Dear Brandeis community,

 

Yesterday I had a brief break between conversations and wandered upstairs to the BUILD space, stepping in for a few minutes to admire the room, even in stasis. I was struck as I walked in by the silence—a kind of silence I remember from the wood shop that was in our basement when I was a kid, the silence that is as much about other senses (dust motes trapped in shafts of sun, the smell of sawdust) as it is about sound. Mr. Neuberger’s notebook was open on the table, questions or ideas about the projects he was testing (something about sukkahs in various materials, as I understand it) in bursts of neat Hebrew script. The room was full of potential energy, waiting for the next batch of students to come bring it alive in joyful noise.

 

I had actually come to BUILD seeking silence—oddly enough—as it is not typically a quiet place. But in the curious itineraries of my reading that morning, I had picked up Alan Morinis’s Everyday Holiness: the Jewish Spiritual Practice of Mussar from my dresser, a gift as part of my ongoing chavruta with Rabbi Batshir Torchio. I opened the book to a chapter at random, landing on “Silence,” and read about the rabbis who taught each other to guard their tongues, to make space for quiet, to reckon with the stillness of the universe. Morinis asks:

 

Have you experienced the thick silence of a forest that penetrates to the marrow? Or the morning after a snowfall when stillness spreads an incomparable blanket on the muffled world? The night sky, no wind? The voluptuous silence of a becalmed sea? A mind released from chatter to stillness?

 

Reading those questions, my soul stirs with a ‘yes!’—remembering a sunrise minyan as part of a high school midrashah (co-educational Jewish studies program) retreat, or stepping into the waters of the Caribbean in Tulum as dawn broke, having been awake all night feverishly finishing Kenneth Bonert’s The Lion Seeker. We each carry within us such memories, such moments—and, Morinis suggests, it is to such silences that we should turn when we say the Sh’ma, in the silences where it is possible to hear, as the prayer reminds us to do.

 

I was called to listen again later in my day, as the new print issue of Tablet magazine arrived, as ever a bold and beautiful thing. Again opening to a page at random, I lost myself over lunch in a story about Rick Rubin and the Def Jam label and logo. It was fascinating to read about the thinking that went into their logo, especially with all the students in new Brandeis t-shirts (you no doubt noticed them come home with your children this week) running around school.

 

Rick Rubin did more than perhaps any other record producer in shaping my childhood soundscapes, from the Beastie Boys to Run DMC to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. But it was his work with Public Enemy to which my mind turned, largely because one of my dissertation chapters was largely about pauses and sound on two Rubin-produced Public Enemy records (as well as pauses and sound in the work of the poet Lyn Hejinian. The argument that I made in that chapter was that the pauses in both works were not passive, were not just the absence of sound, but rather active and energetic, full of the mess and the anger and the noise of history. Such silences are not empty, but full of hope, and action, and possibility.

 

This seems an important distinction as we go about the work of creating space for quiet and contemplation in our own lives and the lives of our children. As we explore mindfulness, for example (with 34 of our faculty members taking a course together this fall on mindful schools!) it seems important to recognize that Jewish tradition teaches us to turn contemplation into deeds, theory into practice, to (yes) make it matter. It brings to mind a quote that my father has long had up in his office, which Google tells me is penned by Do Hyun Choe: “Stillness is what creates love. Movement is what creates life. To be still and still moving, that is everything.” And so, I think, it is: we pause in our silences, filled with potential, and then let the noise and the joy and the doing of life spill back in.

 

Wishing you all weekends full of moving stillnesses, my friends.

 

Warmly,

 

Dan

 

Click here for this week's Yudcast.