Graduation 2019
Rabbi Dr. Seth Grauer
כבוד הרבנים, מנהלים, צוות המורים, חברי הועד, הורים, וכמובן כל הבוגרים – ברוכים הבאים ותודה.
Honored Rabbis, fellow administrators, members of the faculty, members of the board of directors, parents and of course our graduates – welcome and thank you.
Seniors – I know there is much excitement and you are anxiously awaiting receiving your diplomas, but I would like to ask you to try and focus on what I believe to be a very impactful message with the hope that you will keep it with you. And I invite you-our parents and guests to listen in as well.
Jeremy Lin – he played for only one minute at the end of game 3 in the Raptors winning series against the Warriors, but for some of us, it brought back a very different memory of a vastly different Jeremy Lin almost 8 years ago.
It was February 14, 2012 and the Raptors were playing my hometown team – the NY Knicks. The score was tied at 87 all with under 24 seconds left, shot clock was turned off and the Raptors are out of time outs.
Jeremy Linn, NY Knick recent phenom and incredibly exciting point guard at the time, calmly steps forward and sinks a three pointer to win the game and finish off a 17-point comeback – at what was then the Air Canada Centre.
Fast forward to just under two weeks ago, the Golden State Warriors are about to lose to the Raptors in game 4 by the score 123 to 109 and Jeremy Lin is again closing out a game – but this time the game is already won – which is why he is even on the floor in the first place.
Which was a bigger moment for Jeremy Lin? It is an interesting question to think about.
The 2011-2012 season was a season of incredible personal achievements for Jeremy Lin in which “Linsanity” as it was called, was created during a 7-game winning streak for the NY Knicks, yet the Knicks would lose in the first round of the playoffs.
This season – as we all know, Lin would only get on the floor during that last minute of game 3 and he played almost no role in the Raptors march to the championship.
You see the truth is that – Jeremy Lin could have given up years ago.
He had a slew of injuries and has bounced around from lots of teams over the last few years, but he kept going.
He demonstrated incredible perseverance, grit, persistence, determination and what I believe to be one of the most essential and important traits that all of us need to build – and that is resiliency.
Jeremy Lin went from being the hottest player in the league to being a nobody, but he became a hero nonetheless, because this past week – he became the first Asian American to win an NBA championship and an entire region of the world is now celebrating his achievement.
Lin was able to celebrate, because no matter how hard these last few years were – he never gave up.
Two weeks ago, on June 3rd, in the midst of the local Toronto Raptors craze, Dr. Richard Friedman, a professor of clinical psychiatry and a op ed writer for the NY Times, wrote a piece about the recent announcement of the World Health Organization that they had upgraded burnout from a state of exhaustion to “a syndrome” resulting from “chronic workplace stress.”
Did you catch that- burnout is now a disease. But as Friedman points out –
“When a disorder is reportedly so widespread one has to wonder if we are at risk of medicalizing everyday distress. If almost everyone suffers from burnout, then no one does, and the concept loses all credibility.”
Friedman continues and notes what may seem obvious, but what perhaps is needed is a shift in cultural attitudes about what our lives should be like, what our workplace world will be like and even how we need to approach school.
In Friedman’s words:
“However well intended, we have created an unrealistic and misleading expectation that students and workers are supposed to be happy and stress-free at all times, and if they aren’t, it is a problem that needs to be fixed.”
Friedman continues:
Though I can’t prove it, I suspect that my generation suffered less burnout than current students for the simple reason that we expected to have a rough ride, and our expectations often turned out to be worse than the real stresses we confronted.
I have run my school’s student mental health service (Friedman continues) for the past 18 years, and when I orient the incoming medical students every August, I always tell them this: These next four years will be exciting and challenging and stressful. We care about you and have every confidence that you can handle adversity. You would never have made it this far if you couldn’t. It’s entirely natural to feel anxious, overwhelmed at times and exhausted. In fact, it’s evidence you are alive and engaged in your work.
Friedman makes a great point that we need to carefully consider. Please don’t think I am trivializing stress, burnout or mental health conditions in general. They are of course very real, but Friedman’s advice to medical students is instructive and important, because he shows them that he has confidence in their abilities, and he knows they can succeed.
To be clear – burnout isn’t just stress to an extreme. Burnout is significantly more dangerous as being burned out means feeling empty and mentally exhausted, devoid of motivation, and beyond caring. Burnout means that you don’t have any hope of any positive change whatsoever.
