“Something there is,” wrote Robert Frost, “that doesn’t love a wall.” You wouldn’t know it from traversing Frost’s native New England, where woods are crossed by thousands of miles of stone walls. Skilled craftsmen once carefully chose rocks that fit together so tightly that even without any mortar, these walls still stand centuries later. We’ve largely forgotten those craft skills, the enormous wisdom in the hands that enables people to do skilled carpentry or sew their own clothing. We think we don’t need it, in our modern world. We can buy ready-made products or hire people to fix things. But that’s wrong. Here’s why we do:
Some people excel at school smarts – the note-taking and test-taking that we make all of our kids spend 9, 10 hours a day at. But some don’t. (This isn’t about smart or not smart – school calls for one very particular kind of smart. There are many.) And for those kids, school can be one endless demoralization, labeling them as unsuccessful. That inflicts all kinds of harm on them – not least, often leading to their alienation from Judaism which they perceive as related to their sense of not-good-enough-ness. If we valued, recognized, made more space for the wisdom of the hands, we’d allow more people to feel successful, accomplished, seen in our community. We might do a better job at embracing all of us, not just the ones who can excel at school tasks.
Maybe we should learn to love walls.
