I found this teaching that you did on — and so one of the things you say about Elie Wiesel, it sounds like you all talked a lot about “moral madness” — and boy, does that sound like an apt way to talk about the world at this part, in this century, right now — and that the way to meet that is not necessarily a kind of straightforward sanity. I kept... See more

The best things I’ve ever learned were not content. They were some sort of contrast with someone else’s way of thinking that at first seemed really strange to me, that I allowed in, that I allowed to question me.

I feel like some of the things we’re learning scientifically, or maybe that those of us who aren’t scientists are being invited in a new way to take in, is how even — so we say one of the things that feels most reliable is, you look up and the sky is blue, right? But that the sky is not blue; [

laughs

] that our eyes make color of light. So even... See more

And so part of the question is, what do we need to bring to educational moments and encounters, beyond a student’s brain or beyond a teacher’s brain, and beyond the knowledge that they’ve acquired; and how do we do that? How do we bring our hearts and our hands and feet into the learning experience so that we can really encounter something that... See more

It’s closest to Mount Sinai. It’s closest to the origin. But it’s really the white space around the edges that ultimately is most important, because that’s where we get to write our questions, and we get to expand and grow and evolve a tradition that, without us, would have long since become either dormant and rigid, or would’ve disappeared... See more

But also, even the spaces between letters and words is as important, also, [

laughs

] as the letters that you learn. There’s such richness. It’s so layered, that experience.

perhaps Elie Wiesel’s favorite phrase was “and yet.”

the discussions that you describe in that classroom about good and evil and how to be moral, and how to engage difference and how to engage serious, complex questions and disagreement, where good and evil are not at all clear, or what to do with that, it all feels so resonant with, I think, the questions we know that are with us, not just in this... See more

It is an exercise in what Wiesel’s friend and teacher, the great Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel, spoke of as the religious calling to be maladjusted with positive moral force, neither indifferently conformed to the reality of evil and suffering, nor inured to wondrous and redemptive possibilities we can make real.