How does one avoid burnout in the first place or pick oneself up if they feel burnout might be coming?
You might be surprised to learn that mental health professionals and Chazal have very similar approaches and all we need to do is look to our Torah and our Rabbis for instructions on how to live our lives with meaning and purpose and thereby avoid burnout.
Viktor Frankl, famous author and early mental health professional spent three years in Auschwitz, and helped others survive by inspiring them to discover a purpose in life even in the midst of loneliness, depression and a world that seemed devoid of all hope and meaning.
Frankl said that the way to find meaning was not to ask what we want from life. Instead we should ask what life wants from us.
We are each, he said, unique: in our gifts, our abilities, our skills and talents. For each of us, then, there is a task only we can do. We need to therefore believe that we are here for a reason and that there are things that only we can achieve.
Each of us has a tafkid in life, says Frankel – and we need to find that, maximize it, focus it and devote our lives to achieving it.
“Life is a task”, Frankel used to say, and added, “The religious man differs from the apparently irreligious man only by experiencing his existence not simply as a task, but as a mission” sent by HKBH to us that we need to complete.
Chazal understood the same reality:
There are 15 places where the shoresh simcha appears in the Torah and almost all of them relate to the joy around being in the presence of Hashem and in most cases, it involves the bringing of Karbanot.
This past shabbat – we read the longest parsha of the Torah in which the majority was devoted to the bringing of sacrifices, yet as most of you know- we read the same sacrifices over and over again.
We know there are no extra pesukim let alone extra letters in the Torah- why the redundancy?
Rav Soloveichik says that each Nasi brought an identical offering, yet each was in actuality incredibly unique.
You see – on the outside, the Korbanot seemed the same, but just as each shevet had a different flag and a different color, the sacrifices and more specifically the tefilot associated with each sacrifice were vastly different.
Mitzvot are no different. Each person who says shemonei esrei is saying it in a very different way. They were the same sacrifices, but shevet yehuda was thinking about maluchut, yissachar maybe about learning, zevulun was perhaps focused on commerce and growth in business – everyone brought, but each was very different.
Mitzvoth give us meaning and remind us that we are living our lives for a higher goal and a far loftier purpose and when each of us performs a mitzvah – even if it is the same objective mitzvah – the fulfillment is very different because our intent and goals are different.
Seniors – you are all incredibly lucky and fortunate – because much like Friedman’s medical school students, you are prepared and you are ready!
But you have to remember – there will be ups and downs, but you have all the tools needed to fight burnout and live lives of exceptional purpose, meaning and drive. You have built a resiliency that should take you far.
In short order, you will be graduates from an unbelievable institution that will always stand behind you and support you whether you realize it or not.
We will take immense pride and a bit of credit in all your future accomplishments and we will always remind people that you came from Or Chaim or Ulpana.
10 years from now, we will say did you hear what so and so did – you know she graduated Ulpana in 2019 or he is an Or Chaim graduate.
I promise – I, along with all my colleagues, will be shepping nachas along with your parents as we watch you continue to grow.
To your parents- I wish you could have been there at the Dani restaurant for our graduation dinner celebrations. Watching our faculty and administration speak about each of the unique strengths of your children and seeing just how well they know your children was special.
It is a closeness and a bonding that is truly unique to Or Chaim and Ulpana, and I believe in many ways that we all take it for granted.
I have complete confidence in all of you and I cannot wait to see what you become.
Let me return now to Jeremy Lin.
Which was a bigger moment for Jeremy Lin – 2012 or 2019?
It is a great discussion to have. But I know that Lin only got to 2019, because he was resilient, and he fought burnout and persevered.
After the Raptors dramatic win, Jeremy Lin tweeted his hakarat Hatov saying:
“God is perfectly the same through the highs and the lows. Anyone who knows me knows I’ve believed this through all the down times, and He’s just as good at the mountaintop!”
What does it mean to be a Yehudi? It means to have gratitude and appreciation for everything that H”KBH does for all of us. That gratitude helps us to recognize the blessings in our lives and appreciate the moment that we have in front of us.
That gratitude will also help us all to live lives of meaning and avoid burnout.
Graduates – I wish you only the best, mazel, bracha and hatzlacha in everything you do.
Make us proud – I am certain you will. Thank you.
