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Words from the Head of School

Closer to the Falling Away

 
Yesterday, amid the swirl of digital information that coalesces around me daily, a poem arrived, sent by a dear friend, written by Farid Matuk. The poem, from a longer piece called “For a Daughter/No Address,” begins “like the shapes we made in the things we said were demanding of us / now you ask me why the sky is a tank full of lemonade,” and in just that opener I hear what I admire very much about Matuk’s work, which is his willingness and ability to blend the broadest questions of language and human experience with the most quotidian moments he has as a parent. He is a poet that Chris Martin has lauded for “reinventing the Dad poem,” in a group in which I was (too generously) included along with the great contemporary poet Dana Ward. This poem caught my attention and shifted it; as poems often do, it opened an aperture in my morning, left me gazing at different vistas.
 
Farid Matuk has another beautiful line, in his book My Daughter La Chola, in a piece called “My Daughter All Yourn.” That poem begins: “will she be closer to the falling away of the gaze of things than others?” It’s a line I’ve sat with, wrestled with, written with and about, for a stretch of years now. Seeing into my new morning, I reached for that book on my shelf, opened to that familiar page 22, and looked at the line again. What would it mean, to be closer to the falling away? The piece is a kind of prayer and worrying for his young daughter, in her strength and rage and engagement with the world. At one point in it he writes: “put names of your dear ones in it all.” Yes, I thought: put their names, our dear ones, in all of it.
 
Last week was my mother’s ninth yahrzeit. Every year the week after Thanksgiving is full, for me, of her presence, and her present absence. This was the first time I could remember the yahrzeit falling on a Friday, and I relished the opportunity to share stories about her with my daughters at our Shabbat table. We talked about her in the context of last week’s Justice Brandeis Day activity: that she was grounded in deep connection to other people, one of the best listeners I’ve ever known; that she was a brave woman, willing to stand up for peace, once giving a speech on nuclear disarmament to over half a million people in New York City. We lit a yahrzeit candle (thank you, Mollie Stone’s Markets) and placed it next to a photograph of her, her hand on my cheek when I was near Sonia’s age, a Jewish ofrenda on a street and in a state where we navigate by Spanish names.
 
And speaking of, over the weekend we saw Coco with the girls. What a beautiful movie that is! It resonated deeply with this moment, for me—with the closeness between ourselves and our ancestors, with the connection we still feel to family who has passed, with the importance of putting the names of our dear ones in all of it. On Monday, I was lucky to get to join our parent minyan, to stand arms around shoulders and share strength with several community members who had recently lost parents, to hear their stories, their happiness and grief, their joy and their guilt. And then, having lunch with a friend who is also in the month of a parent’s yahrzeit, we talked about how the veil between worlds is thin at the time of a yahrzeit—the way we feel connected differently to the loved ones we’ve lost at this time. Perhaps this is something of what it means to be closer to the falling away: closer to the broader truths of our world, closer to our own longer histories, more closely connected to ourselves, and to each other.
 
Wishing you all weekends full of such closeness, my friends.
 
Warmly,
 
Dan
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