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Words from the Head of School
Being and Nothingness
Dear Brandeis community,
Rabbi Batshir Torchio recently described Yom Kippur to me as a time in which we are “stripped of everything in order to be with everything.” Rabbi Torchio explained that one way Jewish thinkers have conceived of this process is through Yesh (Being) and Ayin (Nothingness). On Yom Kippur, we leave the trappings of the mortal world—eating, even cleaning our bodies—in order to attempt to let go of our particular beings—our Yesh—to become part of or connected to the Nothingness, to spirit, or to God.
In a way that I’m sure would make my philosopher father proud, where my mind went in my conversation with Rabbi Torchio was to Jean-Paul Sartre’s existential treatise, Being and Nothingness. It worries over a world in which we are deeply alienated and disconnected from each other, and ourselves:
Let us consider this waiter in the café. His movement is quick and forward, a little too precise, a little too rapid. He bends forward a little too eagerly; his voice, his eyes express an interest a little too solicitous for the order of the customer...All his behavior seems to us a game...But what is he playing? We need not watch long before we can explain it: he is playing at being a waiter in a café. There is nothing there to surprise us.
So what, then, is the role of surprise? What would it mean to be surprised by this waiter, by ourselves? For this, my mind wandered to Victor Shklovsky, the Russian Formalist critic, and his essay “Art as Technique.” In it, he writes:
If we start to examine the general laws of perception, we see that as perception becomes habitual, it becomes automatic. Thus, for example, all of our habits retreat into the area of the unconscious automatic…[Art] exists that one may recover the sensation of life; it exists to make one feel things, to make the stone stony…The technique of art is to make an object "unfamiliar.”
This process—known as defamiliarization—is a way that we get reacquainted with the world, by becoming estranged from it. We strip the familiar and see the object anew.
Or, as Rabbi Alan Lew put it in This Is Real and You Are Completely Unprepared: The Days of Awe as a Journey of Transformation:
In the visible world, we live out our routine and sometimes messy lives. We have jobs, families, and houses. Our lives seem quite ordinary and undramatic. It is only beneath the surface of this world that the real and unseen drama of our lives is unfolding, only there that the walls of the house crumble and fall, that the horn sounds one hundred times, that the gate between heaven and earth opens and the great books of life and death open as well. It is there that the court is convened, that we rehearse our own death, that the gate closes again, and that we finally come home to the mere idea of the very house that crumbled and fell in the first place.
This is a time when our lives, our spirits, the year, the Torah is made new—when we strip ourselves and the world of everything in order to return ourselves to, and see ourselves as, our truest selves. This is a time when we are given the gift of defamiliarization—not just aesthetically, but spiritually. May this moment of turning inward in order to turn outward be full of surprise, full of wonder and mystery, and full of awe, for all of us.
Wishing you all weekends full of everything and nothing, my friends.
Warmly,
Dan
