Fanatic Hearts

 Dear Brandeis community,

 

 

Welcome, friends, to the first day of school, 2017! We are so glad to see all of you here today—every one of you, new friends and old. We are so excited for the year ahead—a year of learning and purpose, of working together to ensure that what we do each day in our classrooms has impact and meaning beyond the walls of our school. And we are grateful to every one of you—for being a Brandeis lion, for bringing your mind and spirit and heart to school each day, and for being a friend.

 

When you walked into the lobby this morning, I hope you saw our community values in big bright letters, front and center. Last year we had a big group of us—parents, teachers, and school leaders—gather many times to discuss the specific words and phrases that we use to anchor our work together as a community of learners. And I was reminded throughout that process what a gift it is to be part of an engaged, intellectual community, to be among people who care deeply about the languages and words that we use.

 

This morning I want to talk about chesed, now the first of our community values. Chesed means kindness, or loving kindness. For us at Brandeis it means that “We treat one another and ourselves with empathy and compassion.” One of the big changes that we made was to add “ourselves” to the list of people in need of compassion—because, friends, let me tell you, we have to be kind to ourselves. That can mean making time for that special thing that fills you up—like curling up on the couch and reading a good book, or going for a long run, or building a Lego castle. It can mean picking yourself up when you fall, seeing the beauty in an "oops," and celebrating failure as a new opportunity to learn. It can also mean looking for your own strengths, rather than your flaws—seeing your own beautiful smile when you look in the mirror, or being grateful for your quick mind, caring heart, or agile feet. When you treat yourself with care and compassion, it gives you the boost you need to come to school or go out in the world and be a good friend, or an ally, or a hero.

 

So, our community values begin with chesed, and chesed begins with ourselves, but it extends to the entire world. There is a book of Jewish wisdom, sometimes described as Jewish mysticism, called the Zohar. One of the concepts in the Zohar is the notion that there are ten sefirot, or ways that the unknowable or God becomes visible in the world. Those sefirot are divided into domains of the intellect and domains of the emotions. Chesed is the first of the emotions among the sefirot, because all other emotions are contained within it, or created by it. In the Psalms, it is written that “The world is built with chesed." (Psalms 89:3). And so, the rabbis have suggested that every act of kindness—to ourselves, and to each other—is an act of creation.

 

There is an old poem I want to read to you this morning, one whose title I have long loved, from a little-known poet named Ray Smith. It is called “Listen, for I Have Kept a Fanatic Heart.” It goes like this:

 

Listen, for I have kept

A fanatic heart

Age cannot recover

From a young man’s hurt.

Though I get old

Eden’s sun’s not set

My fanatic heart

Still walks mad in it.

 

When we came to the mountain,

The desert huge beneath,

The slow dragging wind

Was god’s labored breath;

Creating, not creation—

All is in the starts

And the goal nothing

To fanatic hearts.

 

Creating, not creation. What this poem knows, what we all need to be reminded sometimes, is that our days, our lives, our world are verbs, not nouns. We are all of us in a process of becoming, and every act of kindness creates new possibilities for us, and even new worlds. And what a gift that is, in moments such as these ones we are living, when we have seen hate bloom across our country and our friends and loved ones in Houston find themselves under water—what a gift to know that each of us, every day, has the capacity to be a changemaker.

 

So, my friends, my wish for you this morning and this year is this: may you be kind and compassionate, on behalf of yourselves and your friends, strangers to you and your communities, and in so doing help re-create and repair our world. May you do much good, may you have many starts, share many joyful moments, and may you hold fast to your fanatic hearts.

Click here for this week's Yudcast.