Dear Brandeis community,

 

Yesterday a lovely blue book arrived on my desk, right as I was sitting down with the leadership team for a meeting. The arrival of books into my life is a blissfully frequent event—from friends and family, from community members, from my children—and I usually remember to stop and feel grateful for the magic of language, this spell we cast again and again. On this particular day the book was Samuel Menashe’s first U.S. collection of poetry, No Jerusalem But This. It sat on the table during our meeting like a quiet totem, and I grabbed it and tossed it into my bag before heading home. Sometime late into the night, after the dishes were done and the emails were sent and everyone else was sleeping, I opened the book and read a few pages of its spare and elegant poems, encountering a spiritual thinker whose new ideas (though fifty years old) I was and am excited to get to know.

 

As I went to sleep, I found myself wondering how it was that the book had arrived in my office. Not the mechanics of its production and distribution (thank you, Amazon), but rather, how I had come to order the book. Waking this morning, I searched a few of my usual suspects—The New York Times, Tablet, Haaretz (figuring it wouldn’t have come via FiveThirtyEight, my election-year obsession, or all the sports blogs I read during the NBA season)—and didn’t turn up an article that would’ve sparked the purchase. Perhaps it was something on Twitter, or some Amazon algorithm set in motion by the Googling I’ve been doing in preparation for a Limmud workshop I hope to offer this year on poetry as prayer.

 

The fact of my inability to track the provenance of the book speaks to a condition of the mind in our present digital age: the infinite branching of the network, the structure of multitasking and split attention that permeates the consumption of information online. I chuckled to myself over the weekend, reading a New York Times article from April on “monotasking” (which is just what it sounds like: doing one thing at a time) that featured a link in the top right corner to “Try the Crossword!” That article shares the fascinating tidbit that just having a phone on the table is distracting enough to reduce empathy between two people—which makes sense since collectively Americans check their phones 8 billion times a day, or about 46 times each. A quarter of people age 18–24 check their phones immediately upon waking—the network is as the dawn, the blue glow our new modeh ani, our gratitude for reaching the morning. Our minds flit like the small bird Twitter’s logo imagines, from branch to branch to branch.

 

Let me say, I don’t write this sitting here from the perspective of a Luddite—I’m grateful for and rather in awe of the new thinking that has been beamed into my living room, allowing me to research these questions of mine as I type. But what, I wonder, does it all mean for attention—and especially for the attention of our children? And too, what kavod should we hold, or intentions should we set, as we go about the daily joy and challenge of raising and educating our kids?

 

Turning to the I Ching of etymologies, as I often do, I was curious to find that the root of both attend and intend is the Latin tendere, to stretch (a meaning we still hear in distend). It takes me to the famous Oliver Wendell Holmes quote that I cited in these pages last year: “One’s mind, once stretched by a new idea, never regains its original dimensions.” I think of the fasts, the meditations, the stretches of contemplation, and intentions, of the Days of Awe we have just passed. And there it is, I think—somewhere in the movement between slowing down and speeding up—the work we do around mindfulness in kindergarten or sacred space in first grade, as much as the digital passports our students work towards in fifth grade. We stretch ourselves and our children to stop and focus, to narrow the lens, and we stretch to cast our minds across the majesty of the rhizomatic net. Our dimensions, inner and outer, grow from the encounters and the efforts—and are balanced in the dialogue between them.

 

Wishing you all stretchy weekends, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan