It is a bitter-sweet time to draw the school year to a close. Sadly we do this in the shadow of last week’s terrible terrorist attack on the Adass Israel shule and the surge in domestic antisemitism. Yet we must also acknowledge the joy of our community and the blessings of a school year that offered so much growth, learning, friendship and unity. 

I would like to share with you an extract from my speech from Presentation Evening and hope that you take on board the core message of yihe tov (it will be good) as we step forward with optimism and hope for a better future.

I wish you a safe, healthy and fulfilling break and pray that the year ahead brings peace to us, to Israel and to all of the world. 

Shabbat Shalom,

Marc Light

Yiyhe tov

It is a daunting thing to offer the school community and particularly our wonderful graduating class an inspiring message of hope and promise in a world that has felt so hard and alien for many of us since the devastation of October 7 2023.

We have been assailed by terrible news of attacks, bloodshed and lives lost. We have witnessed a global demonisation of Israel and a revival of antisemitism with a ferocity that is so hard to believe. We have also seen the political climate cede ground to the extremes. We have seen a nastiness and a persistent cynicism in public discourse that hurts the soul.

With all of this going on now I really thought about what I could say to you and my message to you tonight is – Yihye tov. It will be good. Or the Australian alternative – “She’ll be right!”

I do not present this as a mere platitude but because I believe that we are at a turning point where we can now acknowledge the challenges of our society and take steps to address them. I also believe that each of us can shape our experience and outlook by choosing optimism and hope.

So tonight I will direct my attention to our graduates as I try to characterise a way that they can be part of the movement that I believe will help restore our communal sense of equilibrium.

There is a beautiful story of wise King Solomon who devises an impossible test for a minister who he wishes to humble.

He asks the minister to collect a very special ring for him to wear on Sukkot. The minister assures him that wherever it exists on the planet it will be found. The minister wants to know, however, what makes it so special.

King Solomon replies that the ring has the power to influence one who looks upon it in a unique way – it makes the happy person sad, and the sad person happy. 

The minister searches all over Israel and sends servants to the far reaches of the planet in search of such a ring, but to no avail. The day before Sukkot, in exasperation, the minister goes to the local shuk and asks an old jeweller if he has ever heard of a magical ring that brings sorrow to the happy and joy to the sad. The old jeweller reaches for a ring and engraves some Hebrew letters on it. The minister is filled with joy.

The following day, the minister presents King Solomon with this ring. It has the letters Gimmel, Zayin and Yud. This is short for Gam Ze Ya’avor – ‘this too shall pass’. Wise King Solomon looked at this and immediately realised that it is he who has been humbled by this test.

Gam zeh ya’avor – the genius of this phrase is that while our sorrow is temporary so is our joy and the imperative we face is then not to wallow in our sadness and think it permanent but also not to take for granted our happiness and so we must take steps to appreciate it.

So, Class of 2024, when I say yihye tov,  it is not because I believe that magically all the problems of the world will fall away. It is because you have the power to shape your reality and I know you to be good people – menschen.

A few years ago at a graduation dinner I quoted from the exceptional 2005 Commencement speech at Kenyon College by the late author David Foster Wallace. 

David Foster-Wallace’s address was unique because it did not focus on striving for some external achievement but instead on how a well-lived life is one where we can find meaning in daily existence through focusing on relationships with others and through actively adjusting our mindset to be curious and fully engaged in our lives. 

This for me is the formula of yihye tov – find your joy in your community, practise the discipline of knowing and understanding and heed the call of the metaphorical shofar – wake up to the miracles of daily life.

Foster Wallace’s speech was entitled ‘This is Water’ and it begins with the following scenario: “There are these two young fish swimming along and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says “Morning, boys. How’s the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes “What the hell is water?”

The rest of his address is focused on answering this question – what is water? He says “The point of the fish story is merely that the most obvious, important realities are often the ones that are hardest to see and talk about.” 

What is the invisible stuff that actually sustains us and enables us to live a meaningful life? What is the point of an education? Essentially, Foster-Wallace asks – what is the purpose of life?

For Foster-Wallace one of the ways he sees the water is in rousing himself from a solipsistic worldview,  rejecting the fact that “everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute centre of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.” 

Instead for him, seeing the water is seeing the other – listening and embracing empathy.  This is hard in a world that is so focused on the self. But it offers the joy of truly being an active part of a community where we appreciate that others have differing world views and that this is ok.

When I look at the Class of 2024 I see a diverse group of individuals with differing interests and talents who come together to be a fiercely united collective.

Graduates, you have learnt in your time with us that valuing others is integral to the unique community-mindedness that lies at the heart of The King David School. 

Foster-Wallace then discusses the purpose of education. He says that a feature of this is in taking agency of our thinking. He says: “Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about teaching you how to think is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience.” He says that being an adult is exercising this kind of choice in daily life.

I love this concept because it is so easy to become a slave to contemporary modes of thinking. These can be characterised as being overly quick to judge, tribal, simplistic and to focus on disregarding the message because we do not like the messenger. 

This year, I was privileged to hear from Israeli academic Zohar Raviv who stated that we have a propensity to skip straight from information to opinion. Rather, he suggests, we must apply context and complexity to the information and thus build knowledge which we can then use to form our opinions.

Raviv characterises this as a lack of “dialogue in a world of parallel monologues”. He says that education, and indeed, communication involves suppressing our certainty and arrogance. He says that we must “change our exclamation marks to question marks.”

Can you change your exclamation marks to question marks?

I feel that this distinction between mere consumption and regurgitation of information, and meaningfully processing it through context and complexity, was celebrated by King David’s founders when they selected our biblical motto – l’havin u’lhaskil. To know and to understand.

To our graduates I say that as you enter this next stage of your life don’t succumb to the oversimplifications that are the common fad. Use the critical thinking tools that you picked up in our philosophy, English classes or in debates in the Yr 12 Common Room. Practise building on others’ ideas  and see life as a community of inquiry.

Our graduates will have experienced some of their school days as monotony and boredom. They probably came home and told you, their parents, that they did nothing today. But we know that for many, if not all, of them, they will come to remember these days with warmth and nostalgia as among the best times in their lives. Rather than living in nostalgia, how can you develop a habit of living with awareness today? How can you embrace the extraordinary blessings of community and shared humanity that you enjoy every day?

This is the other key message that I take from David Foster-Wallace is not taking for granted the blessings of our lives. He tells an anecdote about choosing to see the extraordinary in the mundanity of daily life. 

He explains that a valuable education is one that allows us to look beyond ourselves and in trying to find common humanity in others. He gives a poetic example of a tired average worker going through the grind of daily life and fighting the traffic and queues at their supermarket. He describes an experience of others cutting in and getting in their way. 

He says that rather than be defeated by the mundanity of life, or ask why is this happening to me, this is the point where our education must come into play. He says: 

“But if you really learn how to pay attention, then you will know there are other options. It will actually be within your power to experience a crowded, hot, slow, consumer-hell type situation as not only meaningful, but sacred, on fire with the same force that made the stars: love, fellowship, the mystical oneness of all things deep down.”

So to you graduates I say that your lives can be full of meaning in whichever direction the vicissitudes of life take you. You can use the model that you have gained from this school, of valuing and nourishing caring relationships as a guide for meaningful existence. If you can do this, you will put joy out into the world and have it reciprocated back to you exponentially.

Class of 2024, Gam ze ya’avor. The challenges will pass and so will the joys. But the key is to be aware and awake to the magic in your everyday experiences. If you do – yihye tov. It will be good.

Foster-Wallace concludes his presentation with a call for Carpe Diem – seizing each and every valuable day, he says we should stop asking about life after death. Instead he says:

“The capital-T Truth is about life BEFORE death.

It is about the real value of a real education, which has almost nothing to do with knowledge, and everything to do with simple awareness; awareness of what is so real and essential, so hidden in plain sight all around us, all the time, that we have to keep reminding ourselves over and over:

“This is water.”

“This is water.”

It is unimaginably hard to do this, to stay conscious and alive in the adult world day in and day out. Which means yet another grand cliché turns out to be true: your education really IS the job of a lifetime. And it commences: now.”