A DAT End-of-Year Message from Mar Abba

Dear DAT families and friends,

 

This week we read Parshat Beha’alotcha, which opens with a quiet instruction to Aharon: “Be’ha’alotcha et ha’nerot” – when you kindle the lamps of the menorah, the seven lamps shall cast their light toward the face of the menorah (Bamidbar 8:2). The Torah could easily have used the ordinary word for lighting, l’hadlik. Instead it reaches for a stranger word – be’ha’alotcha, raising up, lifting. Rashi offers the following perush: the kohen does not simply touch fire to wick and walk away. He holds the flame to the lamp ad she’te’hei shalhevet olah me’eileha – until the flame rises steadily on its own.

 

I have come to think that one line is the entire job description of a parent, a teacher, and a school.

 

There’s no light switch with kids.  We hold the flame to the wick – patiently, sometimes for years – and we encourage, and we wait. We wait through the temper tantrums in first grade and the eighth-grade eye-roll, through the kid who can’t sit still and the kid who won’t speak up, through good weeks and hard ones. And every so often, if we’ve done the hard work, the holy work, and we’re a little bit lucky, the flame catches and begins to rise on its own. That is the whole thing. Not a fire we keep lit for them, but a fire that learns to burn by itself.

 

But here is the part I keep circling back to, because it raises the bar on all of us. A flame that rises on its own is a beautiful thing – and it is still, in the end, a single light. The Lubavitcher Rebbe describes our work in this world as to not be just be a light, but to a lamplighter. His point was that we are not sent into the world merely to shine. We are sent to light. And so, what we are really after at DAT is not a graduating class of lamps, however bright. We are after lamplighters – children whose own flame burns steadily enough that they go looking for the next unlit wick: the friend who is struggling, the classmate no one has reached, the person who has stopped believing their candle can be lit at all. And then they bend down, and they kindle it.

 

And the final teaching about light – years ago I came across the following YouTube clip that I have never stopped thinking about. It’s an amazing clip of the Israeli superstar singer Shlomo Artzi recording a Yiddish-Hebrew Modeh Ani together with a group of Belzer Chassidim. What he sings is more powerful than the unlikely collaboration itself: “Kol zman she’ha’ner do’lek, ef’shar le’ta’ken” – as long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to accomplish and to mend.

 

(Watch the video, it’s really something special!)

 

 

 

The line comes from the story of Rabbi Yisrael Salanter, the great mussar master of the early 19th century, who one late night passed the home of a shoemaker still bent over his work by the light of a candle. “Why are you still working?” he asked. “It’s late, and soon that candle will go out.” The shoemaker answered, “As long as the candle is still burning, it is still possible to accomplish and to mend.” Salanter, it is said, spent the whole night pacing his room, repeating those words to himself.

 

Hold those three teachings next to each other and they light up. Beha’alotcha tells us how we light the flame – we stay with the flame until it rises on its own. Salanter tells us why we never stop – because as long as that flame is burning, however dim, however late the hour, there is still time to build, still time to mend. And the lamplighter tells us what for: a child kindled until her own light holds is a child who can now turn around and do for someone else exactly what was done for her.

Between the three of them sits everything we try to do here at DAT.

 

That has been the quiet work of this year – my first as your Head of School. From my vantage point, I get the privilege of watching our morot and rabbeim, our administrative team and our whole faculty do it, day after day, lamp by lamp. I’ve watched teachers stay after class or give up their full lunch periods (and do so week in and week out!) to help the student who wasn’t catching it. I’ve watched a child’s face change in the moment something finally takes. And these past few weeks, as we send out our graduates and close another year, what I’m really watching is a whole school and community of neshamot that have started to rise on their own.

 

And to our families, our teachers, our staff, our Board of Trustees and our whole DAT community – thank you for a really strong first year together. As long as the candle is burning, there is so much left to build and so much to work on and so much to fix and mend, and I can’t wait to continue to do it alongside all of you – because none of it, not a single lamp, gets lit alone.

 

We are stronger together. We lift each other up – be’ha’alotcha, we light each other’s lights. We do the work of fixing what needs to be fixed. And we are stronger for it, every time. Chazak chazak v’nitchazek – be strong, be strong, and together may we be strengthened.

 

Shabbat Shalom u’Mevorach and have a wonderful summer.

 

Mar Abba