Class of 2024 Graduation with Inspiring Messages from Principal Jeremy and Vice-Principal Gary

Message from Principal Jeremy Stowe-Lindner

Let me share with you something about the Bialik College logo. It was thoughtfully redesigned a few years ago. It is a tree with 18 leaves, the 18 leaves representing the numerical value of the Hebrew word Chai, or life.

If you look closely at the tree, it has two pointed roots. Whilst the branches and leaves reach upwards, towards light, the roots point firmly into the ground.

Each of these two roots represent two separate but interconnected things. Family and Community.

The metaphor of the logo works well, I think. Trees are a potent symbol in Judaism – we even have a new year for them – and the aspirational growth of the leaves and branches reflecting the transition from childhood to adulthood, with family and community feeding the tree, that’s certainly a truism too.

But what then? What happens when you leave the warm embrace of these solid roots, and you have to make your own way in the world.

What happens when the winds of change rock the tree, force it to consider new directions, experiences – some good, some bad, and family and community are not quite so close, not quite so present.

I always think about this when I prepare my speech each year for the graduating, but this year I have felt haunted by a juxtaposed image.

So many of those murdered, kidnapped and so many other horrors in between on that terrible day of October 7 last year were not much older than you. Over the last few months we have seen and heard of images and brutalities that we could not have dreamt of in our worst nightmares, in settings that were believed to be safe and secure. Bedrooms, kitchens, gardens, cars, music concerts, kindergartens and kibbutzim, people cherished in the arms of parents and grandparents who are supposed to protect them.

And the ensuing horror – the horror of war for both sides on this terrible conflict – and we must not lose sympathy and empathy for every life – the horror of war has returned.

One thing I think we have all struggled to make sense of is not just the horror itself, but the motivation behind those who perpetrated the horror of 7 October, who crusaded into villages and towns, kibbutzim and farms, and murdered so many people – children, old people, women, men. If 1,500 Hamas terrorists were killed on that day, there must have been at least double that number at least who charged in to slaughter.

They too graduated from school. They grew up in households and were nurtured by their parents. They too had lessons in religion, language. They too will have learned mathematics and poetry, geography and play.

What was going through their minds when they committed with their crimes?

In Rabbi Hartman’s new book Putting God Second, he recalls the story in the Talmud that tells us the tale of Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai who, with his son, fled to a cave after the Romans decreed he be put to death. His crime? Criticising the public works of the Romans. He’d said that they only built bridges for taxes, baths to rejuvenate themselves and marketplaces for brothels. Anyway, Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai and his son Eliezer fled to a cave where they sunk into the sand, with only their heads above the surface. Sustained by a carob tree and a well that God created for them, they lived in the cave. They learnt Torah, and became purely immersed in learning and study.

After 12 years the Prophet Elijah told them that since the Emperor Hadrian had died, the death sentence was lifted and they could leave the cave.

But when they saw normal things, like a farmer ploughing his field, they were disgusted that people were not studying Torah and worshipping God. They were so outraged and so holy that whatever they saw with their eyes turned to flames. They burnt everything through their righteousness.

They killed and they destroyed.

Presumably they were motivated by two things. Firstly outrage at the perceived injustice that they saw, and secondly they were seeking the approval of God. After all, doesn’t God want perfection and purity.

But God did not respond in the way they expected. Rather than praise, the Talmud tells us that God was horrified. Surveying the seen of death and destruction God issues some terrible and heart-wrenching words.

Who asked this of you? And a second time. Who asked this of you?

Now let’s pause the story there and consider the author of the book that references this story. Do you remember last year an American Rabbi called Doniel Hartmann spoke with you? We were in the hall and he chatted on the sofa with you. Anyway, Rabbi Hartman tries to explain the people that Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai and his son Eliezer became. They were, says Donniel, intoxicated with God. They were drunk on God, and drunk on their own righteousness.

Donniel asks, is this what God wants? Fundamentalists who are intoxicated with their own self belief? After all, God gave them the carob tree and the well. So instead of approval, God is furious – furious - and sends them back to the cave for punishment for another year. ‘Who asked this of you?’ cries God in condemnation. ‘Who asked this of you?’

