Encased

 

Dear Brandeis community,

 

In July, we took a family road trip up to Oregon, to while away some sunny days along the Deschutes, the Rogue, and other tributaries and byways. One of our stops was at the Oregon Caves National Monument, a fascinating set of marble passages and caverns just over the Oregon border (this was part of my insistence this summer that our girls learn to share my fascination with caves, which I’m happy to report was a complete success). In one room the tour guide shined his flashlight on the wall, and hundreds of signatures and notes suddenly bloomed from the darkness—not modern graffiti but rather the memory book of the early spelunkers who explored the caverns. They would pencil in their names and dates in this room, which in the late nineteenth century was the farthest one could navigate, using the bare rock as a guest book. At some point in the twentieth century naturalists and rangers thought the room should be returned to its pristine state, and so came in with erasers (not the big pink ones, I imagine, but who knows)—but by then calcium deposits had dripped down the walls, perfectly preserving each one of those scribbles and loops.

 

While on that trip, I brought some of my stack of summer books, including Lewis Glinert’s fascinating history The Story of Hebrew. Glinert, a professor of Hebrew studies at Dartmouth College, traces the origins of the language and tells the tales of how it moved from a spoken language to a written one and back to a spoken language. He uses metaphors for this process that sound like they come from Jurassic Park—a language encased in amber, the Torah, and rabbinic interpretive traditions as a kind of time capsule.

 

These two stories left me thinking about different kinds of time—geologic, the times of a people, and the times of individual persons—and about what gets preserved, held, passed on. I found myself listening to podcasts as we drove and wondering if anything of these scintillating narratives that sparked our hours in the car would remain, 50 or 100 years from now. And of course, because I am a parent, because I am an educator, I wondered about what all of this might mean for our students. In our tradition, we share stories that go back millennia, and at Brandeis we get to know deeply timeless characters as well, from Charlotte and Wilbur to Atticus Finch and Scout. But for our young people, growing up in this saturated age, how do we help them learn to separate the wheat from the chaff, the purposeful from the meaningless, or worse, harmful? What of all the writing on our walls is worth reading? What will remain?

 

These feel like timely questions, for a few reasons. The first is that we are in a year of articulating the strategic plan for the next chapter of our beloved school, which includes a great deal of thinking about the future and our students—you will hear much more about that process over the course of this year. The second—perhaps more urgent, certainly more visceral—is the rapid-fire nature of crises these past weeks. The moment we speak of white supremacist violence in Charlottesville, Houston is already flooding. And our students are still writing notes to the Houston community while our conversations turn to worries for loved ones in St. Thomas and in Miami, with Irma barreling and battering away at homes and lives. We have not had time to send prayers to one place before another needs our support. We worry for the individuals affected, and we worry about the larger scales of time and our world, in the wake of a weekend’s heat unlike any I’ve seen in close to four decades living in the Bay Area.

 

In moments of feeling overwhelmed by the scale of the challenges we face, I often like to remember the title of a great book of dialogues between Paolo Freire and Myles Horton, We Make the Road by Walking. This seems to me a strong echo of Rabbi Tarfon’s famous dictum about tikkun olam from Pirkei Avot: “You are not obligated to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.” And so, we teach our children well that ours is a collective responsibility to repair the world, and we are mindful of our good fortune, and we do what we can to help—a donation, a hug to a community member worried for loved ones, a note, a thought. One foot in front of the other, and suddenly new paths, new stories, new possibilities bloom from the darkness.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of safety and stories, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan