Graduation Speech
By Avi Small, Class of 2011
June 19, 2011

January 29, 2011
It’s a Saturday night, and surprisingly, the dining hall is filled with students. The lights are dimmed. Three stars have appeared in the sky. The class of 2011 stands in a circle, paying rapt attention to the leader holding a brightly lit candle in the middle. They wrap their arms around each other, begin to sing a familiar tune and sway in time with the music. Then the leader finishes and blows out the candle. The tune is over, the moment is gone, and the basketball team goes off to prepare for its upcoming game against Maimonides.

What you have here is a classic Gann Academy moment. At least half of the grade has come together for our final Shabbaton where we celebrated Shabbat together. For the preceding 25 hours, we had eaten together, slept together, sang together, talked together, relaxed together and prayed together. But now, we’re almost done with the Shabbaton and are standing in the dining hall for the ceremony called “Havdalah,” — or “Separation” — which marks the end of Shabbat and the beginning of the regular week. In this one moment we have combined the following crucial aspects of the Gann experience:

First, the candle. The significance of the lit flame on the Havdalah candle is one that stretches back to our class’ introductory meeting with Rabbi Baker on step up day four years ago. That morning, he excitedly told us of the joys of “firing it up.” It’s a metaphor that has stayed with us since then, not only because our head of school himself seemed so lit up by the prospect, but because this spirit has stayed with us since then. The idea of firing it up, of touching something with the potential to be great and setting it aflame with our passion while illuminating the entire building in the process is a theme which threads through the four years which followed.

Next, the tune. Gann Academy is notoriously song-happy. From the ninth grade orientation, at which new students are taught some classic Gann favorites, to the senior Ma’avar program where seven of my classmates chose to do some sort of musical or composition project, each class at Gann is constantly setting something to music. It’s not uncommon to walk down the hall at lunch and hear three voices harmonizing in the music room, or a ukulele, harmonica, piano and steel drum jamming in the lobby. Of course, we don’t only express ourselves in song. We’re plenty happy to show our artistic talent in the darkroom, on the easel or in the kiln, or to raise our voices in protest or in debate.

Then, there’s the basketball game. Immediately following the Shabbaton, this inter-judeo-scholastic competition is classic Gann. We transitioned out of Shabbat and came here to the gym, bringing a spirit and an eccentricity that is unique to our school. We don’t have cheerleaders, we just have fans who shout pithy Gann-isms like “Plu-ra-li-sm!!!” from the sidelines, and the games begin with the American and Israeli national anthems. But, our teams are not just quirky; they’re also pretty darn good. As the banners all around this room can attest, we’ve had quite a bit of athletic success. We owe our success to our unique identity; the set of standards to which we hold all our athletes is itself uniquely Gann, placing an emphasis not only on good sport but also on good sportsmanship.

You also have all those standing in the circle. The class of 2011 was joined at Havdalah by faculty chaperones who had chosen to spend this weekend with their students. This too is typical Gann. Jewish and non-Jewish faculty members alike were standing arm-in-arm with their students, singing and dancing along. That weekend, teachers had brought along their children to spend time with us students. They had shared with us their stories from childhood, their philosophical musings, their favorite board games and song tunes, and even some of their most age-appropriate children’s books. It was almost easy for 25 hours to forget that these friendly adults were the very same people who had subjected us to some of the most challenging, rigorous and rewarding coursework over the past four years. Almost.

But the most archetypical Gann part of this very Gann Havdalah was the act of Havdalah itself. Havdalah exists in this strange in-between space between the religious and the secular. We break Shabbat and light a candle, ready to enter the secular week, but smell the cinnamon sticks to bring some of the sweetness and sanctity of Shabbat in with us to our normal lives. Havdalah is our way of marking the intersection of the secular and the sacred.

At Gann, we exist in this tension every day. We struggle with how to balance these two different but intimately connected parts of who we are as a school. What sets Gann apart, what truly makes Gann unique is how we struggle with the tensions between the secular and the sacred, bein kodesh l’chol. That’s why simply referring to our school by the name “Gann Academy” is kind of misleading, when the school’s full name is “Gann Academy, the New Jewish High School of Greater Boston.” You see the word “Academy” in print, you drive down Forest Street and towards our spectacular building and you think you’re approaching a conventional school. Really, though, you’re just approaching NewJew, a place where we have always done and will continue to do things that are truly revolutionary. As it turns out, we added the word Academy to our school’s name as a reflection of our dual identity; in English the word conjures up images of a classic New England School but translated in Hebrew as Yeshiva, it reminds us of our Jewish roots. If you’re looking for the “normal high school experience,” you’ve come to the wrong place. We do things differently here; we’re quirky. Gann will never be your typical independent school. We are defined not only by our academic, athletic and artistic successes but by our unique and precarious status as one of the only schools in the entire country which successfully and simultaneously combines the religious and the secular. NewJew is the marker which stands between these competing values; to paraphrase Amos Oz, this is the crossroads where we belong. This is the school from which we, in about ten minutes, will be graduating.

When you think about it, there’s something a bit incongruous about Graduation. It comes at a strange point in the year where we’ve already been done with classes for a while, but are still a few months away from our post-high school plans. For a few months, we exist in this vacuum where the perfectly harmless question “where do you go to school” for the first time in your life makes you stop and think. We no longer have a simple answer. We can blabber on that, well, actually-I’m-done-with-High-School-classes-but-Gann-has-this-interesting-internship-program-and-really-it’s-a-great-opportunity-but-its-not-school-and-oh-I’m-going-to-college-next-year-did-you-know-so-to-answer-the-question-um-I-don’t-know. We’re stuck in this in-between space, neither in high school nor finished with it, but we’re still supposed to somehow mark today as something special. We have to march out through the doors in the back of the gym and be different from the people we were when we came in.

June 19, 2011
It’s a Sunday afternoon, but the gym is filled with students, teachers and family members. The class of 2011 sits right here, participating in their graduation. For these few hours today, Graduation is our Havdalah. It is our way of marking our place between the opposites of old and new, home and away, Gann and whatever lies ahead. We sit here in this gym, changed from who and how we were four years ago, ready to leave, and sanctified by this ceremony. After all, to sanctify in Hebrew, L’kadesh not only means to become holy but also to become separate and unique; distinct from who we were before. Pretty soon, the ceremony will be over and the moment will be gone. There’s really no telling what happens next.