Principal Jeremy Stowe-Lindner's Speech to Class of 2023

Friends, I must confess that I have agonised over this speech more than any in recent times. I wrote it a few weeks ago, and last week I tore it up and started again, the world around us is changing very quickly, and the world that you have started Year 12 in – or indeed started the final term of your school career in, on 2nd October, is very different to the world that we find ourselves in today.

The scourge of antisemitism throughout the western world has returned, and on October 7 our people faced its darkest day since the Holocaust.

I changed my speech because the one I wrote in September doesn’t work any more. It doesn’t reflect today’s reality.

I have reflected a great deal on how to learn something from that terrible day on October 7. I won’t go into the graphic detail of it – many of you will have seen or 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, in the arms of parents and grandparents who are supposed to protect us.

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 have struggled to make sense of is 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 double that number at least who charged in to slaughter.

What can we learn from this. Is there anything to learn? And does it have relevance to you, our graduating class.

Well, let us tonight try the impossible.

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 were stripped off their clothes and 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.

Now let’s pause the story there and consider the author of the book that references this story. Do you remember a few months ago 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 back to the story, 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?

How do we 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 2023, 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. Unfortunately now is a time for war.

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 2023, 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 2023, 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 2023, 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.

Consider how you acted in your final week of school. Your week began with the 7 October massacre and the final day of your schooling was not and could not be what you dreamt it would be.

When you were asked to have no outward celebration in those terrible few days after the massacre did you complain? You did not.

When we came together as a school community did you focus on coming together as a community, as caring for and loving each other? You did.

Did you step back into yourselves, into despair, into depression or did you step forth with courage and lead. And hold your heads up high.

And then you stepped into your VCEs, you made your way through the VCE period with courage, with dignity, with resilience and with kindness.

How did you do this?

You did this because you as a year level, and you as individuals proved that you are exactly what we hope for, what your parents hope for – you are menschlich, and kind, and supportive.

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, or linear thinkers, or exclusive of the ideas or beliefs of others. You have emerged 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.

Class of 2023, your ATARs are not read out at your funeral. But your menschlichkeit, your treatment of your friends and your family, your positive impact on the 3rd
rock from the sun during our brief and oscillating time on it – these are the things that are. Be wary of extremes, treat with scepticism those who are confident they are right, keep your critical eye and your open heart, and I wish you everything you hope for in your Health and Happiness, Community and Family next year and in the years to come.