By Tennyson Wheeler, Year 11 – Emanuel School
Tisha B’Av is the saddest day of the Jewish calendar, a commemoration of the destruction of the First and Second Temples, as well as the many other tragedies in our shared history. And on this day, it is important to ask a rather simple question: “how?”
On this day, we have a responsibility not just to commemorate, but to reflect, asking not just how the world came to face the tragedies we mourn, but how we can learn and rebuild from them and ultimately how we can grow from it. This speech is about the essential element of dreaming of the how.
What does it mean to dream? I know it’s a silly question, but I want to take it seriously.
Perhaps it’s that you want to ace the test. Perhaps you want to get in shape, or travel the world, or write a book, or become rich, or famous. Or perhaps not.
Or perhaps these aren’t dreams.
Because what I’ve imagined so far is, ultimately, achievable. Because truly, a dream is to pierce through the veil of the ordinary, to look beyond the horizon: it is a thing distant enough to inspire you, yet close enough to keep you walking. But somewhere along the way, we stopped chasing the extraordinary and settled for the achievable.
We tell ourselves we’re dreaming, but we’re not really. Because we’ve forgotten that essential element of wonder.
Some of us try. We read the books, take the courses, chase the feeling of change. It may make you feel brand new. It probably won’t.
Because the thing is, we’ve forgotten how to dream.
We have been confined by ourselves. We have reenvisioned society and become domesticated by comfort. We’ve stopped trying to change the world and started trying to find our place within it. We have traded dreaming for security, a fault purely of our own.
There’s a line from a film, Up in the Air. How much did they pay you to give up on your dreams?
The line isn’t about money, because nobody pays anyone to give up on their dreams. Instead, it is a government that shields us from hardship, a workplace that protects us from conflict, and a culture of parenting that removes obstacles from their child’s path before it could be overcome alone.
So, it should be no surprise that when someone says they want to be a musician, or a writer, or an actor, the first question back is always, “Okay, but what’s your backup plan?” Because they’ve dared to be uncomfortable. And we’ve built a culture around eliminating discomfort.
And look at what that has let us settle for: We put ourselves into debt for 30 years to afford a house. We work a meaningless job for 30 years in order to have money to retire. And 30 years later, we fade into obscurity. And we do it because that’s the way it’s done.
But it wasn’t always this way. For centuries, we did not merely experience life. We took it by the reins and became the masters of our fate. We wrote our own stories instead of waiting for one to be written for us.
That is what it means to dream. And that is how we dream again: by picking up the pen, by choosing the discomfort, by never settling for the ordinary.
I dream to dream again.