Dear Nursery School Families,
When I sat down to write this note earlier today, it was supposed to be about our return to school health survey. I will send the link to the health survey as well as a link to upload test results tomorrow. However, having watched such frightening events unfold in our capital today, it feels imperative to instead pause and take this moment to acknowledge what we have witnessed.
It has been difficult to stop and reflect this year. So much in the operational pace of each day has felt urgent and unrelenting. But we must all stop tonight and find the strength to focus, not only on our individual health, but on our collective, communal, and national health.
Our most fundamental goal in the Nursery School is to raise caring young citizens. Our days with children are spent scaffolding their ability to solve problems with words, to attend to one another’s feelings with care, and to invest their hearts and minds in making their classroom communities and their world better. I have great hope for the future of our country and our world, because I have the privilege of spending my days immersed in the voices of a rising generation and witnessing their compassion.
But we cannot wait to hand the world over to them. We owe our children better than the violence and profound rupture that we witnessed today and have been witnessing for too long. It was particularly heartbreaking to look upon this day through parental eyes. We want so deeply to be able to show our children a world they can fall in love with and be inspired by.
Hannah Arendt said that, as adults, we must love the world enough to bring children into it, while at the same time taking responsibility for the world as it is, including all that is broken and ugly. It is hard to do this tonight. But there is no better reminder of our obligations, or of the tremendous hope that remains, than looking into the eyes of our children and seeing the love, wonder, and trust that they reflect back at us.
So I am reading the words of the poet Elizabeth Alexander tonight, holding fast to the promise that accompanies struggle, to better days ahead, and to our responsibility to row with all our might toward that hope.
“Praise song for struggle, praise song for the day.
Praise song for every hand-lettered sign,
the figuring-it-out at kitchen tables.
Some live by love thy neighbor as thyself,
others by first do no harm or take no more
than you need. What if the mightiest word is love?
Love beyond marital, filial, national,
love that casts a widening pool of light,
love with no need to pre-empt grievance.
In today’s sharp sparkle, this winter air,
any thing can be made, any sentence begun.
On the brink, on the brim, on the cusp,
praise song for walking forward in that light.”
The JCC is planning an interfaith vigil to take place this Friday at 3:00 p.m. We will share more information on this soon.
Tonight, may we all hold our children close and muster the strength to continue walking forward together toward a future that reflects the kind of citizenship they practice at school each day and deserve from us.
In strength, commitment, and hope,
Alicia Stoller