Tomorrow we will be celebrating our Class of 2021 graduation. Time to celebrate! It seems just like yesterday when we sat considering how to do a covid graduation for the class of 2020. While that drive-in graduation was unlike any Yavneh graduation it still was an evening of celebration! And, upon looking back at the 2020-21 year, despite the masks, the plexiglass, the distancing and changes in many of the school routines it was a year of many celebrations. In fact, celebration characterized this past year. How, you might wonder?!
(I was just privileged a few hours ago to join the Bergen County community in a United for Israel parade. When we gathered at Phelps Park and marched down River Road, Cedar Lane and Garrison closed to traffic, I felt that air of celebration. For those of us who miss the Salute to Israel Parade, (although we could do without the commute!), we did not imagine that we could celebrate Israel this year. And, yet, the celebration continued).
My daughter recently shared with me a selection by Rabbi Jonathan Sacks that shares the true essence and the purpose of celebration.
“In 2001, shortly after September 11th, I received a letter from a woman in London whose name I did not immediately recognise. She wrote that on the morning of the attack on the World Trade Centre, I had been giving a lecture on ways of raising the status of the teaching profession, and she had seen a report about it in the press. This prompted her to write and remind me of a meeting we had had eight years earlier.
She was then, in 1993, the Head Teacher of a school that was floundering. She had heard some of my broadcasts, felt a kinship with what I had to say, and thought that I might have a solution to her problem. I invited her, together with two of her deputies, to our house. The story she told me was this: morale within the school, among teachers, pupils and parents alike, was at an all-time low. Parents had been withdrawing their children. The student roll had fallen from 1000 children to 500. Examination results were bad: only 8 percent of students achieved high grades. It was clear that unless something changed dramatically, the school would be forced to close.
We talked for an hour or so on general themes: the school as community, how to create an ethos, and so on. Suddenly, I realised that we were thinking along the wrong lines. The problem she faced was practical, not philosophical. I said: “I want you to live one word: celebrate.” She turned to me with a sigh: “You don’t understand – we have nothing to celebrate. Everything in the school is going wrong.” “In that case,” I replied, “find something to celebrate. If a single student has done better this week than last week, celebrate. If someone has a birthday, celebrate. If it’s Tuesday, celebrate.’ She seemed unconvinced, but promised to give the idea a try.
Now, eight years later, she was writing to tell me what had happened since then. Examination results at high grades had risen from 8 percent to 65 percent. The enrollment of pupils had risen from 500 to 1000. Saving the best news to last, she added that she had just been made a Dame of the British Empire – one of the highest honours the Queen can bestow – for her contribution to education. She ended by saying that she just wanted me to know how a single word had changed the school, and her life.
Celebration is an essential part of motivating. It turned a school around. So celebrate.”
I believe there are two aspects of celebration that Rabbi Sacks, zt”l highlights.
First, in actuality, just when you are down, when things look like they are at an all-time low, that is the time to celebrate. One must make a conscious choice and effort to sift through the difficulties to find the joy.
Rabbi David Aaron, in his article “Celebrating Jewish Sadness” contemplates Tisha B’av and even Yom HaShoah experience that he experienced as a child of Holocaust survivors. He asks, “How can Jews find meaning, power and beauty in our long history as victims of incredible oppression and cruelty?” He answers, “As counterintuitive as it may seem, it is necessary for humans to feel pain in order to feel joy. We strive to be happy our whole lives and avoid all sadness and pain. But only people who truly know pain and sadness can truly know pleasure and joy.”
In Eicha 2:19, as Yirmiyahu describes the destruction of the Beit HaMikdash he says,
". Pour out your heart like water" שִׁפְכִ֤י כַמַּ֨יִם֙ לִבֵּ֔ךְ
Rabbi Aaron shared that Yirmiyahu is stating that tears actually satiate us like fresh water. Crying fulfills a need and it quenches. We know that psychologically speaking, denying our pain can be destructive. We will ultimately express the pain in unhealthy and dysfunctional ways if we do not express it.
The ability to experience both sadness and celebration allows a person to be “whole.” Rabbi Aaron asserts, “Judaism is not about being happy; it's about being whole. Wholeness, however, is actually the only true path to real happiness because then you experience an inner happiness even when you are sad.”
How does one sift through the difficulties to celebrate:
By seeing the cup ½ full instead of ½ empty. As I have discussed before in this column at length, we also call this in Advisory the ability to see the world through “rose-colored glasses” instead of dark glasses. And, the ability to see that cup half full is an active choice. Just like the spies in this past week's parasha- they all saw the same land, but only Calev and Yehoshua were able to see the cup half full. We can model for our children how we do this ourselves and ask them directly to do so themselves. See the good that comes out of all situations.
Ralph Waldo Emerson said, “The purpose of life is not to be happy. It is to be useful, to be honorable, to be compassionate, to have it make some difference that you have lived and lived well.” In Dr. Viktor Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning he writes of his experience the Nazi concentration camps. He notes that the difference between those who lived or who died was meaning. In fact, Dr. Frankl commented on the constant “pursuit of happiness” that is mistakenly engaged in by Americans. "To the European," Frankl wrote, "it is a characteristic of the American culture that, again and again, one is commanded and ordered to 'be happy.' But happiness cannot be pursued; it must ensue. One must have a reason to 'be happy.'"
Again, as parents, we can help our children find that meaning through encouraging them to become involved in activities that focus on others and not only on material pursuits.
I believe that one lesson our children learned from these months is that one can be happy and find celebration despite living through difficult times through focusing on the positive and the pursuit of meaning.
The second aspect of Rabbi Sacks’ celebration from which our children can learn is that one should celebrate EVERYTHING! As he says, it’s Tuesday so celebrate! Celebrate that your son remembered to make his bed. Celebrate that your daughter gave you a hug when she came home. Celebrating small things helps us pause and appreciate the small things in life. And, the more we appreciate those small things, the more grateful we are, the more positive emotions we experience, the happier we are and the more resilient we are to negative occurrences in our lives.
Rabbi Sacks’ advice to constantly celebrate is ironically a lesson that our children learned quite well during this covid time. They learned about seeing the cup half full, pursuing meaning and that the more you celebrate the more positive you feel. And, of course, they have learned that we must celebrate everything. Pre- covid would we have celebrated the ability to see our grandparents? Probably not. Or even to go to shul? Probably not. How about seeing the actual faces of our teachers? Definitely not. I think our children have learned this year that we need to celebrate EVERYTHING for one should never take anything for granted.
So, tomorrow evening, as our 8th graders celebrate, we can confidently know that they have learned how to celebrate. May they continue to celebrate many more occasions in contentment and health! Mazel tov!
Advisory Update:
Sixth Grade: Our sixth graders did a session on preparing for finals and how to manage their possible worries.
Seventh Grade: The boys finished their Do Not Stand Idly By Unit on standing up to injustice and our girls did a lesson on finding the heroism within themselves.
Eighth Grade: As their last Advisory session students discussed how it felt to say good-bye to Yavneh, what they learned and gained, and the mixed emotions they felt. They also filled out a survey regarding what they feel they gained and what needs to be improved at Yavneh from their perspectives.
