April 9, 2024
Dear LGA Community,
The spring is here, Pesach is almost here, the spring break is almost here. Everything is ready to start budding, unfurling, and blooming – including all of us! There’s so much going on at the school that I want to share with all of you, and in this update you will find a few of the highlights, or as one my favorite musicians of all times, Raahsan Roland Kirk called them, the “bright moments”. I am sending this through as an email, and also as a video for everyone’s accessibility and convenience.
While school fundraisers aren’t widely known as pinnacles of fun, our kick-off event at the Abandoned Building Brewery was an incredible party with rocking live music, excellent food, and inspiring (and entertaining) speeches. I was moved to see not only our current families, but many alumni families and community members, as well. As a reminder, our fundraiser, Holla for Challah, is happening this week, and as of this email, we’re already 82% of our way there! If you have not yet donated, or spread the word, please do so asap, because during this week, all of your donations will be doubled through a very generous $50,000 match. Here is the link: https://givebutter.com/LGA2024. Please make our bright moments even brighter!
I think you will agree with me that children’s laughter is one of the brightest, most light-filled experiences in the world. And while there is always laughter here at LGA, during the two weeks preceding Purim, in addition to all the learning, a great deal of silliness and goofiness reigned in our hallways – fake mustaches on eight-year-olds simply do not get old. This made the learning so much more joyful! The culmination of it all was the Purim Shpiel that our Kitah Vav/Sixth-Grade students wrote, produced, and performed. It was hilarious, sure, but to me, the greatness of the work was in the meticulous preparation: over many months, these sixth-graders dug deep, analyzing and interpreting the Book of Esther, and then imagined ways of turning their learning into a meaningful performance that would appeal both to our youngest students, and the grown-ups, too.
I recently read a wonderful new collection of poems, “Unalone” by Jessica Jacobs, in which the poet masterfully responds to the first twelve parshiot/Torah portions of the book of Genesis. It is clear that this poet has worked hard to take ownership of these classic Jewish texts – so as to hold them close, transform and reinterpret them. As I was reading the book, I thought about the Kitah Vav Purim Shpiel, and marveled that our students, even at their young age, are already taking deep ownership of the tradition – remixing it, playing with it, and making it their own. The lines of Jessica Jacobs ring true for any one of them:
what healer, what bridge,
what shelter, what builder, what writer
Yes, all of these bright things, and more.
Last week, when early April surprised us with a snow storm, we started the day with a dance party in the oolam – disco ball and all. That was an exceptionally bright moment. Yesterday, I saw one of the Gan students holding the door for older kids, with utter casualness and camaraderie. Seeing our youngest students transform so profoundly, so thoroughly has been an incredible string of bright moments. A cohort of students, new to the study of Hebrew, working hard and over the course of the year catching up to their peers, was a bright moment. The recitation of 250 digits of pi was an astonishingly bright moment. Welcoming two new students in the second half of the year – and seeing the warmth with which they were received by their classmates – was a bright moment for all of us. Just yesterday, so many of our parents and grandparents joined us on the blacktop to watch the eclipse – with blessings and oreos, too. A bright, albeit temporarily eclipsed, moment.
In reflecting on these experiences, you will notice that every single one of them is made bright by deep connections of our learners. In a world so fractured and divided, it is most heartening to see how close they are. And so I want to finish this message with three lines from another poem by Jessica Jacobs. In it, she describes a memory of climbing a tree, as a young child. The climb becomes a metaphor for growing up, physically and spiritually, in a slow ascent through the branches of time, community, and tradition.
A vantage we could not have reached
on our own, a vision otherwise beyond us.
All of us, in that overstory, unalone.
Here’s to the brightness of togetherness!
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