Dear Brandeis community,

 

Last night, after I returned from a dinner out with some colleagues and friends, Kate and I finished watching the fourth season of Transparent. I’ll admit that I was skeptical of the show at first; we don’t make a great deal of time for watching TV together, and when we do I’m often looking for something light and effervescent. But Kate watched the first season a while back and insisted we watch it again together, and I was hooked. It’s been described to me as the most Jewish show on television, and for good reason—it dives deep into the tradition and culture, the rituals and the food, the bickering and ambivalence and the love and warmth. This fourth season travels to Israel and explores the deep connections and conflicted feelings many American Jews feel there, in profound ways—it’s beautifully done.

 

I was struck, though, not by the landscape or setting in particular last night, but rather by the big questions about gender and sexuality that the show continues to explore. Without spoiling anything, I’ll say that there was a scene where a gender non-conforming character hooked up with another gender non-conforming character. The conversation that they have—trying to locate their non-binary roles using the language of gender binaries (because what else is there?)—was a powerful reminder of how limited we are by our received modes of thinking and talking about identity (or so many other things, truly). Later several characters try out the pronoun “they,” rather than “he” or “she,” in a wonderfully open and playful moment. I am grateful for cultural objects such as Transparent, that invite me to consider and question my own biases and assumptions, even those baked into the language I love and use daily. As the credits rolled, Kate said it best, and simply: “So good.”

 

Turning out the lamp, I caught a last illuminated glimpse of a poster made by our friend Nate which hangs in our family room, a print that reads, “Resist Much, Obey Little.” It’s a quote from a short poem of Walt Whitman’s (who is my spirit animal, if poets can be spirit animals), which is usually titled “To the States,” and reads in its entirety:

 

To the States or any one of them, or any city of the States, Resist 
much, obey little,

Once unquestioning obedience, once fully enslaved,

Once fully enslaved, no nation, state, city of this earth, ever after-
ward resumes its liberty.

 

What I love about this poem is its reminder of our national origins: as a grand democratic experiment, one that is reliant on each of us to think for ourselves. Resistance, for Whitman, is about questioning, and questioning is the responsibility of a democratic citizen.

 

I’ve written previously in these pages about questioning as ritual in Jewish practice and here at Brandeis. I saw it in action again yesterday when I had the good fortune to pop into an 8th grade science class. Ms. Freilich was just back from a trip for a family wedding, and was having the class share their reflections about the substitute teacher they’d had, and the work she had left behind for them. They filled out a form on Whipple Hill to record their impressions, and then she led them in a discussion about the experience. There were positive statements (I liked being able to listen to music and work at my own pace) and negative ones (we didn’t learn as much without you here as we do when you’re here). At the end of the discussion, Ms. Freilich invited them to consider why she’d set things up the way she did, including questioning what was or was not in her control, or theirs. In ten short minutes, she reinforced a positive classroom culture, opened a space for thoughtful reflection on both individual and collective learning, and empowered students to ask critical questions about the class. It was, to borrow Kate’s phrase, so good.

 

That work, of asking critical questions, including asking those kinds of questions of authority figures, feels especially important right now, in an age of infinite media and false facts. I feel grateful that our dual traditions at Brandeis—the American and the Jewish—both insist on the centrality of questions. As Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel put it, “We are closer to God when we are asking questions than when we think we have the answers.” And while God has not often been how I have articulated my relationship to the sacred, I feel the truth of that statement to my bones. I hope that our students continue to question their teachers, their learning, and their world; and may our Brandeis graduates, now and for generations to come, help make ours an age of questions.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan