Dear Brandeis community,

 

A few weeks back Abbe Wainwright asked me if I would come visit her reading elective some time, to talk about poetry with her middle school students. I leapt at the opportunity, of course—there was a time in my life when teaching poetry to middle schoolers was my primary work in the world, how I hoped to make a difference. So we checked my calendar and found Tuesday, December 1 as a date that would work, and I made a note to grab some of the weirder and more beautiful books of poetry from my office to share with Abbe’s students.

 

Here at the Glass household, our Tuesday, December 1 began by lighting a yahrzeit candle for my mother, now seven years passed. We lit it here in the kitchen where I sit now, watching the flame catch and grow, feeling a quiet settle over our girls. It was an auspicious beginning for a day of poetry: my mom was a woman who knew the power of words, a great writer and orator, and a lover of the minor textures of language as well, always prepared with a timely quote. I arrived at school knowing that Brandeis CONNECT, our parent minyan, was upstairs in the fiction room (how beautiful, sheltered by stories) praying together over loved ones gone from this earth and those in need of healing. There are days that swell with meaning—this was one of them.

 

I arrived to Abbe’s office, a scene about as cozy as you can imagine. Nine middle school kids sitting in a circle on the rug, sharing blissfully hot tea and homemade cookies. It smelled like cinnamon. Groups of girls were snuggled together under blankets. They’d saved me a special chair in the corner, but in the spirit of Rambam (“The teacher should not sit on a chair, while the students sit on the ground. Rather, either everyone should sit on the ground or everyone should sit on chairs.”), I grabbed an open spot on the floor. Abbe had asked the kids to bring a poem that was meaningful to them, if they were so inclined. One eighth grade girl, Kate, went first—she had brought in William Blake’s “Night,” a poem she loved because her mom often recited parts of it to her.

 

As it happened, Blake’s illustrated/illuminated Songs of Innocence and Experience was one of the books I’d brought in, and Blake was a poet my mom too would quote to us. (As I said: some days swell with meaning.) We passed the book around and I said that I’d always been curious that a poem called “Night” was so filled with light, both as it's written and illustrated. It begins:

 

The sun descending in the west,

The evening star does shine,

The birds are silent in their nest,

And I must seek for mine,

There moon like a flower,

In heaven’s high bower,

With silent delight,

Sits and smiles on the night.

 

It is a quiet lullaby of a poem, but one that shines bright gold. As I carried that duality of light and dark with me throughout my day, my mind lingered on that first line, the setting sun. We are in the season now of the early dark, and with that comes Hanukkah, our festival of lights. While the story of the oil lasting eight days and the hanukkiah may have been a later addition by the rabbis (since the original Hanukkah was a Sukkot celebration), you can see why a celebration of light would have made sense at this time of year. The sun descends quickly these days; it is no accident that many faith traditions have lights and candles at the center of their winter chagim (holidays).

 

But more than the light of candles, my mind went to The Light of Creation, a fascinating and challenging essay by Rabbi Lawrence Kushner. The essay travels from b'reisheet—the “in the beginning” that begins the Torah—to Edwin Hubble’s application of the redshift phenomenon and the theory of the ongoing expansion of the universe. In the beginning, according to the theory we call Big Bang, light and matter and energy were essentially undifferentiated. In the first .01 second,

 

...the universe was a hundred thousand million degrees centigrade with a density 4,000 million times that of water. A primeval fireball growing smaller and smaller. The immense gravity draws into itself all the matter and all the energy until… all being is drawn back into one dimensionless mathematical point of infinite density, which Einstein would call a singularity.

 

Kushner puts forth the argument that astrophysics and the Torah are in agreement: in the beginning, there was light—a light which held all of us, which we all still hold. The goal of mindful study and prayer is “to become aware of the work of creation,” to recognize the light of our connectedness.

 

This has long been the place of poetry in my life, a hopeful place, to insist upon the light that animates our spirits and our world. This feels especially important this morning, as we wake again today to a world besieged anew by senseless violence. But there are many ways that we beat back the night—with song, with food, by snuggling together under blankets, by gathering together around candles as their flames catch and grow. For me, in addition to poetry, it is often the sparks of children that light my world. The Sparks box outside my office—which you may remember from the first day of school, and the sparks we gather in our work of tikkun olam—has been filling and filling again with stories: “I enjoyed singing,” “My BFF is Eleanor,” “I learned long division really quickly,” “Sonia took me to Areal [sic] when I got hurt.” Of all of them though, I think it was kindergartener Aidan who put it best:

 

 

Sharing. Amen.

 

May you share your light and that of your loved ones, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan