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Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy Commencement Address June 2020

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Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy Commencement Address June 2020 Jack M. Barrack Hebrew Academy Commencement Address June 2020 Good evening. I would like us all to take a deep breath. Look around the room — both IRL and virtual — the people you are with. Now close your eyes. Let’s take a moment of silence. Our country is hurting right now as we mourn the lives of George Floyd, Ahmaud Arbery, and Breonna Taylor and over 100,000 U.S. lives lost to COVID-19. These are heartbreaking times. Now… let’s open our eyes, take another deep breath, look around you, and turn our attention to celebrating. When I first saw the email from Sharon and her team asking to have a conversation about the Class of 2020, I thought to myself, “What could this possibly be about?” I agreed to a Zoom meeting, “back then” when Zoom was a novelty for many. Sharon, in what I have come to know as her inimitable fashion – full of vim and vigor, full of passion – proceeded to inform me that she, her team, and you, the Class of 2020, wanted to know if I would be willing and able to come to Philly in June to speak at your graduation. I was floored. Speechless. Not generally an adjective commonly used to describe me. All kinds of thoughts raced through my head in rapid-fire succession: What? Me? Seriously? Why? What could I possibly have to offer? (especially compared to “Famous” alums, like Jake Tapper and Mitch Albom who I understand have graced the commencement dais in years past?) Sharon, perhaps sensing my apprehension, jumped onto my train, or train wreck, of thought and said: This is an Amazing Class They are Our Largest to Date They are Athletic They are Gay, Straight, Allied, and Aligned They are Thoughtful They are Deeply Engaged in Jewish Community They are Diverse You, Wendy, have so much to offer to them. 1 Well, that moved me to the next phase of “Whoa, OK, this is awesome… I can do this — I want to do this!” And so I started throwing out ideas of what I could talk about and, in so doing, went from incredulous and speechless to, well, stoked. The floodgates had opened into a stream of deep and fond memories of my time at Akiba, as well as ideas centered on your time at Barrack. We were cooking with gas. I told Sharon and Rebecca I would be honored. And I meant it. We sealed the deal. I put a pin in it. Meaning, for me, I went into hyper logistics. I have flown 2.5 million miles on United and another 1 million on other airlines since I began my, well, third or fourth career — depending on how you count — and am constantly on the road. I blocked out the dates on my calendar to be sure that I could attend my daughter Gaby’s graduation from her “small school” at Berkeley High on June 5, with 200 graduates, on the front end, and the “whole school” senior class commencement with 800 kids in her class on June 13, on the back end. Beautifully, miraculously, June 11 fit right in the middle. It was all going to work out. With logistics squared away for the time being, I put this speech on my long-term to-do list and smiled at the prospect. That was back when the world was, normal. Less than six months ago. Fast Forward. By the middle of March it had become apparent that all of my plans, and way more importantly, all of YOUR plans, were likely not to be. I sent an email to Sharon and Rebecca suggesting we set a time to talk. They agreed. Slight diversion — by this point, I was sheltering in place at our second home on the Northern Sonoma coast. With a bout of pneumonia only a year behind me and two autoimmune conditions, one of which is alopecia, which you can see by the fact that I have no hair on my head, not by choice(!), my doctor strongly advised that I “get out of Dodge” (in this case, Berkeley) fast. And so on March 16, my life-partner Peg, our youngest daughter Gaby (the senior at Berkeley High), and our foreign exchange student from Germany, Esther, piled in our cars and drove 2.5 hours north. Within a matter of days, two things became abundantly apparent: First, Esther’s year abroad living with us would be cut short — she would have to go back to Germany soon. Second, the despondency and despair of the inevitable loss of so many rites of passage at the end of Gaby’s high school career had begun to take hold and the isolation of this space — so good for me — was so terrible for her. As I set out to share some thoughts with you this evening, I want to say that while I don’t know most of you, I can relate. As the parent of a high school senior, class of 2020, I can relate. As a graduate of this amazing school, I can relate. My hope is that you find in something of what I say here tonight something you can relate to. 2 One of my professors at Stanford, where I did my PhD in Education, advised me before my oral defense: “tell them what you are going to say, then say it, then remind them of what you said.” So, in homage to this professor… In this talk, that I hope will be followed by some rich conversation, I hope to take you on a journey, akin to the one we just traversed between Pesach and Shavuot. This journey I hope to take you on starts with Yitziat Mitzrayim, our exodus from Egypt, moves to the Omer, where I will talk about counting, then on to Matan Torah, and ends with Redemption — in this case, a charge for the future — your future. Because I was told that all good commencement speeches must have a “charge” at the end. Let’s see how I do. ——— In Chapter 12 of Shemot, we learn about the Israelites’ exodus from Egypt. The text states: 38 And a mixed multitude went up also with them; and flocks, and herds, even very much cattle. A mixed multitude also went up (out of Egypt) with them, the Israelites. The Torah, which is at best a spartan document with so much left open for inference and filling in, for some reason goes to the trouble of telling us, in this most propitious moment of our collective history, that we left Egypt along with, a PART OF, a mixed multitude. What could this possibly mean? Rashi, compelled to comment on the phrase “erev rav”, says that the “ ”, that is, a mingling of various nations of converts to Judaism. Ibn Ezra, one of Rashi’s contemporaries, takes a different tack. He contends that the “erev rav” were Egyptians (non-Jews and non-converts) who had, in Egypt, been “mixed in” with the Israelites. He uses the Hebrew – which has been translated by many as “riffraff” but actually comes from the Hebrew word “gather” (le’esof)– meaning, those that were gathered among them, which is a much friendlier and I daresay more accurate translation of the word. While these two readings are pretty much descriptive and, inasmuch, a “positive” reading and rendering of the text – it turns out that most of the rabbis of the Midrash and Talmud tend to disfavor the “erev rav” – the mixed multitude – scapegoating them for any number of failings and backslidings by the Israelites during their desert wandering. These failings and backslidings include, on the most severe, the making of the egel zahav, the golden calf, as they, the mixed multitude, collectively, stood at Sinai, to the more general protests of complaints and ingratitude expressed by B’nei Yisrael all along the 40-year journey. Aside from Rashi and Ibn Ezra, so far, our view of the “erev rav” – the mixed multitude – is not a pretty one. It gets worse. Much worse. Haim Vital, an influential 16th Century Kabbalist who was a student of the famed Isaac Luria, went so far as to state, in Sefer Ha-liqqutin, that “the essence of sin of Adam was that he wanted to draw near to him the mixed multitude … And Moses followed the same pattern when he drew to him the mixed multitude, and 3 they destroyed and degraded the yolk by making the calf and we are still in exile and will not be redeemed until we are cleansed and purified from them.” There are many more texts and examples I can bring of how this negative and disparaging view of the “erev rav” – the mixed multitude — has been pervasive in our collective consciousness — persisting through millennia, even into contemporary times. Suffice it to say, our sages and our community has struggled with, has had mixed emotions about, our mixed multitudeness since our very beginnings. That’s our moment of Exodus. ——— Now I want to turn to Omer – to counting. Judaism has tons of rules about counting. What gets counted, who gets counted, how we count (or don’t). Our liturgy, our laws, and our lore are filled with them. A biggie is that we are not supposed to count Jews – as the prophet Hoshea says, “And the number of the children of Israel shall be as the sand of the sea, which shall neither be measured nor counted.” But we do. The first attempt to estimate the Jewish population in the U.S. post-World War II was in 1957 – when a single question was added to the U.S.
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