About Us
Words from the Head of School
Integrity and Awe
Dear Brandeis community,
You will be hearing from me in this weekly space on a variety of topics related to Brandeis, from questions in education to contemporary Jewish practice. You can find an archive of previous Words of the Week here and catch an audio version of the Word of the Week on the Yudcast podcast (now in its third season!), which always also features selections of poetry, and sometimes special guests. This week, I’m sharing the words I shared with students and parents on the first day of school.
Good morning and welcome to the first day of school! We are so happy to see you all here.
Last year, we started our first day talking about kindness: about how we can act with kindness each day, the kindness in greeting a new friend with a smile, how kindness can be an act of creation, and about how some rabbis have said that the world is built with chesed.
Today, I want to talk with you a little bit about another of our core values, integrity. In our lobby, you will see these words:
Integrity — אומץ לב Ometz Lev
We act honestly, responsibly, and courageously.
Integrity comes from the same root as integer in math—a whole number—or integrate, and it refers to being whole, or complete. To have integrity is to be at one with yourself and your community, to be whole in your values and your actions. Integrity is telling the truth, even when we are scared or nervous. Integrity is picking up after ourselves, regardless of whether anyone is watching. Integrity is being an ally for a friend or a stranger, standing up against unkindness or injustice.
One of the things I love about Brandeis is that we are a community of many different languages, just like we are a community of many different family structures and backgrounds, and many different ways of being Jewish. Walking the halls here you will hear Russian and Hebrew and Spanish and others alongside English. The fabric of our community is multilingual—it has many tongues, as it has many faces—and we find wholeness in celebrating our diversity.
The Hebrew side of integrity in our core values is ometz lev, which translates directly as courage of the heart. And it does take a courageous heart to be honest and responsible! It is also, as the poet Marge Piercy writes in a poem called “Maggid,” a kind of courage to “let go of the door, the handle,”—to set out on any new adventure. The root of ometz—aleph, mem, tzadi —forms the Hebrew words for support, strengthen, encourage, and endeavor. I hope that as we set out into this new school year you will remember that your courageous hearts can also support each other, strengthen a bond, encourage a friend, and imagine shared endeavors.
And I also want to imagine another kind of courage with you this morning. In some ways, it is a simple kind of courage, but like many simple things I think it is also quite profound. It is this: the courage to look up. To look up! Here, let’s all practice it right now, as a community: tilt your chin up, and look up at the sky.
It’s big, isn’t it?
We live in a moment in history where we are constantly invited to look down, and to look down in particular at screens. Every app I download on my phone asks whether it is allowed to send me push notifications, each of them wanting to whistle and buzz and ding at me to remind me to look down at my phone and find out what is happening somewhere else. And that connection can be powerful—it fills my heart when I get texts with pictures of my daughters, off doing something fun—and I celebrate that power. But it does, unceasingly, draw our eyes down.
In thinking about the courage to look up, what I am thinking about truly is the experience of awe. Awe is that feeling of radical amazement, of realizing how big the world is, of realizing the large horizons of our universe and experience. Recent studies have shown that just taking a moment to look up and feel that sense of wonder at the world boosts a person’s kindness and compassion, willingness to help others, and prioritization of ethical behavior. The "A" in the acronym of our CREATE Space stands for "Awe," and it comes from Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, who wrote that “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.” To feel small in the face of the vastness of the world, the universe, centers us—both spiritually and ethically. (And as we talk about sometimes in doing our mindful minutes to start the day, it can also center us in our bodies.)
So, my friends, here is my hope for all of you this year:
May you be at one with yourselves and your friends.
May you be whole as you grow, in your mind and your heart.
May you name the truth as you see it, and stand up for that truth.
And may you have the courage to look up, and be amazed by the world.
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Two years ago, we decided to rewrite our school’s core values, after hearing from our families and community that courage is a big part of who we are, but it wasn’t represented among the language of our values. In retrospect, we should have known that it wouldn’t be a quick process—Brandeis isn’t a community that is short on opinions!—but at the time I naively thought we could bang it out in a couple of months. A full year of wrestling with questions of translation later, we had affirmed our original three core values, but added some language to the descriptions to get to the bold and beautiful statements we now have.
One of the biggest questions we wrestled with that year was about “integrity” and “ometz lev,” and the way that the two are not really translations of each other, as the words I shared with our students just now perhaps illustrated. But ultimately, the group of parents and educators who worked on the core values agreed that we are a community of many tongues, and that the in-between-ness of those two words being in harmony or in tension speaks to our diversity.
I also think it speaks—both the process and the outcome—to the degree that we are continually in a state of becoming. Last year, at the Ethical Creativity Institute, Rabbi Carla Fenves led a group of twenty educators from across the country in an exploration of Donniel Hartmann’s work on the covenant of being and the covenant of becoming, looking at how Jewish life has both evolved and held fast over the years. I think we often look at our children and affirm the ways that they are becoming, as they sprout up inches, master new elements of literacy, or try on new hobbies and interests. But we also often lose sight of the ways that we as adults are growing and changing, just as our institutions, when they are living and learning with us, must as well. This year, I hope that you will give yourselves the gift of acknowledging your own becoming, affirming your own growth. In doing so, you will also find new ways to connect to and grow this school and community, adding your voice to our wholeness and your courage to ours, joining us in this process of becoming.
Wishing you all weekends full of big skies, wonder, and growth, my friends.
Warmly,
Dan