What did they get wrong? They failed to contextualise their righteousness and their learning. They were too linear in their thinking. They didn’t put their study and purity in the context of the world that had been created – world which after creation, Genesis tells us that God remarked ‘ki tov’ – it is good. And a world that having created man, remarked that ‘ki tov m’od’ – for it is very good.

So they went back to their cave for 12 months and then emerged again. Now you’d have thought they’d have emerged perfect after that story. But they didn’t. The Talmud tells us that Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai healed where Rabbi Eliezer continued to destroy. And even Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai’s repentance is an illusion – every time he fixes his son’s excesses, he says ‘you and I are enough’. Even the healer’s indifference to suffering is staggering.

As Donniel Hartmann says, this story is a testimony to the powerful attraction, the misguided destructiveness, of being intoxicated.

Intoxicated with what? With God? With self belief? With righteousness?

Is this what happened on 7 October? Were those murderous rampagers intoxicated on their own righteousness, were they intoxicated with hatred, with self belief? It seems they were so consumed with this that there was no space for seeing humanity in their zeal. We would be right to echo God’s desperate cry: Who asked this of you?

Who asked this of you?

Back to October last year, we have a recording of one of the terrorists, an intercept of a phone call of him calling his parents to tell them he had killed some Jews. I’ve listened to that recording and read its translation.

And the response of the parents is more deafening and more devastating than that of God. I won’t share it with you, but if ever there was a failure of parenting, of morality, or ethics, of care for humans, it was in their response to their son.

What they should have said is this. Who asked this of you.

How do we as a community respond to this ourselves? How do we respond to their horror? How do we do the right thing, the just thing, how do we defend ourselves, whilst not becoming similarly intoxicated. How do we carry on whilst continuing to carry our own humanity with us.

Class of 2024, I believe this is the challenge of our times.

I am not asking you to reach out with flowers to those who hate and kill. I am not asking you to forgive and forget. They are still holding our precious hostages and they are not letting them go. Others are firing rockets on our people from near and afar.

Unfortunately now is a time for war.

But – and this is the point – But there will be a time, there must be a time, when we make peace with our enemies. After all, you don’t make peace with your friends. And there will be a time when we each need to detox ourselves from our positions, and find ways to co-exist.

Class of 2024, you graduate from the warm embrace of your school into a world of shouting, protests, slights and slurs, into a Zionism that is as challenging as it is challenged.

What I ask of you is that you do not become intoxicated with self belief and I ask you to find space for doubt.

Pure self belief and the absence of doubt forces us to reject the views and the viewpoints of others, and in its extremity makes us fear the alternative, the opposite and apposite. As Rabbi Yoda says Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

Class of 2024, you have graduated from a pluralistic school, one in which you have been immersed in a culture of thinking. Think critically of all around you. Emerge from your cave not as Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai and Eliezer, but as the rabbis of the Talmud who bravely told the story so we can learn from it, be frightened by it. Do not become so consumed with righteousness, correctness, that we act in ways where others have to cry Who asked this of you?

Class of 2024, if any year level can do this, it is you. You are known to be a menschlich year level that has each other’s backs. A year level that is quirky and kind, bright and positive.

Do you remember when Gary and I spoke with you to discuss with you your final day of school, and we reflected on the Muckup Days of yesteryear, when young children were frightened to come to school and mess was created that people on minimum wage were expected to clear up, and we said These are not our values. And we also reflected on the juxtaposition of private school Jewish kids in October 2024 against those of graduates in

Beersheva, or Tel Aviv, or Metula, or Lebanon or Gaza – and we knew that our Celebration Day had to be a different one to years of old.

And I looked around the room and wondered which of you would not rise to the occasion, and I can honestly say that I could not conceive of any of you not being kind, and decent, and generous in thought, deed and action.

Consider how you acted in your final day of school. You had a great time, and you were positive and joyful, you flourished as a year level and as a group, yet your roots – your family and your community – were ones that you relied back on to give you the moral barometer of how to do this with kindness and dignity.

