Yesterday marked the last of our staccato beginnings, the start of our last short week of the opening holidays, the end of our chagim or festivals. At Brandeis, we observed the occasion in the only way that seemed appropriate: with a dance party. Technically, I think we referred to it as an assembly—and we did unroll one of our Torah scrolls, and get a tour of the Torah from Rabbi Camille, and read its end and its beginning—but the spirit of the morning was a dancing one. Out on the bluetop, with an unexpected sun joining them, the kids whirled in circles, snaked grapevines together, and stood laughing at themselves and each other (and, let’s be fair, at some of my dance moves too). We had a live band with our own Jonathan Ferris, Ardath Kirchner, Kim Lostetter, our new band teacher Ari Micich on trumpet, and featuring Brandeis alum Edan M. (class of 2014) on saxophone. The party closed with “Od Yavo Shalom,” a song for peace, and like the rest it rang with joy.

 

We ended our last Wednesday-that-feels-like-a-Monday in our weekly faculty meeting with another prayer for peace. This time the tone was quiet and reflective, as we stood together to recite Kaddish for those affected by gun violence in America, remembering our connection as a school community to the families and students in Roseburg, Oregon. Rabbi Camille and first grade associate teacher Benjy Wachter led us in the Kaddish, which interspersed the locations of mass gun violence with lines of the prayer. It was a long list. We spoke of the number of guns in the United States: 88 per 100 people, more than any other country in the world. These are hard facts, difficult truths. Our prayer for peace was a prayer for change.

 

After our meeting ended, I was thanking Rabbi Camille for leading us so gently through a difficult tefillah. Our conversation turned to these Words of the Week I have been writing, something there in our shared love of poetry and words. I told Camille that I was not yet sure what I would write this week, but that I knew it would have something to do with the resonance between these two prayers that bookended our day, from peace to peace, their different registers.

 

So last night, after dinner had been cleaned up, and the girls were clean and asleep, I sat down with Alan Morinis’s book Everyday Holiness, a primer on musar I am reading as part of a Torah/musar study that I am doing with Brandeis trustee (and former Brandeis parent and faculty member) Rabbi Batshir Torchio. I opened the book hoping to find a chapter on peace, something to help me give words to the resonance I still felt echoing around my soul. Of course there is no such chapter; c’est la vie, such is life, so goes the universe. My eyes were drawn instead to a chapter on responsibility, hearing in it the timeless reminder left to us by Frederick Douglass: “If there is no struggle, there is no progress.”

 

What I learned there, in studying about responsibility, is that the Hebrew word for this trait is achrayut, and there is a disagreement in the literature about its origins. Some say its root is achar, meaning “after.” Others argue that its root is acher, meaning “other.” (I am not ashamed to tell you that when the book started going into arguments about etymologies, I was in my own personal word-geek paradise.) So: after, or other. How do we understand responsibility? We are taught that wisdom comes in knowing or anticipating outcomes, in thinking of what comes after us. Thus we plan for the future, we worry about climate change, we consider the lives ahead for our children. We are also taught that the foundation of a spiritual life lies between a person and their friend. As Eli Wiesel put it:

 

Consideration for the other must precede scholarship… Words are links not only between words, but also between human beings.

 

The poet in me is tempted to add to Wiesel’s sentence that words are also links to worlds: Our work in studying and writing words is also studying and writing the world, and studying and writing new worlds. This is why our prayers are prayers for change: we are trying to imagine new worlds, better worlds, for our communities and our children. And that creative work, that imaginative work, is I believe what links these two understandings of responsibility, and also how I would describe the resonance I still feel this morning in my chest. Peace is a gift: it is a sunny morning dancing with children, greeting a new morning. And peace is a responsibility: it is struggling through the painful lists that our country and our world write anew, seemingly each day. Our responsibility as Jews and as human beings is both to each other and to the future, acher and achar—and to the difficult, joyful work of praying, thinking, creating, and working for peace.

 

Wishing each of you peace in your homes and your hearts this weekend and beyond.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan