Some Notes on Courage

Dear Brandeis community,

 

At our Town Hall meeting and State of the School presentation this past Tuesday, I went back to my remarks from the past two years to begin, opening with a quote I ended with in 2015, from Rabbi Joachim Prinz’s famous speech from the March on Washington:

 

In the realm of the spirit, our fathers taught us thousands of years ago that when God created man, he created him as everybody's neighbor. Neighbor is not a geographic term. It is a moral concept. It means our collective responsibility for the preservation of man's dignity and integrity.

 

I love the courage embedded in that idea—that we are everyone’s neighbor, and therefore bear responsibility for all of our fellows, and so must stand for their dignity as well as our own.

 

This is a time of year when we sit together and think of freedom, and the courage it takes to be free, and the responsibilities we bear in being free today. Pesach is, I think, the moral heart of American Jewish life—the most celebrated of our holidays, and the one that most firmly grounds us in our values.

 

At our family seder, we read from Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s speech that same day in Washington in 1963. And we tell the story of Nachshon, who walked into the Red Sea until the water reached not to his ankles or knees or belly button but to his nose, and in so doing showed his neighbors what it meant to be free. We think of all those who are not yet free—our neighbors in Syria or Sudan; the refugees caught in between; or the homeless encampments here in our city, our physical neighbors.

 

And today a group of us will be sitting together to consider similar themes—what is courage, what is integrity, what they might mean—as our core values task force reconvenes to consider how best to articulate the shared values we hope to impart to children in our work together here at Brandeis. We near the end of that work, but the work of being equal to the concept of being everyone’s neighbor—including our own neighbor, how we can lift ourselves up—that good work continues.

 

Wishing you all happy and thoughtful Passovers my friends, up to your noses in bright courage.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan