling him "you are blind," and the one afflicted by telling him "you are lame" or "mute"!
Society has made of your orphanhood an infirmity: it has shut you away in an institution set apart for you, considered you a helpless member, prepared a special course for your upbringing and formation, and bound you to weakness and incapacity. Had it been just! it would have seen in you the possibilities it sees in the
child torn from its own heart, and it would have prepared for you the best and finest of opportunities.
Your small self rebels before the decree of fate, and I stand alone with you before the cruelty of society; and if there is any charity I might hope from it — risen as it is today, marching on its way toward building and reform — it is that it give back to you the right it robbed from you, and that it look upon you as one of its own, you owing it, and it owing you, the duty of guidance and sound upbringing.
This society, in whose noble, overflowing humanity I believe, this society that dreams of great, rich souls who will look upon it in its tomorrow to supply it with life and strength — I want it to raise its hand with you today to wipe the word orphan from the world of existence and replace it with the word school, or house of education. I want it to adopt you and create for you in its corners a home that gives you from the wellspring of its substance until you lack nothing save the mercy of your Lord, and from its moral affection a stream that washes the isolation of orphanhood with the water of forgiveness and with what makes you forget the bitterness of loss.
O orphan, you are ours and of us — and yet your society still considers you a stranger in your homeland! Is the bitterness of emigration harder than the bitterness of the resident who is a stranger? Of the whole man counted deformed! Of the strong man counted weak?
Orphanages, in their name and their systems, are the work of the Middle Ages, and we are in the twentieth century, separated from them by generations of civilization and progress that cost man long stages of striving and moral struggle, and lifted from him a darkness whose shadow it does not wish to remain a symbol embodied in you.
I saw him a waif, the plaything of the whims of fate, which robbed him in his tender years of his
father's providing and his mother's tenderness. A little one running about laughing, looking on among the rows of mourners as if he had not been struck by deprivation, had not seen eyes fill with tears whenever they turned toward him to watch his every movement and stillness, had not heard the whisper of someone saying: "Poor child!"
I heard him as a dependent boy, complaining of the harshness of the verdict and denouncing the injustice of time; and I witnessed him grown, crouched in a corner of his chamber, drops of sorrow trickling in his depths for an eternal journey traveled by the most faithful friend and the best of companions.
May heaven guard you, O deprived child! O wretched boy! O chastened youth! For orphanhood is a natural stage that existence willed you to pass through, the day its will cast you forth, a living creature, upon its shore, and the day it chose you into the ranks of beings, that your lot might be theirs in life and death, in taking and giving, in permanence and passing away.
You are a departer like all others, insofar as life is reckoned the passageway of the departing; and you abide insofar as you count your self a breath of the spirit of permanence, and insofar as you give fruit that eternity welcomes, and production that lives on despite the terror of death and the unceasing threat of extinction!
Orphanhood — this cup is drunk every day by hundreds like you, and repetition upon repetition has not softened the sharpness of its weight upon any soul. Had the trains of poverty alone dragged over you, we would have said: these are the economic conditions, tossed about by efforts and circumstances — prosperity lifts, adversity lowers — and we would have counted it an ordinary matter and left you to yourself, without gathering today to recall it, and recall you with it, awakening memories in your soul and regrets in ours.