Dear Brandeis community,

 

 

I want to tell you a story. When I was a little boy, we had a TV that didn’t have a remote control. It’s true! It had a big knob you would turn to change the channels, almost like an oven, except it clicked when you turned it. It was in our living room in a little house I lived in with my dad and my sister in Berkeley, and each night I’d get up and walk a few steps across the living room to change from channel five, where we watched the CBS evening news, to channel nine, where we watched the PBS news hour. Six, seven, eight, nine. Four clicks.

 

As a little boy watching the news, I grew to love politics, which seemed to be a big part of what was on the news—stories about the president, or senators and congress people, or the Supreme Court, about new laws being written or debated or signed or struck down. Our representative democracy—this system of government we have where we elect people to represent our best interests—seemed a wonderful, messy, aspirational project. 

 

Today we are celebrating Justice Louis Brandeis, our school’s namesake, who was the first Jewish member of the Supreme Court, the court where they bring the most important and most complex questions in the country (and did you know, since Justice Brandeis came onto the Supreme Court, there has been always been a “Jewish seat on the court” that has almost always been occupied by a Jewish person—which is the seat that the "notorious" Ruth Bader Ginsburg now holds?). We have pictures here of Justice Brandeis, donated to us by an architect whose father had them up in his law office here in San Francisco for many years—and we’ll be installing them here in the school, along with the beautiful portrait made by the middle school art elective in the photo on this slide. Justice Brandeis once wrote something that captured my sense of what was so special about our representative democracy. He wrote:

 

What are the American ideals? They are the development of the individual for [their] own and the common good; the development of the individual through liberty; and the attainment of the common good through democracy and social justice.

 

What Justice Brandeis means here is that as American citizens, our responsibility is both to ourselves—to make every day matter by trying our best, as we pledge at the end of each year—and also to each other—to act for the common good and for social justice, or what we describe in our pledge as working toward a better world. In this way, Justice Brandeis is much like Rabbi Hillel, one of the school’s other historical namesakes, when he said:

 

Now I want to tell you another story. Last year, during the presidential election, I watched the news a lot—though I mostly watched it in small clips on my computer. Watching the news last year, I noticed that people, from the candidates to the news anchors, seemed dismissive of each other’s ideas if those ideas were not like their own. I noticed that instead of debating about ideas, people were calling each other names.

 

It made me wonder—how can we work toward the common good, if we do not see the good that we have in common? How can we make sure this wonderful, messy, aspirational work of creating a representative democracy persists, if we do not recognize b’tzelem elohim, that we each carry a spark of the divine in us, or as this nation’s founders put it, that we are all created equal? So I began talking with your teachers and parents, and to rabbis and artists and leaders in the community about radical empathy—a kind of empathy that would help look for the value in ideas that are different from our own, and see the human and the divine in everyone. And some of them, including Susan Karp and Paul Haahr, supported us generously in exploring this idea, and our approach to democracy and civic education, and in developing projects like Justice Louis Brandeis Day.

 

Today, in celebrating our first annual Justice Louis Brandeis Day, we are celebrating our school’s namesake, someone whose life and work was dedicated to the common good. Here’s just one cool fact: Did you know that Justice Brandeis was known as “the people’s lawyer,” because he was a pioneer of “pro bono” representation (which means he volunteered to help people with free legal services)—and did you know that pro bono means "for the public good"? Justice Brandeis was grounded in his sense of himself as an American and as a Jew, and he was a person who was willing to stand up for other people. Today we’ll be learning more about his life and his work, and about others who have stood up for what they believed in. You yourselves will each be exploring what grounds you, and what you are willing to stand up for.

 

As part of our festivities today we have the visiting artist Julia Goodman here with us, who in a video (link: https://folktales.thecjm.org/julia-goodman) for the Contemporary Jewish Museum described looking for “a model for leadership that is based on humility, empathy, and a long-term perspective.” I believe Justice Brandeis offers all of us an example of this kind of ethical leadership, a shared ancestor we will all benefit by getting to know better.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of such radical empathy, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan