The Many That We Are

Dear Brandeis community,

 

This morning the chair of our board of trustees, Russell Cohen, sent me an article by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, about “Judaism’s Three Voices.” In it, Rabbi Sacks describes the competing voices of our tradition: the king or judge, the prophet, and the priest. The first mode of thinking is practical and informed by experience; the second is creative and impassioned; the third is rule-driven and detailed. The three together speak to Judaism’s insistence on moral complexity, rather than simplicity—on numerous perspectives in place of a singular one. Think of the Talmud’s array of commentaries, or all the jokes about ten Jews, eleven opinions.

 

I started my day here at Brandeis in a second grade classroom, speaking with the students about their study of poetry. I told them about my discovery of Walt Whitman in high school, and how amazed I was by his capacity to tell his own story as the story of his country and his world. I didn’t use the phrase, but I was thinking of his line “I am large, I contain multitudes”—how he insisted it was not a contradiction to be all of the citizens of a country, to speak with all of their voices at once. A century later, George Oppen would say it again in his urban opus “Of Being Numerous”: “The shuffling of a crowd is nothing—well, nothing but the many that we are.”

 

The students wanted to know what poetry had meant in my life. This morning, this week, I would say it means much the same as what being Jewish means to me: that we are many, that we contain multitudes; that moral complexity is the norm and it is the power of our tradition; that we are at our best when we come together (even within ourselves) in critical dialogue. In doing so, we imagine new possibilities for ourselves, our children, and our world.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of being numerous, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan