Transcript
0:00 To my great colleague Nadav Tamir, Israel's Consul General for all of New England. To all the families and friends. To my family and my parents who are here. And to the graduates of Brandeis Class of 2010. Congratulations! Mabrouk and Mazal Tov!
0:38 People—young people especially—seem fascinated with the fact that I served as a paratrooper. “Cool,” they say, “How many times did you jump?” And I disappoint them. “I rarely jumped,” I say. “Most times, there were these two large gentlemen on either side of the door who pushed me out.” Now, you, too, now stand at the door—outside the darkness is howling, and you’re far from the ground with a chute that you hope will properly open. At such anxious times, it helps to think back and remember the transformative moments in your lives—we all have them—that inspired or motivated you and animated your dreams. A transformative moment, perhaps, brought you to this open door at this moment and you’re about to exit.
1:39 For me, that moment was the 1967 Six-Day War, an event that many American Jews thought would culminate in Israel’s destruction but instead concluded with Israeli paratroopers dancing in front of the Western Wall, Judaism’s most sacred site. Watching that scene as a kid in suburban New Jersey, I vowed to myself, “I’m going to be one of those dancing paratroopers someday.” A few years later, while visiting Washington with my Jewish youth group, we were introduced to Israel’s ambassador to the United States. I’ll never forget this. We applauded him until our hands were numb, sang “Shalom Aleichem” until our voices became hoarse. And silently I said to myself: “That—that is what I want to be when I grow up, Israel’s ambassador to America.” I wasn’t much of an athlete or even a student—I was a letter-man but the three letters were ADD. But it was the Seventies, a time of dreams, a time when an ingenious musician named Paul Simon could imagine himself flying—“I dreamed that my soul rose unexpectedly,” he sang, “and looking back down at me, smiled reassuringly.” Right after college, I moved to Israel and I joined its Defense Forces. That’s when I learned that being a paratrooper was not about dancing. Being a paratrooper was about plunging from a plane fast enough, even with an open chute, to break both your legs. Being a paratrooper, I learned, was about having to make split second decisions of profound moral consequence.
3:51 Later I went to work for the Israeli government at the beginning of an historic process for peace with the Palestinians. The process precipitated protests and terrorist acts in which many people were killed, including my sister-in-law, Joan, who was a visiting American student at Hebrew University in Jerusalem. My boss at the time was the ambassador who had inspired me as a teenager and who was now Israel’s prime minister. His name was Yitzhak Rabin and for his dream of peace he, too, paid the ultimate price.
4:42 Transforming your dreams into reality often incurs a cost, especially when those dreams take shape during times of great challenge. As ambassador, I must grapple with issues that affect millions of lives, including those of my wife and our three children, and frequently I have to face criticism in the media and on campuses. Traveling this great nation, I’m not always greeted with “Shalom Aleichem.” But along with the price there is the inestimable privilege of serving. Whether as a soldier or an ambassador, I’ve had the supreme honor that comes with shouldering responsibilities for one’s people and for the causes of security and peace.
5:27 The connection between realizing dreams and accepting the responsibility for them has long been a theme in Jewish history. The Bible tells us of Joseph, the ultimate dreamer, who dreamed his way to position of great responsibilities in Egypt and he used his position for his people’s betterment. But Joseph’s descendants were later enslaved and had to await another dreamer, Moses, to secure their freedom. And even then, those people complained, “We were better off living as slaves than dying in the wilderness.” Moses nevertheless carried out his responsibilities with pride and, at the end of his life, he entrusted Joshua to guide his people to independence. “Hazak v’Ematz,” Moses exhorted his young successor.
6:20 Be strong. Be courageous. In modern times, the Jewish people’s vision of liberty in their homeland, then known as Palestine, was galvanized by the Viennese writer Theodore Herzl. “If you will it,” Herzl famously said, “it is no dream.” Now Herzl was writing during a period of deep despair for the Jews of Europe, confronted with the fiery anti-Semitism fueled by the Dreyfus Trial in France.
6:53 Yet, rather than yielding to that despondency, Herzl created the Zionist movement that inspired millions of people—Jews and non-Jews—worldwide. Dreaming during such turbulent times indeed takes courage, but an even greater valor is required once those dreams are fulfilled. Indeed, Herzl’s adage “If you will it, it is no dream” should always be paired with the axiom coined by Herzl’s contemporary, the great Irish poet and nationalist William Butler Yeats. Writing at the time of the great struggle for home rule, “In dreams,” Yeats wrote, “in dreams begin responsibility.” The dream-responsibility nexus was personified by another contemporary of Herzl and Yeats, that towering figure of 20th century American jurisprudence whose name graces this extraordinary university.
7:51 Like Moses, who originally planned on a career in shepherding, and Herzl who only wanted to write plays, Louis Brandeis, too, did not at first see himself as a visionary. But like Moses beholding the burning bush and Herzl witnessing the Dreyfus Trial, Brandeis experienced a transformation. Brandeis was what we used to call a wunderkind. He graduated at the top of his Harvard Law class at age 20—don’t you hate people like that? But he was no hero but rather handled conventional commercial cases. That is until a monopoly tried to take over all of the railroads in the Boston area. The times were also turbulent, with mass exploitation of working women and immigrants, but Brandeis had a vision of America, a nation in which all citizens, irrespective of their social standing, national origins or gender—all of those citizens— enjoyed equal rights and opportunities. He took on the railroad and the gas monopolies, and went on to secure the rights of women to humane work conditions. And he never once took a fee for that.
9:16 Brandeis reached for his dreams and, through his dreams, he assumed immense responsibilities on the highest court of this land.