You are exactly what your parents hope for – you are menschlich, and kind, and supportive.

And now, as you step forth with courage from your home in Bialik, your friendships, your care and love for each other, have and will sustain you.

You stand on the cusp of independence. So stay together, support each other, laugh together, have a sense of perspective together, and your relationships will be the inoculations, the vaccinations, to protect you and sustain you throughout your lives.

You have developed these friendships through, for most of you, the 15 years you have spent in your cave, here at Bialik. And you have emerged not as fundamentalists with the frightful worldview of Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai and his son Eliezer, or linear thinkers, or exclusive of the ideas or beliefs of others. You emerge from this cave with shared experiences and memories, a composite of togetherness and time, and with an outlook that is kind, outward looking and inclusive.

Friends, keep doing what you are doing, and you will turn wherever you are in the world, whatever you are doing, whoever you are with, not into the cave of Rabbi Shimon bar Yokhai but into the home that you have made here in the Bialik family.

Have confidence in your roots, but do not be so confident in your opinions that your zeal over-rides your duty of kindness to other humans.

Let’s end on another Talmudic story, this time of Rav Ishmael ben Elisha, who said I once entered into the innermost part of the temple to offer incense, and I saw – seated upon a high and exalted throne – Akatriel Yah Adonai Tz’va-ot, who said to me ‘My son Ishmael, bless Me!’ I replied: ‘May it be Your will that Your mercy prevail over Your other attributes, so that You deal with Your children through the attribute of mercy and, on their behalf, not be constrained by strict justice! Akatriel Yah Adonai Tz’va-ot nodded to me.

Class of 2024 this is the worldview we aspire for you. Your ATARs are not read out at your funeral. But your menschlichkeit, your treatment of your friends and your family – these are the things that are. There is a time for justice, but there is also an over-arching time for mercy and for love.

Be wary of extremes, treat with scepticism those who are confident they are always right, keep your critical eye and your open heart, and I wish you everything you hope for in Health and Happiness, rooted in Community and Family, next year

Message from Gary Velleman, Vice Principal and Head of Senior School

Before I formally address the class of ’24, I wanted to first thank the amazing and dedicated team of staff, both lay and professional, all the way from our Children’s Centre through to our VCE teachers. Bialik is a community of carers, and in the high-pressured area of Year 12, the support of homeroom teachers, this year in Jennifer McKenzie, Michelle Zvedeniuk and Anat Tobias, played an important role in your children’s wellbeing.

With our careers’ counsellors, Jeni Ritterman and Lindy Lifszyc, who tonight also proudly wears the hat of a mother of a graduate, our students have been able to source bespoke advice and information to help them with their post-secondary choices. Naturally, the glue that keeps the senior school together, the indomitable Shelley Cameron, knows every child, their peccadillos, needs and is a logistical genius, able to juggle the complex rooming and supervision of all, applying a particularly sensitive lens for those with special arrangements.

Notwithstanding the aforementioned, tonight represents a particularly significant event at the College and I wish to take a moment to acknowledge and thank the astonishing, Mark Lenga. For 34 years, I have been privileged to work with someone whose DNA is constituted from an amalgam of the purest intent to ensure his students are 100% cared for.

Never have I been around a more committed, professional, networked (and particularly to key people at the VCAA who drop everything when he calls), organised, fair, decent and honourable colleague. The hours of energy expended in conversations, the writing of supporting documentation, driving our graduation events and the coordination of Year 12s over decades, often after hours and unseen, were all motivated by his care for each student.

Bialik is better for Mark’s remarkable years of service and I am better for having the fortune to have worked so closely with him for many years. On behalf of the entire school community, I thank Mark for his dedicated service, for the difference he has made, for the better, for so many students and wish him happiness, great health, travel, the joys only a grandparent can experience and the speedy development of a wicked forehand drive as he takes his lawn bowls career to the next level.

It was only two score and two, or for the young and hip in the audience, three baker’s dozen and three years ago that I was sitting where you, our dear graduates of 2024, currently are. Though becoming an ever-diminishing memory, I do recall an old cantankerous Vice Principal delivering his speech, full of pearls for the departing students. Oh, how I wished I had listened more closely!

