The Most Wonderful Time of the Year

Undergraduates, you may at first think I am out of my mind with the title of this blog post, or blissfully oblivious of your end-of-term travails. Reading week and exam period tend to be a stretch of days in which people are really interesting intellectually, and really boring socially. So what am I on about?

Well it's that first bit, about your being really interesting intellectually at this season - if only one bothers to ask. So I'm asking.

One of the joys of my particular perch here at Harvard (not to taunt you with the increased leisure bandwidth I have when your noses are firmly to the grindstone) is having the brief conversations on the fly, and the individual study-breaks for coffee in Harvard Square, in which I get to listen to you talk about the conclusions of your classes, and the papers you are writing, and the exams for which you are preparing. And yes, I know, some of it feels like drudgery, and maybe some of it is. But let me tell you something: this is when I see it really happening.

What, exactly?

The way you light up (yes, you actually do) when you get to talking about an end-of-semester project that turns out to be something you enjoy, or at least find compellingly valid and worthwhile - exercises that turn out to be the first glimmers of concentrations, and theses, and careers. Even the projects you don't like are clarifying. And so, at least in the intellectual dimension, this is when I get to see you truly becoming who you are. And honestly, it's like watching a miracle. In fact, perhaps that's exactly what it is.

In case you have ever wondered what I like about this job - that's one thing, right there, at the top of the list: you becoming you.

You may seem to your friends to have disappeared down a hole - but actually you are writing plays, and solving problems (at least on paper), and dancing ballets, and your minds are in every part of the past and of the present, and in every corner of the universe. And if my rhapsodizing here about it all sounds hopelessly romantic in this often adamantly prosaic world of Harvard, well maybe that's part of my job, too.

This is a week when we read in our Torah about dreams.

Perhaps you recall some of the biblical Joseph's original dreams: eleven stars and the moon and the sun, eleven sheaves of wheat, all circling and bowing to the dreaming, junior brother.

Yes, it's all a bit self-involved - oh, just a bit extremely self-centered. But you know what? There's a time for that. Even if your siblings and your friends now and then feel like throwing you down a hole, so as not to have to hear you go on about your dreams - like Joseph's brothers do to him - you know what? Dream away. This is your time. And, like Joseph in this week's story, the dreams you have just now really do tend to foretell the future.

There is something else about those dreams.

A wonderful bit of ancient, rabbinic fan-fic (to borrow a perfect colloquial term for what Midrash is from my friend the poet and singer Alicia Jo Rabins, who recently visited us at Harvard Hillel) has Jacob, Joseph's doting but stern father, reacting with recognition and astonishment, as Joseph describes his self-glorifying dream, and saying, "Who told you that my secret name was Sun?"

What I am getting at is that your dreaming your own dreams at this season and becoming who you are also helps the rest of us become or remember who we are.

This is not just a matter of illuminating contrast in the negative - "I am never going to be as excited about the law as so-and-so, or as rapt by a computational conundrum as such-a-one." It is a matter of seeing ourselves in your light. What are we really up to? Where do we fit in - to your vision? We may not always agree with you, perhaps often not - but even the reactions we have when that is so tend to bring out our own senses of what we really are about.

All of which happens only, of course, when you share what is going on in your dreams - and, okay, yes, Harvard, at this time of year, in your drudgery as well.

That is the glory of those walks around Lamont Library to clear your head, when you bump into someone and have a tangential conversation that winds up swinging you back around to your table, somehow full of purpose and resolve again. It is the glory of co-working spaces - late nights at Rosovsky Hall, for example. (Shameless promo there, but true.) Brain breaks become brainstorms - and sometimes, by way of cloudburst, you are someone else's much-needed, quenching and fructifying rain.

So tell each other about it, even if some say - as Joseph's brothers do in our reading this week - "Here comes that dreamer of dreams again."

And tell me - let's have coffee in the Square.

Pleasant dreams when you rest, and every success in all you are doing at this busy and most wonderful time of the year - and a luminous Chanukah!

"A lion roars - who will not tremble? The Lord, the Eternal One speaks - who will not prophesy?" (Amos 3:8)