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Words from the Head of School

Awe

Dear Brandeis community,
 
I have previously mentioned in these words of the week the excellent and humbling (in its excellence) Brain Pickings, a website that I largely experience as a weekly curated newsletter of reasons to be fascinated by our world, and by the lives of the scientists, artists, and writers who reflect our world back to us, and in so doing expand it.
 
WoW

Last week Maria Popova, the author of the project, gave me the gift of a new glimpse into an old favorite, by sharing the illustrations from a rare 1913 edition of Walt Whitman’s Leaves of Grass, done by an English artist named Margaret Cook. The above illustrates the line, “We found our own, O my Soul, in the calm and cool of the daybreak,” from “Song of Myself.” It comes from a moment when Whitman is realizing the limits of his universalist project, recognizing that containing the sunrise would kill him, that its light must enter and leave him—an analog for how he understands the democratic speech of his poetry. The multitudes he contains in his long, looping lines are not only contained, they are thrown back out to the world, to change the world.
 
Before last week, I had never stopped to picture the joyful abandon of the moment in Whitman’s line—but seeing Cook’s illustration, I was reminded of the moments in my life when I have been present to the sunrise, and the sense of wonder it so often provokes. It brought me back to what I first loved about Whitman as a young man, which is his almost childlike sense of awe at the smallest parts of our world—grass, leaves, the molecules of our bodies. (What a gift, to meet an old friend anew, thanks to the magic of a painting!)
 
Awe, of course, is part of the acronym that makes up our CREATE space (Creativity, Reflection, Exploration, Awe, Tinkering, and Entrepreneurship), an idea we took from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel's book God in Search of Man:

The meaning of awe is to realize that life takes place under wide horizons, horizons that range beyond the span of an individual life or even the life of a nation, a generation, or an era. Awe enables us to perceive in the world intimations of the divine, to sense in small things the beginning of infinite significance, to sense the ultimate in the common and the simple; to feel in the rush of the passing the stillness of the eternal.

As we said at the launch of the spaces, “at Brandeis this work of creativity and entrepreneurship, of building and discovering, is necessarily linked to the wider horizons of history, nation, and person- and people-hood. There is a responsibility to the world in Jewish ethics (present in our core values, tikkun olam especially) that these spaces will embrace, empower, and celebrate—joyfully.” Nearing three years later, I find myself still in awe of the world around us, and equally in awe of what those ideas have become—the notions of ethical creativity, and the Ethical Creativity Institute, which for the second summer will welcome dozens of teachers from Jewish organizations from all over the country and world, to join members of our faculty in learning about design thinking, Jewish ethics, and maker education. Like Whitman, we are not only containing these ideas, but sending them back out into the world, to change the world.

Wishing you all weekends full of the calm and cool of daybreak, my friends.
 
Warmly,                                                                                                                                
 
Dan
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