Word of the Week Archives

Being True to the Imagined Thing

Dear Brandeis community,
 
In this season of celebrations, the first grade tefillah is one of our biggest. These are the remarks I shared with our students and families for this morning’s ceremony.
 
Welcome, everyone to the first grade tefillah. My name is Dan Glass, and I am the head of school here at the Brandeis School of San Francisco. Two years ago, my older daughter went through this special ceremony, and next year my younger daughter will, so I say good morning to you today as a fellow parent and traveler on these roads. A good morning as well to our extended community of grandparents, cousins, aunts and uncles, and dear friends, and to all of our Brandeis students.
 
What a momentous occasion we’re sharing here today: a rite of passage, a moment when we pause and become aware of time’s passing, a page we turn in the book of our daughters’ and sons’ lives, in our lives as parents. This morning we step out of the routine of our days, to celebrate our first graders as they take a step into leadership, into tradition, into spiritual practice, into community.
 
First graders, these siddurim, or prayer books, that you have received today tell a story. They tell a story of many different people in many different places and times sharing similar moments. Often, I think of the moments in the story of this siddur in terms of gratitude: being grateful for the morning, for food, or for the gift of having arrived at just this experience, right now, together. It is not a stretch to call these prayers acts of mindfulness, practices that call our attention to the smallest and the grandest things: to breathe, to sit, to be alive.
 
But there is a different part of the story that I want to highlight for you this morning, and it is one we don’t always think of when we think of our siddurim. There is a story in here as well about imagination—about thinkers and songwriters and poets and artists seeing their worlds with new eyes and adding their visions and voices to the Jewish tradition, to the words of these books.
 
I have been thinking about imagination recently, thanks to an interview I heard with Philip Roth, a pioneer of Jewish-American literature, who passed away this week. In this interview, Philip Roth talked about becoming a writer, and described an ethical purity to his early work, which involved being true to the word as he heard it in his mind: “Being true,” as he said, “to the imagined thing.” Being true to the imagined thing. What a beautiful notion: that we can imagine something, and that act of imagination also implies an ethics, that we maintain a fidelity to that imagined something. Then the creative act is wrestling that imagined thing from our minds onto the page or the canvas, into three dimensions or code, wrestling with it until we know we have expressed its truth.
 
And the wonderful thing about imagination is that it transcends limits. Imagination goes outside of the lines, off the page, past the end of the sidewalk. The 18th century poet Phyllis Wheatley, another pioneer (of the African-American literary tradition), wrote to imagination when she said:
 
We on your pinions can surpass the wind,
And leave the rolling universe behind:
From star to star the mental optics rove,
Measure the skies, and range the realms above.
There in one view we grasp the mighty whole,
Or with new worlds amaze the unbounded soul.
 
Imagination takes us past the universe, beyond the heavens. Imagination allows us to grasp the mighty whole, the echad in the “Shema” prayer that says “Adonai, the universe, all people are one.” And, perhaps most importantly, imagination allows us to envision new worlds. Because Brandeis students, let me tell you: now and always we need new worlds.
 
First graders, you are part of a chain, from eighth grade to first grade, from yourselves to your parents, from your family to your ancestors, but it is a chain of imagination, of imagining and reimagining what these words might mean, what the words are that we should share, imagining and reimagining this world and new worlds, and the mighty whole of all of us. First graders, Brandeis students, what I want you to remember from this morning is that there is an ethical imperative in that act of imagining, one that reminds you to be true to what you have imagined. So, my wish for you is this: may you always be true to the imagined thing, to the words and the worlds in your minds and hearts—and in so doing, may you write new stories for yourselves and for our books, and may your souls be forever unbounded. Mazel tov and thank you.
 
 
Wishing you all weekends full of truth and imagined things, my friends.
 
Warmly,
 
Dan
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