by Rabbi Donna Berman, Ph.D.
A sermon given at Fenwick, 2025
In 1894, Oscar Wilde wrote his famous play, The Importance of Being Earnest. Not surprisingly, some great lines came out of that work like, “I never travel without my diary. One should always have something sensational to read in the train.” Then there’s: “If I am occasionally a little over-dressed, I make up for it by being always immensely over-educated.” He writes, “To be natural is such a very difficult pose to keep up.” He also says, “The very essence of romance is uncertainty,” and that brings me to what I want to talk with you about this morning. I want to talk with you about uncertainty and the importance of being, in its wake, …foolish! Yes, I want to invite us all, in these very serious, grim times, to bring a little bit more foolishness into our lives. Maybe that sounds odd for a rabbi to be saying (except perhaps at our raucous holiday of Purim!), but I’ve been giving a lot of thought to this, lately, in particular with regard to three things that are very close to my heart—love, justice and art.
In April, my beloved dog died. I miss her everyday. It’ s been very hard. And this is not the first time I have thought about the fact that it’s really crazy: we human beings bring dogs and cats and other animals into their lives, knowing full well that their time on this earth is short and we will, inevitably, go through the pain of losing them. And, yet, we do that. We invite them into our homes and our hearts and, of course, we do the same with other human beings.
There is a beautiful and sobering prayer written by Rabbi Chaim Stern that is recited at many Jewish funerals. One of its most haunting lines is: “it is fearful thing to love what death can touch, a thing for fools, this.” And isn’t it true? Any quick cost/risk analysis would deem this foolish.
And we live in a time when it is dangerous to speak out about things that we know are wrong. There is always a risk in doing this, but now the stakes are even higher—speaking out might mean the loss of a job, loss of funding, being ostracized, losing one’s community, losing relationships with family members and friends. Why take that risk? Isn’t it foolish to do so?
And, because I am the Executive Director of the Charter Oak Cultural Center, a multi-cultural arts center doing the work of social justice through the arts, I think a lot about the arts. Lately, I’ve been focused on what they mean in perilous times, like the ones we are living through now. Are the arts frivolous, a waste of time, time that could be better spent building a bunker or providing other, more concrete, services (please forgive the pun) like food and shelter?
This summer, Charter Oak offered 5 camps. All free. All really high quality. All included a healthy breakfast and lunch and snacks. As always, we had a long waiting list of kids who wanted to attend. We just don’t have enough space or money to serve all these children. We are undertaking a huge building project that will enable us to have room to welcome another 250 kids into our City School of the Arts which is tuition and audition free, but we will need more resources to hire more teachers and purchase more musical instruments and visual art supplies for our additional students.
So, just a few weeks ago, we offered a camp called “Literacy Through the Arts.” It was inspired by the pioneering work of Mary Anne Wolf on the impact of reading books—actual books you hold in your hand–on the brain. The things the kids read came to life each day with art projects that highlighted the content of each book. They learned about building a family tree, how to hold a violin, the basic positions of ballet, and the color pallet used by Vincent Van Gogh. The children ended the week with a trip to Barnes and Noble where they had story time and saw the range of books and topics available to them. Their Hartford Public School ID enables them to take out books from the public library and what that means and how to do that was a focus of discussion. At the end of the camp, each of these children went home with 12 brand new books for them to keep, to add to or start their own library. Susan Mazer, the brilliant director of our City School of the Arts, said that these children came out of that camp with a new, deeper love of reading. Our goal was to help our students cultivate more of an appreciation for literature, provide them with the opportunity to experience the joy and comfort and calming effect on their nervous systems of reading, help them develop critical thinking skills and teach them that they can travel the world, learn about other people and cultures, deepen their capacity for empathy, without leaving their chair and for very little money, if any at all. Again, it could be argued, I suppose, that this a foolish use of resources during a time of crisis in our country and in the world.
And what about making art? In these fraught times is making art like Nero fiddling while Rome burned? Throughout the ages, so much criticism and cynicism has been and continues to be heaped on the artist and can so easily be internalized by them.
Virginia Woolf wrote this about the creative process and the feeling of foolishness, any artist can so easily feel:
“…anyone moderately familiar with the rigours of composition will not need to be told the story in detail; how they wrote and it seemed good; read and it seemed vile; corrected and tore up; cut out; put in; was in ecstasy, in despair; had one’s good nights and bad mornings; snatched at ideas and lost them; saw their book plain before them and it vanished; acted their people’s parts as they ate; mouthed them as they walked; now cried; now laughed; vacillated between this style and that; now preferred the heroic and pompous; next the plain and simple; now the vales of Tempe; then the fields of Kent or Cornwall; and could not decide whether they were the divinest genius or the greatest fool in the world.”
It seems to me that the greatest strides have been made, the greatest love known, the greatest experiences had when one is, by the standards of a world entranced by devices and technology, computers and their computations, foolish. Some people would use the word “crazy.” It seems to me that the other word for “foolish,” is actually courage. Courage to move beyond a simple calculus that centers on avoiding embarrassment, of avoiding discomfort, of avoiding pain. Foolishness is not for the faint-hearted.
For if we do not take these risks, what do we become? We will lose the joy of love, we will lose the joy of creating, we will contribute to and collaborate with those whose actions we secretly deplore, as we enable them. We are desperately in need of more of that kind of foolishness.
All innovation, it appears to me, is fueled by foolishness. It is the willingness of some to be ostracized and ridiculed and to risk failure that pushes us all forward. Thirty years ago, in an iconic Apple commercial, Steve Jobs read this:
Here’s to the crazy ones, the misfits, the rebels, the troublemakers, the round pegs in the square holes… the ones who see things differently — they’re not fond of rules… You can quote them, disagree with them, glorify or vilify them, but the only thing you can’t do is ignore them because they change things… they push the human race forward, and while some may see them as the crazy ones, we see genius, because the ones who are crazy enough to think that they can change the world, are the ones who do.
I believe we’d do well remember those words now.
In The Importance of Being Earnest, Wilde has his character Jack Worthing proclaim: “I am sick to death of cleverness. Everybody is clever nowadays. You can’t go anywhere without meeting clever people. The thing has become an absolute public nuisance. I wish to goodness we still had a few fools left.”
So, on this gorgeous summer morning, as we bask in the sweet company of each other, in this beautiful chapel, in this beautiful place, I want to invite us all to have the courage to be those fools who take the risks that love and a commitment to justice and the making of art all entail. Let us choose to be dreamers, let us be willing to be called crazy for seeing horizons where others see barriers, let us choose to embrace hope, in the midst of despair. Here’s to the foolishness that is love and creativity and a yearning for a world that cherishes and respects all life. Here’s to the courage it takes, even and especially in the face of what is ugly, to create that which is beautiful.