Dear Berman Community,
The gap between being and becoming is the aspirational space of this most wonderful time of year: the convergence of the first week of school and the month of Elul.
In the first days of school, hallways and classrooms awaken again, and an excited energy that vacillates between the familiar and the new reminds us—teachers and students alike—that the year ahead remains a kind of blank canvas and full of possibility. The power of these first moments cannot be overstated, as Wong and Wong have demonstrated in their classic work, The First Days of School. Tones are set, expectations and routines take shape, promises, spoken and unspoken, are made about the days ahead. At the outset of the year, we are all living in that liminal and exciting space, between who we are and who we hope to become.
In the few walkthrough moments I had this week, the heart of our special school was beating to this aspirational rhythm. I wove through lab safety procedures in the Upper School and the kashrut of shofarot in the Lower School; I heard books read aloud in Preschool and watched Middle School students analyze imagery from their summer reading. I saw seniors rise with the sun and dance our youngest students into school, friends playing sharks and minnows, classmates building community chains, and colleagues enjoying loaded nachos in the cafe—and seashell pasta in the cafeteria.
So much of it felt wonderfully familiar, and so much of it is a tribute to our incredibly talented and devoted faculty and staff. And yet, because it is the beginning, all of it also felt new. Some might dismiss this time as not representative of our year. They are correct. This is a time when we set the bar high, that we act in a way that we wish to sustain.
Elul asks us to inhabit that same tension. It is a month of emet—of looking honestly at who we are and what we have done—while also imagining who we might yet become. My friend and teacher R. Joey Rosenfeld pointed out this week that אלול shares a numerical value with the word כאילו—“as if.” There is something powerful in that connection, because sometimes we become something by first acting as if we already are. That is not necessarily a pretense or a sort of inauthenticity. It means instead bringing our best and most aspirational selves to the task at hand—and, through practice, continuing to rise and grow into them.
Perhaps that is part of the magic of a new school year. We begin by acting as if: as if this will be the year I become the student, teacher, parent, or friend I aspire to be. And slowly, God willing, the as-if becomes who we are.
That idea also captures what we hope to do with Meaningful Moments this year. When we launched Meaningful Moments three years ago, we imagined it as a small weekly pause: an opportunity to notice the wonder of our school community and celebrate the sparks of learning and greatness illuminating our halls.
These were moments of being. This year, we want to create more space to consider how our being is related to who we are becoming.
Beginning this year, Meaningful Moments will arrive monthly rather than weekly. The slower rhythm will allow us to tell deeper stories, elevate more voices from across our community, and connect the moments we witness each day to the larger questions of our mission and aspirations.
There will still be nachos and shofarot, classrooms and cafeterias—the wonderfully ordinary moments that make a school a school. But we hope to use Meaningful Moments to ask larger questions that Emet demands: What do these moments reveal about who we truly are—and who we aspire to become?
With gratitude to our teachers and students for a wonderful first week, and with wishes for a meaningful Elul,
Rabbi Dr. Hillel Broder
