I’ve written before about the fact that for the Passover holiday every year we turn our kitchens upside down. That includes exchanging all the dishes, pots and pans and silverware for items that are used only during the eight-day holiday. I have vivid memories of helping my parents haul up the cartons of Passover materials from the basement storage locker where they resided the remaining 350+ days of the year. Every breakable item was wrapped in last year’s newspapers, reporting events that had now passed into history. They made fascinating reading and slowed the packing and unpacking routines.
All the Passover paraphernalia is now sitting in the hallway of our apartment, awaiting their return to our own storage locker downstairs. Looking at the boxes of mixing bowls, platters and tablecloths, I was caught between two different sets of emotions. First, there was the craziness of turning your life upside down for just a week, but on the other hand, there’s beauty and wisdom of the temporary transformation.
That’s the strand I want to explore here. Restoring the everyday contents of our kitchen made me aware of them. Without the change they would have remained part of the background, not worthy of our attention, like the pictures that have hung too long on our walls. Change jiggles our senses and triggers a deeper recognition of what is/was. After 25 hours of fasting on Yom Kippur, that first glass of orange juice is a jolt of pleasure that is heightened by the change from fasting to the return to eating.
Anyone who has moved at least once has experienced the heightened awareness that accompanies the change of location, making us take notice of aspects of our lives that have become so routine that they no longer deserve conscious thought – where we shop and bank, the shortest route to the nearest bus or train station, when the mail gets delivered. Change makes us more sentient human beings, at least until new routines are established.
I know some schools that engage in the admirable practice of establishing a theme for the year around which all curricular decisions revolve – Resistance, Cooperation, Remembering. My favorite choice would be Change. Ever since I became a teacher, I had this hopelessly ambitious aspiration that my students would, at the least, come away with a sense that everything in the world, no matter how rock solid and permanent, is engaged in some process of change. When we lived in Houston, one of my favorite jogging routes took me around the perimeter of the Rice University campus. It’s a handsome and substantial campus indeed. Most of its buildings are in what’s called Mediterranean Revival style. It certainly changed during the 13 years we lived in the city. New buildings were constructed, landscaping changed, but basically the campus felt like it had been there forever, and it was hard to imagine it gone from the space it occupied. Yet, we know that there was a time when it didn’t exist and a time when it would no longer occupy that space.
Even the earth beneath our feet, which seems so permanently solid, may have been underwater in some earlier geological period or covered by dense forests. Our continents were formed by tectonic shifts that separated them from some land masses and distanced them from others. Climate change has brought home to us in the most painful way thatthe weather we expected a decade or two ago has been transformed within human lifetimes, unlike the geological timetable played out over eons.
Perhaps the closest we come to recognizing the pervasiveness of change lies within our own bodies. Children either dread or long for the transformations that catapult them into adolescence and adulthood, and older folks are all too aware of the changes that announce decline. But the one change that remains unimaginable for the young is the one that transforms them into the old person that I have become.
So, the old cliché that the only thing certain is change recognizes a basic law of nature. I dreamed of sharing that truth with my students, but it was far more important for me to invest our time together assuring them that they were valued, capable of leaving their mark on the world, that I saw, respected and cared deeply about them. Only when those relationships are established could I even begin to dream about larger goals like introducing them to the universality of change. The rare occasions when teachers reach that pinnacle are the gifts that keep us in the game.