As you can imagine, there are many events that I attend over the course of a school year, but none is as enjoyable or highly anticipated as this one. The cynics among you may think this is because I finally get to see the back of you, but in truth, tonight is my favourite evening as it transports me back to the end of my student days, fills me with a sense of nostalgia, making me a little green with envy for the futures that lay ahead for you.

Another turning point, a fork stuck in the road

Time grabs you by the wrist, directs you where to go 

So make the best of this test, and don't ask why

It's not a question, but a lesson learned in time

It's something unpredictable 

But in the end, it's right

I hope you had the time of your life

Over the last 15 years, most of you will have enjoyed, some of you endured, several avoided, plenty rationalised, justified, enabled, perverted, defended, argued, played, fallen, obfuscated, hidden, embraced and accessed school, all the while evolving into the young adults you have become.

Moving forward, life becomes a little less structured, and much more self-directed and driven. As exciting as this appears, and many of you will thrive in this new paradigm, the adjustment for others will be more taxing, challenging and discombobulating.

Chekov observed that, “Love, friendship and respect do not unite people as much as common hatred for something.” Sadly, you leave Bialik during a moment in history where his observation appears to be playing out in front of our eyes daily. One of your many challenges is to undermine the opinion he posited – I would argue that only through the union of love, friendship and respect that common hatred will meet its conqueror.

Around two-and-a-half thousand years ago, and for about 20 years, Aristotle was Plato's student and colleague at the Academy in Athens, an institution for philosophical, scientific, and mathematical research and teaching. One day when walking together Aristotle turned to ask his mentor, “Which is more important, the journey or the destination?” After a short pause, Plato replied, “Neither - it’s the company!”

On a night such as this, and particularly as you begin your journeys exploring the four corners of the globe; to travel, to study, to live and work, and to embrace life beyond the shtetls of Melbourne and Bialik, the message of comradery, mateship, support and a shared experience could not be more salient.

For many of us here, it was the friendships we built and the collective memories created at school that form the cornerstone of lifetime connections. It never ceases to amaze me that one of the great realisations that comes with getting older is that one rarely laughs as hard as one did when a school student or when back in the company of those with whom we went through school, yet as adults, we will get plenty of opportunity to cry more intensely.

You leave here to face the real world, the big world. Your VCE results, the focus of almost single-minded attention for many of you, will arrive shortly (perhaps) and pass even more quickly.

Rest assured, the result won’t protect you from illness, accident or injury, from sadness, pain and the vagaries you will inevitably encounter; neither will it guarantee contentment, wealth or success. Celebrate if pleased, mope for a bit if disappointed and then move on – because the world will whether you come along for the ride or not.

You won’t not be judged by whether there is a number, or by how big or small the number may be after your name, and if anyone elects to use that measure, I encourage you to find better company. As Tom Brady, the greatest quarterback in American Football history notes without any reference to ATARs or SATs, “Understand this. Life is hard and to be successful at anything, the truth is, you don’t have to be special, you just have to be what most people aren’t; consistent, determined and willing to work for it. No Shortcuts!”

None of us is truly aware of the calculus of life. What is apparent, to quote the great UCLA College basketball coach, John Wooden, who spent decades identifying the characteristics and traits that help define a successful person, is that, “Things turn out best for the people who make the best of the way things turn out.” So, as you enter the next phase of your life, channel Ernest Hemmingway, the novelist, sportsman, world traveller, and war correspondent, “Before you react, think. Before you spend, earn. Before you criticize, wait. Before you quit, try.”

And finally, while your body will age, and eventually creak and moan, hang on tight to your inner youthful exuberance, disposition and attitude. In his classic children’s book, Winnie the Pooh, A. A. Milne’s ends with, “Whichever way they go in the enchanted forest, a little boy and his bear will always be playing together.”

Don’t sacrifice your playfulness, your joyfulness by an unconscious need to validate your existence. Play is so important, and joy is so important. I encourage you, the Graduating Class of ’24, to always keep playing in the enchanted forest – together!

Dirchu Na’Oz – thank you.