Questioning as Ritual

Dear Brandeis community,

 

We have begun a practice this year at our leadership team meetings of “crossing the threshold,” reserving the first few moments of the meeting to share a reading or observation or activity to help each of us transition into the space of collaboration and shared thinking. It is not dissimilar from a d’var Torah (a word of Torah or reflection on the week’s parasha, something with which we typically begin many meetings) in its way: an opportunity to pause and learn before launching into the work ahead. As the responsibility for crossing the threshold rotates among each of the team members, it is also an opportunity for us to get to know one another and the questions and modes of being that shape each of our individual minds (it will surprise no one at this point, for example, that my offerings have all come from my poetry shelf).

 

Earlier this year, Debby Arzt-Mor shared a poem from a book that was new to me—a collection of Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s poetry, mostly written when he was still a young man. Heschel’s work is very important for me: his passion for caring for the soul of the world as an expression of his own spiritual identity, his wholehearted engagement with issues of equity and social justice, and his joyful appreciation of the beautiful and often magical world in which we live have always resonated with me deeply. But I had never read his poetry! So when Debby brought out The Ineffable Name of God: Man (what a title!), I made a note and quickly bought my own copy.

 

I tend to hunt and peck in poetry books—opening them when I have a spare few moments, reading a few pages here, another stretch there. It has always been that way in my life, and there is something of the I Ching to it for me: I often read poetry when I am searching for words for something, or when a certain slant of light descends on my mind, and I find answers, or hints at least, in the poems as they appear. Over the past weeks I have been wrestling with some of the big ethical questions of headship—how and in what ways to share news with our community, whether we as educators are innovating diligently enough to prepare our children and students for what rough beast this century sends slouching toward them. In that struggle, I turned to Heschel’s poems.

 

I was taken by one poem in particular, “A Prayer for All Rulers,” with its biting refrain: “Shame me, if my disgrace / would be a comfort to the weak.” As in his theological writings, Heschel the poet sets a high moral bar, and invites us to ask difficult questions of ourselves. Are our lives tuned toward the betterment of all people? Who benefits from the work we do in the world? It brought to mind for me a powerful moment in Rabbi Noa Kushner’s Rosh Hashanah drash, shared with me by several members of our community. In it, she writes:

 

Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook had something to say about the process of repentance, called t’shuvah. We cannot change, he said, there can be no t’shuvah unless we first admit what we have done wrong. Only once you have admitted what you are currently doing can you even decide to change. And then, once you have the admission and the decision, then you can begin to think about the actual change. The admission comes first. It is a necessary prerequisite.

 

Rabbi Kushner shared this in relation to The Kitchen’s work with Bend the Arc around race, economic disparity, and the criminal justice system. She was struggling with what 5775 had been in America: a year of young black men killed by police in what felt like astonishing numbers. Her argument was that we all need to recognize our place in that system, to admit what we are currently doing, per Rabbi Kook, so that we can begin to work toward a more just society.

 

In that sermon as in Heschel’s poem, we are challenged to ask difficult questions. Among the texts Rabbi Kushner engages with in the sermon was Ta-Nahesi Coates’s National Book Award-winning Between the World and Me (interestingly, Heschel wrote a poem called “Between Me and the World”). I no longer make the time to write year-end “best of” lists, but if I had, this is a book that absolutely would have made it on my list, and near the top. Written as a letter to his 15-year-old son, the book invites us to understand the horizons of violence (institutional and social) that set limits on the lives and opportunities of African-American men. Like Heschel, like Kushner, it is not easy, and like their work I loved it for that. But what really made this book sing for me was the prose: Coates is a beautiful writer. There are passages that speak to creative work in the world, or to parenting, that I have underlined and returned to many times in the months since reading the book in my book club. But there is one passage in particular that seems especially apropos for this week’s word:

 

My mother and father were always pushing me away from secondhand answers—even the answers they themselves believed. I don’t know that I have ever found any satisfactory answers of my own. But every time I ask it, the question is refined. That is the best of what the old heads meant when they spoke of being “politically conscious”—as much a series of actions as a state of being, a constant questioning, questioning as ritual, questioning as exploration rather than the search for certainty.

 

I would not claim to know the answers as to what lies ahead for our children, or for how best to fix the parts of our society and our world which seem at times unapproachably broken. But I do know this: that we can give our students and our children the gift of questioning as ritual—a very Jewish gift, a gift that reminds them of the power of their minds and the possibility and responsibility of their lives. Question authority. Question everything. And above all, question the ethical and the moral assumptions made by the people and the world around you.

 

On Monday we will celebrate one of our nation’s greatest questioners, Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., a man who helped us across an important threshold as a country, and whose example continues to exhort us all toward the greater good. So I will leave you this week with his thinking on questions, and teshuvah, and the work of our lives:

 

Cowardice asks the question, is it safe?

Expediency asks the question, is it politic?

Vanity asks the question, is it popular?

But, conscience asks the question, is it right?

And there comes a time when one must take a position

that is neither safe, nor politic, nor popular,

but one must take it because it is right.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of challenging questions, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan