Dear Brandeis community,

 

We ended a day of strange heat yesterday with a beautiful celebration of story, as the eighth grade students and parents came together for the Kinship Project evening. We sat together and shared family histories, from days at the ballpark to swim team pranks. Many of our eighth graders shared "decade poems" that charted a chronology of family, and many of those poems ended with proud moments on the bimah (elevated synagogue platform) at bar and bat mitzvah services. I felt I knew many of the kids and parents in that room better by evening’s end—I imagine they felt the same. The stories performed a kind of knitting of community, and I was so grateful that we give ourselves and our children such an opportunity.

 

As I walked out to the car and drove home through a tropical night—home to an unnaturally hot house—I found myself thinking about the power of speech, and story, the little pieces of narratives that stick with us, that we share, that coalesce in the spaces between us by virtue of that sharing. This week's parashah (portion), Tazria, concerns itself largely with ritual purification for women around childbirth, and around a disease called tzaraat, which may have been leprosy. What caught my ear though was the fact that our sages attribute this disease to lashon harah, speaking ill of someone behind their back. Jewish ethics is quite clear: that kind of speech is forbidden (a useful tool for working with children!), and in this week's parashah, the sages offer one consequence of such damaging speech. The power of words here is conceived in the negative sense—how what we say might hurt us, as well as others.

 

So how then can the words we use and the stories we tell help us, empower us, lift us up? It is now Thursday morning and the house has cooled somewhat, with windows thrown open to the night and now morning, but I’m still sitting in shorts rather than my typical San Francisco–appropriate flannel pajama pants. I can’t help but feel the weight of this heat not just in terms of my personal discomfort but as well in terms of climate change, especially in light of the government report released last week, "The Impacts of Climate Change on Human Health in the United States." It paints a stark picture of rising sea levels and extreme weather events in the coming century, our children’s century. ("Daughters of your century / I will know only part," as I put it in the title poem of a collection addressed to our children and that future.) Sitting here this morning, I wonder what to do with the weight of that knowledge, of this heat.

 

I am taken back, in this moment, to another recent moment reflecting in heat, standing at the lip of Makhtesh Ramon (the Ramon Crater) in Israel, being guided through a meditation of wilderness and Judaism by Zelig Golden of Wildnerness Torah. We spoke of beginning a journey, of wandering. Zelig shared with us the connection between desert or wilderness (midbar) and speech (dabar), which share a root in Hebrew. We were newly gathered in Israel on the Rabin Mission, and we were not yet grounded in ourselves as a community or in the land. It was a story not yet told. Our walk through the desert along the edge of that crater was an act of speech, a community beginning to write itself.

 

Tablet Magazine, which I've known as an online journal, has recently started publishing a print journal, a large-format, bold glossy beast of a magazine. The second issue—the first that I've gotten—is well worth the price of admission. In it, there is a beautiful review of Avrom Sutzkever’s poetry, written by Dara Horn. Sutzkever was a Yiddish poet, and his work is new to me. There's a stanza in the review that has been lingering with me since I read it, from a poem called "On My Thirtieth Birthday":

 

—That's how, my child,

Try out on your hands the weight of life,

So you get used to

Bearing it later.

 

And I think this speaks of the purpose of speech, of the stories our eighth graders shared, of the work of sharing stories at all: to try out the weight of the world, to imagine holding it. Speech, in Jewish tradition, is deeply powerful. G-d speaks the world into being with a series of "let there be" statements; Proverbs insists that "death and life are in the power of the tongue."

 

It is a weighty world we live in, a heavy century ahead for our children. And as it was last night, it is a beautiful and a joyful world too. As we allow our children to try out that weight, to share their stories, we must insist on joy in equal parts with responsibility. I believe it is in those moments, beautifully woven together in community, that we most honor our children, our traditions, and the possibility in each.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of stories made and shared, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan