Last week, on May 22, in New York’s Louis Armstrong Stadium, the city’s Yeshiva University held its graduation ceremony. Its head, Rabbi Dr. Ari Berman, presented an honorary doctorate to a woman who has become a hero to so many of us since October 7. I’m speaking, of course about Rachel Goldberg-Polin, mother of the late and great Hersh Goldberg-Polin, who was killed brutally by Hamas along with five others while in captivity. (An award named after Hersh — the Ohr Shel Hersh Award— was also inaugurated at the ceremony.)
Her speech for the new graduates contained in it beautiful guidelines for how to live in order to make the world a better place.
She started out with gratitude, noting that the root for the Hebrew word for “gratitude/thank you” is also found in the Hebrew word for “Jewish.” She talked about Sarah Milgrim and Yaron Lischinsky, sending to their parents comfort from the heavens and saying that her heart and soul are with them, and that they did everything right.
She then went on to talk about an incident she had as a 7-year-old on a seesaw, when the girl across from her suddenly stood up — a moment that ended with her face down on the handlebar in front of her with a few teeth knocked out and that “curtailed any future aspirations of me becoming a nose model,” she joked. More than anything, the incident taught her a lesson she keeps coming back to: “I try to remember how challenging but important it is not to stand on the ends nor go to extremes.”
The Jewish mother then went on to talk about how Rambam shared with us a similar lesson, urging us to “seek the golden mean, the middle, the balance, staying in that center and not edging out to the extreme ends is what keeps us all agile and questioning, seeking and thinking. It keeps us on our toes. The temptation, of course, is to be black or white, on, off, left, right, early, late, up, down, empty, full, all or nothing, because then no introspection is needed. Contemplating, grappling, reasoning, not necessary. The salty, tasty extreme is comforting. It’s fun, and sometimes it even feels righteous. But Rambam implores us to push to that tricky, but revered middle the, ‘Wait a minute,’ the, ‘How can it be so?'”
It’s such an important message to impart at a time when our digital world urges us to flatten everything and live in the extreme, when people even tell us that the extreme is the only righteous way to be.
She spoke about Rav Kook and how he said that if a halakhic decree — a decree of Jewish law — contradicts our moral sense, that “tension indicates that we have misunderstood the halakhah, because the Torah is paved with mercy, with peace, with kindness.” She urged the students in the crowd to follow the instruction of Pirkei Avot when things don’t make sense to them and “keep turning it and turning it, unwind it, untangle it. Get lost in our mesores [tradition]. Everything is in there. Embrace the struggle. Don’t run from it.”
She thanked the “wise, passionate, brave, intentional young people” in the crowd for “being with us and with all the hostage families.”
“From day one, you never stopped and said, hey, they don’t look like us,” she continued. “They don’t have our exact shita [method], they don’t have our exact haskafa [world view], their shul does things differently than our shul. No, you looked at what connects us,” she said, tearing up. “You said, your agony is my agony. Your pain is my pain. Your son is my mother’s son and so your son is my brother.”
“Like Ruth in the Megillah that we will read next week, you said, I will not leave you, even after your son died. I bind myself to you. Your fate is my fate,” she said, referring to the story that we retell on Shavuot. She talked about how the people of Yeshiva University “administered spiritual CPR on us and all the hostage families,” by showing up, by continuing to show up.
“I don’t care if we look different,” she said, and used the Hebrew expression “al tishtakel bakankan,” do not look at the jug, but at what is in it; and inside, Golberg-Polin says, “we are one.”
“We in Israel are at a crossroads,” she shared. “We are bruised and battle weary, not just from the outside in, but from our inside rifts; that is beyond dangerous, and it cannot be an option.”
Golberg-Polin talked about one of Aesop’s fables, the one about the bundle of sticks; the moral is that one stick is easy to break, while breaking a bundle is impossible. There is a strength in unity.
“When bound together, the sticks are unbreakable, impenetrable, even if the sticks are all different from different trees, different lengths, textures, diameters, if some sticks wait three hours after eating meat, and some sticks wait six and the Dutch stick waits a measly one hour,” she said, a reference to different ways to observe the laws of kashrut.
She told her fellow Jews in the crowd that our “only option is together, be different, have variety, disparate voices, opposite opinions, but one. Yes, it’s hard, annoying, demanding and sometimes infuriating, but you all have the sechel [Hebrew word for brain and wisdom] and the tenacity to make that work… Remember you are obligated to find what binds you, what binds you with each other, what binds you with your fellow Jews, what binds you with your fellow human beings.”
“And lastly, something that I have learned during this bulky, circuitous and celestial challenge that my family has been handed,” Goldberg-Polin said, ending with the most important lesson of all: “We are not what we say, we are not what we think, and we are not even what we believe. In this life, we are what we do.”
“So go, do you, you shining lights of wonder. Go be our North Stars. Go be our beacons. Go be our hope. There is a whole world out there awaiting your arrival. So go, you beautiful people. Go and do,” she urged the graduates.
We are so grateful for Goldberg-Polin, who continues to be our North Star, too.
