As delivered to the Ethical Culture Society of Bergen County on Sunday, January 4, 2009:
Ethical Culture teaches that in eliciting the best in others we can find the best in ourselves.
We Ethical Culturists have faith that people can grow and change.
Felix Adler taught that any place people meet to seek the highest can become as holy ground.
I am a teacher and I live these principles each day.Tomorrow I begin again - a new year, a new term with the same 450 plus young children whom I will see for a brief span of 45 minutes once each week. My classroom is our holy ground, sanctified again by the happy singing, chanting, clapping, dancing and playing of my charges doing their best. Freely creating musical responses that, I fervently hope, take them above and beyond the present day lives they lead, lives of promise or, perhaps, of poverty and pain, lives filled with nurturance or neediness. Through times of self confidence or self doubt, whether enjoying rich lives or enduring barren ones, I believe the music we make together, if they claim it as their own, can carry on in them, informing their choices and in a small, but not insignificant way, helping them shape a life that without their own music singing inside, would be barren indeed.
This is what I offer my students. A gift of ambitious potential, I think. But the greater gift is mine, because among the patient explanations, false starts and do overs, laughter, crashes, and yes, frustrations, I can at times see my best self, best teacher but even more, best human being I can be, peeking out from behind the piano or conga, over the music stand or a child’s bobbing head and I thank Ethical Culture for teaching me that my work is an expression of my religious life.
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