*For the Love of Teachers | Maya Tevet Dayan | 6 Minutes on Friday | August 28, 2026*
At the end of my undergraduate degree, an opportunity fell into my hands that would change my life forever, though I didn’t understand that at the time: the university announced that it was looking for teaching assistants. I thought it might be nice. I was working in journalism and advertising, and this seemed like another decent side job. I applied to teach philosophy and art, because that was what I had studied for my bachelor’s degree. And I was accepted to teach Indian philosophy.
.
Why Indian philosophy? In retrospect, it turned out that something about my grades had caught Professor Biderman’s eye when he called me in for an interview - and it wasn’t the good grades. Why, exactly, do you have such terrible grades alongside such excellent ones? Biderman asked me. That’s simple, I answered. I always excel at what I love, but I can’t excel if my heart isn’t in it.
.
You’re in, he announced, and those two words changed the course of my life. I spent that summer immersed in the intensive study of material I barely knew, but fell more deeply in love with every passing day. In the end, I taught about India for fifteen years at three universities in Israel and abroad, traveled there and back, lived there for extended periods, wrote a doctorate on Sanskrit poetry, and essentially left behind everything I had been doing before in order to devote myself to this love.
.
But even before all that, there was another moment that changed me: the moment I first walked into a university classroom as a teaching assistant. I was twenty-five. When I put my bag down beside the lecturer’s chair, several students who were older than I thought I had made a mistake and politely gestured for me to come sit beside them. When I began teaching that first class, my heart was beating so fast I became dizzy. I had never seen the classroom from that angle. No one had ever listened to every word I said with such attention. I remembered nothing and everything at once. I had never been so exhilarated. I had never felt so intensely that I had found my place in the world.
.
I have been teaching ever since that morning. Twenty-six years now. After I felt I had to leave academia, I taught private courses about India. Then, when I began writing poetry, I moved on to teaching writing. And when I studied feminism, I taught feminism. In fact, everything I learned, I always wanted to pass on, to infect others with my enthusiasm. And I wanted to talk about it with them, too - for them to ask me questions, for me to be able to answer “I don’t know,” and for their questions to make me learn more.
.
Because of my students’ questions, I published the book Feminism as I Taught It to My Daughters. I translated a book by the poet Dorianne Laux. Because of my encounters with students in the United States, I wrote essays about antisemitism. This is what my inner engine is made of - learning and teaching. But it was only when I came across poet Wisława Szymborska’s Nobel Prize lecture that I understood this. In her lecture, she spoke about inspiration and where it comes from, and this is what she said:
.
“Inspiration is not the exclusive privilege of poets or artists generally. There is, has been, and will always be a certain group of people whom inspiration visits. It’s made up of all those who’ve consciously chosen their calling and do their job with love and imagination. It may include doctors, teachers, gardeners – and I could list a hundred more professions. Their work becomes one continuous adventure as long as they manage to keep discovering new challenges in it. Difficulties and setbacks never quell their curiosity. A swarm of new questions emerges from every problem they solve. Whatever inspiration is, it’s born from a continuous “I don’t know.” [Wisława Szymborska’s 1996 Nobel Lecture, “The Poet and the World”]
.
That speech told the whole story of what I had felt: because my own inspiration, too, had always come from the people I taught. From their questions. From my own “I don’t know,” and from sleepless nights spent searching for answers, only to return to my students in the morning and stand before a whole new set of questions.
.
No wonder that these days, when you can already feel the first stirrings of a new school year, my heart expands at the thought of teachers about to open their classrooms, new courses, a fresh school year. Over the years I have written a great deal about teachers’ salaries, about the fact that most teachers are women, about this profession as pink-collar work. I have written about extraordinary teachers we have encountered and about teachers who make you wonder why they are in the profession at all, because like every parent in the school system, every year I move between peaks of exhilaration and abysses of despair.
.
But not at this time of year. These are the teachers’ holy days. Teachers within the school system and teachers like me, outside it. Teachers of children and teachers of adults, like me. These are the holy days of everyone for whom the very thought of students ignites the engine of inspiration and excitement in their body.
.
So in their honor, and in mine as well, I bring here one of the poems that moves me most, by the Polish poet Zbigniew Herbert. Many poems have been written about teachers. But this one is an elegy for a teacher, a poem of remembrance, the kind of poem that can only be written about a teacher who poured so much into you that the abundance keeps spilling out of you throughout the rest of your life.
.
As you will see, the poem hints at death from its very beginning. But also at immense vitality. And immense love. I will end with it, wishing all of us to remember the touch of eternity that exists between teacher and student, especially during these holy days of learning and teaching. And if you have joined me for the Season of Inspiration, which begins the day after tomorrow, we will also have a session of study and writing devoted to this very poem. Here it is:
.
*Biology Teacher / Zbigniew Herbert*
I cannot remember
his face
He towered over me
his long legs spread
and I saw
a gold chain
an ash-colored vest
and a scrawny neck
with a dead bow-tie
pinned on
he was first to show us
the leg of a dead frog
touched with a needle
it contracted violently
he led us
through golden binoculars
into the intimate life
of our ancestor
the paramecium
he brought in
a dark kernel
and said: ergot
on his insistence
I became a father
at the age of ten
when after a tense wait
a chestnut sunk in water
released a yellow shoot
and everything around
burst into song
in the second year of the war
our biology teacher was killed
by history’s schoolyard bullies
if he went to heaven-
perhaps he now strolls
along long rays of light
wearing gray stockings
with an enormous net
and with a green box
happily banging behind
but if he didn’t go up-
when on a path in summer
I meet a beetle clambering
over a mound of sand
I go up to it
make a bow
and say:
-good day Sir
permit me to assist you-
I transfer him gingerly
and watch him go off
until he has vanished
into his murky professor’s office
at the end of an avenue of leaves
.
Wishing all of us Shabbat Shalom and a school year filled with inspiration,
.
*Maya Tevet Dayan*