At last night's graduation, The Davis Academy class of 2016 had a chance to hear from Leah Michalove (Davis '08). About to embark on a remarkable journey as a Rhodes Scholar, Leah shared these thoughtful and important remarks with our most recent graduates. There's no doubt that the class of 2016 will continue to ask thoughtful and world-changing questions as they continue on their journey.
Thank you! And congratulations Davis class of 2016!
This is my first graduation speech (though I’ve heard quite
a few at this point) and I spent a lot of timing trying to come up with how I
should prepare. I read famous commencement addresses - the author David Foster
Wallace and H.H. the Dalai Lama used theirs to urge compassion; other writers
and poets encouraged creativity, J.K. Rowling used her lecturn to teach about
failure. And these are all honorable topics, appropriate for an evening such as
this one, but, they were not quite right, not quite perfect for this particular
gathering.
And so instead I thought back on my own Davis graduation,
eight years ago, give or take a couple weeks. I sat right about there - I was
cooler then, my hair was purple under my white cap - and I remember being sick
of this place, and wondering how and if these past nine years would really
matter. Like many of you, I was headed off to secular, public high school, and
while I felt academically prepared, I could not help but ask, ‘What had been
the point of nine years of Jewish education?’
I may have had a little too much attitude at fourteen,
but still, this is what I want to talk
about tonight - not the answer to that nearly-decade-old question (though we’ll
come to that later), but rather the importance of questions themselves.
Questioning is itself a Jewish value - the classical
structural unit of Torah study is the Hevruta, in which two scholars debate the
ins and outs of Jewish belief. The Talmud and parts of the Torah are written in
question and answer mode; we are told stories of ancestors who questioned not
just the law, but God’s decision-making itself. Indeed, we gained the name “Am Yisrael” when Jacob physically struggled with God and his Judaism. Our religion
is one of active engagement; we are commanded to puzzle and challenge and
question in pursuit of wisdom and righteousness.
In Pirkei Avot, the rabbis identify seven traits of the wise
man, which can be summed up
as rules for debate: the wise man asks good questions and gives thoughtful
answers - he admits when he doesn't understand and concedes to the truth.
Wisdom then is not the acquisition of facts, but a discursive practice, the
product of a lifetime of thoughtful questions.
In the spirit of Pirkei
Avot and the Haggadah, I want to outline four kinds of questions, each of which
impart their own kind wisdom, and each of which you will find necessary as you
move into the world.
First,
the Whats. Whats are easy; they’re how we get a sense of the tangible material
world. What is this street called? What’s in this food? What’s your phone
number? We need Whats to ground us, to give us our bearings so we are
comfortable enough to ask harder, more opaque questions.
Next,
Hows - how is this this fabric made? How is this fruit grown? How did you get
here? With Hows we step deeper into the mechanics of the universe - physics is
a science of Hows, but so too is empathy. Hows require us to listen carefully
to another’s expertise and experience, to act as receptors of someone or
something else’s truth. Through Hows, we learn without passing judgement.
Third,
the Whys. Why do we read this book for class? Why do we light two candles? Why
did we bomb that city? Why are our neighbors hungry? Whys require of us a
deeper level of engagement- they may
take longer to ask and much longer to answer. As an anthropologist, I deal
mostly in Whys, the whys of culture and ritual and identity; Judaism too
insists that we ask why - of our customs, of our laws, of our values. And Whys
challenge us to ask the next question:
Should it be so?
The late community
organizer Saul Alinksy asked us to think in terms of two worlds: the world as
it is, and the world as it should be.
The role of the activist - and I think, of the Jewish student - is to bridge these worlds. The Jewishness of
this concept is of course no accident. If we are commanded to use our wisdom to
repair the world, and if wisdom comes from questions, the questions we ask are
necessarily engaged with higher purposes, with justice, and peace, and Tikkun Olam.
So, eight years, two diplomas, seven jobs, and countless
classes later, I am happy to share with y’all the unmatched, indelible, and
perhaps most important outcome of your Davis education: you learned to ask good
questions.
Despite Mr. Barry’s efforts, you will forget the foreign
policy achievements of Millard Fillmore; much to Mora Sigal’s dismay, you will
lose your Hebrew vocabulary - you may not remember the periodic sign for lead,
or the words to Birkat HaMazon, or your bat mitzvah torah portion, or how to
tie knots in Tzitzit, but you will remember how to ask questions.
Never stop asking them. Question your teachers, question
your parents, question our community, question the media, question your own
faith, your own bias, your own certainties. Push back on things you disagree
with, and on the things you support. Ask yourself: What is this? How did it
come to be? Why is it like this? And, should it be so?
Our world is such that the answer will often be “no.” And my
wish for you, Davis class of 2016, is that your questions beg more questions,
that those questions propel you to action, and that your curiosity drives you
to not only investigate the world, but begin to improve it, building, however
slowly, the world as you feel it should be.
