Good afternoon, Deerfield, and welcome to Convocation. I wanted to thank Billy for his remarks, congratulate our award winners, and recognize one and all, especially our seniors, for beginning the year with such energy and spirit. As we look to the new academic year—a year I hope that will be rich in learning and joy—I also want to acknowledge your teachers here today—for their service, their creativity, their dedication to the art and craft of teaching and mentoring, and their commitment to the mission of this school.
Most especially, I want to recognize Mr. Keller, the recipient of this year’s Greer Award, from whom we will hear in a moment. Mr. Keller has, as they say, done it all: teacher, coach, dorm resident, advisor, and parent of Hunter, Class of 2020. Mr. Keller has taught at Deerfield for over three decades—twelve of them while living in Doubleday. He has chaired our Math Department, teaching at every level, served as president of our chapter of the Cum Laude Society, and coached three sports, including a 2001 New England Championship in girls hockey. He has brought unstinting dedication to generations of Deerfield students. Mr. Keller, thank you for your service to the Academy.
Before I hand the podium over to Mr. Keller, I wanted to offer a brief reflection on what it means to be a member of this community. And there is, perhaps, no better place to start than the poem that Adeeva read so beautifully just a moment ago.
As you prepare your breakfast, think of others
(do not forget the pigeon’s food).
As you conduct your wars, think of others
(do not forget those who seek peace).
As you pay your water bill, think of others
(those who are nursed by clouds).
As you return home, to your home, think of others
(do not forget the people of the camps).
As you sleep and count the stars, think of others
(those who have nowhere to sleep).
As you liberate yourself in metaphor, think of others
(those who have lost the right to speak).
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).
You will notice, if you attend carefully to this poem, that it charts a kind of journey, beginning in the morning, at breakfast, proceeding through the day—paying bills and returning from work—and finally coming to rest at night, as the “you” the speaker addresses throughout the poem, sleeps and counts the stars. And at each stage in this journey, we are asked to extend and enlarge our circle of thought. It begins by asking us to remember the pigeon’s food—presumably, they are hungry—and expands from there—to those who are “nursed by the clouds,” to those who are displaced and houseless, to those who have lost the right to speak, and finally to “others far away.”
Darwish’s poem is, most simply, a call to mindfulness to expand awareness, concern, and consideration.
This idea–that our obligations to others should extend outward and expand and grow in strength over time–is a very ancient one. We find it in the sacred texts of the world’s great religions—think, for example, the parable of the good Samaritan. We find it in the ancient wisdom literature of the Greeks. “We should,” wrote Plutarch, “regard all human beings as our fellow citizens and neighbors.” We find it in many works of art and literature. The philosopher Martha Nussbaum remarks that it would be “difficult to find a powerful work of art that is not at some level concerned with the claim of” others.
Nussbaum asks us to envision our lives as a series of concentric circles. “The first one,” she writes, “encircles the self, the next takes in the immediate family, then the extended family, then, in order, neighbors, fellow city dwellers, and fellow countrymen.” “Outside of all of these circles,“ she says, echoing Plutarch, “is the largest one, humanity as a whole . . .. And our task as citizens of the world is to draw the circles somehow toward the center.“
I should say that not everyone agrees with Professor Nussbaum. Even Nussbaum, pushing her argument to its logical conclusion, asks some very tough questions of herself: “May I give my daughter an expensive college education while children all over the world are starving and effective relief agencies exist?“ Charles Dickens, whose imagination was fired by concerns of social and economic justice, worried that a concern for others far away beyond our borders would lead us to ignore the suffering next door, and he ruthlessly satirized those who reserved their charitable projects for distant lands while ignoring those in need closer to home. He called this tendency “telescopic philanthropy.“ Mary Ann Evans, who took on the pen name George Eliot, asked the readers of her great novel Middlemarch to imagine what it would be like to have unlimited powers of imaginative sympathy. “It would be,“ she said, “like hearing the grass grow and the squirrel’s heartbeat, and we should die of that roar which lies on the other side of silence.“ Quite simply, the roar of all that life would overwhelm us and render us deaf. Thinking of others, moreover, requires intentional effort. Not for nothing does the speaker of Darwish’s poem repeat—seven times no less—his call to “think of others.“ The grammar of his poem is shaped by a defining tension between the claims of everyday living—paying our bills—and our responsibilities to others beyond the horizon of our vision.
So, what are our obligations to others? How far do they extend? What are the limits to our empathy and our capacity for moral imagination? As I have tried to suggest, these are rich and complex questions.
But I should say, I like this idea of our lives as an expanding circle of care, as difficult and as challenging as that effort might be. I celebrated my sixtieth birthday this summer and looking back over my life, it rings true. As we age, we take on new roles and new responsibilities; our scope of concern and care expands–and our lives are made all the richer and more meaningful because of it.
Which brings me back to this moment. Today, I would suggest to you, marks the beginning of an important chapter in the story of your life. Convocation marks an expansion of that circle of care and responsibility so beautifully evoked by Darwish to include the members of this community. It marks a new role for you – or for older students the re-affirmation of an old one: as citizens of Deerfield, with all of its extraordinary possibilities and also all of the duties that citizenship in this community entails.
In an interview he gave not long before his death, the great Israeli novelist Amos Oz told the parable of what he called “the order of the teaspoon.“ He imagined a great calamity, a fire–in the face of which he suggested we have three options. We can, he said, simply run away. That way lies disengagement, withdrawal. We can give ourselves over to blame, finger-pointing, and recrimination; we can grow sick with cynicism or rage. For Oz, a student of the human heart and the many kinds of fundamentalism that disfigure and warp it, that was the path of fanaticism. Or, he said, you can bring a bucket of water and throw it on the fire, and if you don’t have a bucket, bring a glass, and if you don’t have a glass, use a teaspoon. “I know,“ he said, “a teaspoon is little, and the fire is huge, but there are many of us, and each one of us has a teaspoon.“
He’s speaking in metaphors of course, but what he means is this: together we have tremendous power. And together, we can use it; we can use it to make our communities, to make Deerfield, stronger, more caring, more vibrant, more kind, more creative, more imaginative, and more joyful.
As you think of others far away, think of yourself
(say: “If only I were a candle in the dark”).
This year, I hope that each of you will strive to be a light for others. And I hope, most of all—since the success of our year together depends upon it—that the light of citizenship and leadership of this class, the Class of 2025, will shine bright and strong among all of us.
Mr. Keller, the podium is yours.