On Time

Dear Brandeis community,

 

Today we mark one of our most significant ceremonies—our first grade tefillah. These are the words I shared with all of our students and the families of our first graders this morning:

 

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.

 

The word siddur, or prayerbook, comes from the same root as our Passover seder—it means order. The siddurim we offer our children today capture an order of daily prayer that for many generations of Jewish people would have been a given, a practice as immediate to them as our morning coffees or evening Netflix binges are to us. For most of our history as people these prayers were oral tradition, passed down in the immediate context of family practice. Writing them down was an act of preservation, an attempt to communicate across time and generations.

 

We live in an age now where writing moves through space much more so than it does through time. I text my wife from the grocery store to ask about milk; daily updates from the 8th grade Israel trip appear on the walls of our school within moments of being written; the songs the culture produces fade from our lips nearly before we’ve begun to sing them. So little of our written language insists upon or imagines the future or the past—it flickers into being and is gone, stacked in email inboxes thousands upon thousands of messages deep.

 

Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote that “Judaism is a religion of time aiming at the sanctification of time. Unlike the space-minded man to whom time is unvaried, iterative, homogeneous, to whom all hours are alike, quality-less, empty shells, the Bible senses the diversified character of time. There are no two hours alike. Every hour is unique and the only one given at the moment, exclusive and endlessly precious.”

 

Endlessly precious. I would posit to you that the act of parenting is the act of coming to an awareness of the dilation of time, as the sleep-deprived blear of infancy turns to toddling tantrums and school-aged discoveries proudly shared, and we turn to each other year after year wondering where the time has gone, how these small beings could have grown so big, become so fully themselves. There are no two hours alike among them, and yet it is so hard to hold onto any one.

 

And so, Jewish practice teaches us to set time apart. To pause from the week and rest. To be full of wonderment at the world around us, and to stop and share our gratitude and awe with our friends and loved ones. Ceremonies like the one we are sharing this morning are aimed at this work of sanctifying time—not making it sacred, but giving ourselves the inspiration, the breath, to recognize its sacredness. In doing so we remind ourselves and each other that there is an order to the world beyond its daily hurtling and headlong rush, and that we all belong as well to that longer narrative of human history, community, and tradition.

 

This week the poetry world celebrated the birthday of Robert Creeley, a poet whose voice shaped and shapes my map of what it means to be an American poet, and whose memory is surely a blessing. He lived for a long time not far from here, in Bolinas, and wrote poems in the early 1970s to share at the Bolinas School graduation ceremonies. This one (Graduation, Bolinas 1972) seemed just right to share with you this morning:

 

Round and round
again, and
up and down
again—always

these days do
go by, and
this one is yours
to go by.

This walking on
and on, this
going and coming—
this morning

shines such lovely
light on
all of us.
We're home. 

 

My wish for you first graders, and for all of us, is this: may you always find a home in words, in time, in prayer, in bright mornings, and here at Brandeis—and in doing so may you expand your connection to each other, and to the world. Mazel tov, and thank you.  

 

Wishing you all weekends full of such homes in each other and in the world, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan