About three years ago I had a chance to return to school after many years. Now I am a Bubbie with a Student ID. This brings rewards and challenges. I can get into movies for cheap. But I have to do homework, write papers, and take notes. My son reminds me to get off Facebook and get back to work. I am called upon to be logical, draw conclusions, argue a point.
Life teaches us that not everything is under our control. It never has been. It never will be. In the twenty-first century, when human beings have decoded the genome and photographed the birth of galaxies, there is one thing not even the greatest Nobel prize-winning scientist knows: what tomorrow will bring. We live with uncertainty. That is the human condition and always will be.
Nineteen campuses across North America will participate in the Ask Big Questions Fellowship program beginning the fall of 2012.
New campuses include Cornell University, Hofstra University, University of Guelph, University of Virginia, University of Wisconsin-Madison, and York University.
All thirteen campuses from 2011-2012 will return for a second year of the fellowship program.
Working on a college campus, perhaps it would be natural to discuss what I have learned throughout my studies. But what I’ve really learned so far is that it’s actually the day-to-day experiences outside of the classroom that shape me the most. Here’s a snapshot of what I have learned:
Express my feelings:
When I was in college, I had a poetry professor who became a friend. He told me (at what now, in my 40s, seems like a young age) that everything I needed was inside of me. He also told me a Zen koan about the perfect gift, which turned out to be an orange. In regard to the former, I had a sense that he was right, that somewhere, somehow, I already knew this to be true.
I am a rabbi. When I tell people that I lead a program called Ask Big Questions, many of them respond something like this: “Oh, that makes so much sense. Judaism is all about asking questions!” Jews are a people who love questions, who are characterized by questions, who “answer a question with a question.” Or so we tell ourselves.
What creates freedom? A revolution in the streets? Mass protest? Civil war? A change of government? The ousting of the old guard and its replacement by the new? History, more often than not, shows that hopes raised by such events are often dashed, sooner rather than later. “Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,” wrote Wordsworth about the French revolution, but the mood did not last long. It rarely does.
Practical Ideas for Making Great Conversations (and Great Seders)
One of the most important elements of a successful conversation, like a good Passover seder, is participation. A second element is preparation. Find a way for a lot of people to contribute. Ask folks to bring an item of food. Ask them to reflect on a question or do some homework before the event—nothing strenuous, but enough to be meaningful.
Here are a bunch of ideas (in addition to the ones in our conversation guide on the question “Are we free?”)
Are We Free? This certainly qualifies as a Big Question—one of the biggest—and one that is appropriate to consider as we prepare for Passover. There are two ways in which I want to look at this question, each of which leads me to the conclusion that, as free as most of us may feel from day to day, the answer is: No, we are not yet free.
When I was in third grade, my incredibly creative and thoughtful teacher announced one morning that our class would be knitting a blanket for a homeless mother and her child. The nineteen eight year olds in my class looked at her in amazement. How would we knit a blanket? None of us even really understood what it meant to knit. After a few lessons, all the boys and girls spent many hours knitting squares that one of the class parents sewed together into a blanket. We then presented the completed blanket to a mother and son who shared their story with us.