May 8, 2008. The euphoria slips away and the words of the speakers fade but one thing remains of this spring day...a piece of paper framed on the wall bears the record of this momentous occasion and the road there long afterward. Commencement marks the culmination of success in academia. One journey has ended as another one begins. GTU graduates are forever changed and will change the world around them.

Graduates by degree

Doctor of Philosophy
Doctor of Theology
Master of Arts
Master of Arts with a Concentration in Biblical Languages

Excerpts from speeches

James A. Donahue, President of the Graduate Theological Union

“You are an outstanding, talented, diverse, engaged group – a real, live example of the GTU as a place ‘where religion meets the world.’
Read Dr. Donahue’s greetings…

Randall Miller, student speaker

“In this year which marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I hope that his example will continue to inspire all of us who have been granted the gift and privilege of higher education. In a world cast so often in black and white, may we shine greater light on life’s complexities and nuances. In a time when religious life is so often focused on the self, may we hear again King’s warnings that a faith that has no public expression has lost its distinctive flavor.”
Read Dr. Miller’s entire speech…

Naomi Seidman, faculty speaker

“Today I’ll talk about another of my favorite blessings, the shehecheyanu, which is a kind of catch-all blessing recited on a variety of occasions; it blesses Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, who has given us life and sustained us and brought us to this day.”
Read Dr. Seidman’s entire speech…

Doctor of Philosophy

Whitney A. Bauman
From Creatio ex Nihilo to Terra Nullius: The Colonial Mind and the Colonization of Creation
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Rosemary Radford Ruether (Coordinator)

Brooks Berndt
Preaching Amidst Class Conflict: A Class Analysis of Preaching in Oakland
Homiletics
Thomas G. Rogers (Coordinator)

Karen Chaney
Thinking Globally, Acting Nationally: Negotiating the Duties of Justice within the First World Agricultural Protectionism Debate at the World Trade Organization
Ethics and Social Theory
Karen Lebacqz (Coordinator)

Christopher D. Doran
Implicit Presuppositions Made Explicit: A Critical Appraisal of the Theology of Intelligent Design as Found in the Work of William Dembski
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Robert J. Russell (Coordinator)

James Haag
Emergent Freedom: Process Dynamics in Theological, Philosophical, and Scientific Perspective
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Ted Peters (Coordinator)

Nathan John Hallanger
Atoning for Evil: Theodicy and Soteriology in Theology and Science
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Ted Peters (Coordinator)

Nathaniel Hinerman
Sources of Religious Insight at the End-of-Life: A Semeiotic Retrieval
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Alejandro García-Rivera (Coordinator)

Christina K. Hutchins
Departure: Using Judith Butler’s Agency and Alfred North Whitehead’s Value to Read Temporality Anew
Interdisciplinary Studies
Judith A. Berling (Coordinator)

Donny Inbar
A Closeted Jester: Abraham Goldfaden between Huskalah Ideology and Jewish Show Business
Interdisciplinary Studies
Naomi Seidman (Coordinator)

Rebecca Irelan
A Little Experiment in Pragmatic Divinity: Charles Sanders Peirce and the Women of Early Methodism Socialize the Subject of John Wesley’s Doctrine of Sanctification
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Ted Peters (Coordinator)

Jacob Hee Cheol Lee
Exploring Shame: Re-articulation through the Lens of Social Psychology and Korean Theology
Religion and Psychology
Archie Smith, Jr. (Coordinator)
Lewis R. Rambo

Randolph H. Miller
Colored Justice: Situating Martin Luther King, Jr.’s Justice Ethic in Normative Discourse
Ethics and Social Theory
Karen Lebacqz (Coordinator)

Scott A. Mitchell
Taking Refuge in the Dharma: Post-Colonialism, Ritual Theory, and American Buddhist Studies
Interdisciplinary Studies
Richard K. Payne (Coordinator)

Debra J. Mumford
Above All Prosper: A Critical Analysis of the Preaching of Creflo Dollar, Jr.
Homiletics
Mary Donovan Turner (Coordinator)

Jung Eun Sophia Park
A Hermeneutics of Dislocation as Experience: A Resource for Asian American Spirituality
Christian Spirituality
Barbara Green, O.P. (Coordinator)

Bradley Arthur Peterson
Towards a Protestant Monasticism: The Convent Life Expressed in the Evangelical Church Orders of 16th Century Germany
History
Christopher Ocker (Coordinator)

Damon A. Powell
Black Is Beautiful: An Exploration in Black Theology, Aesthetics and Art
Interdisciplinary Studies
James A. Noel (Coordinator)

Chesung Ryu
The Silence of Jonah: A Postcolonial Reading of Jonah 4:1-11
Biblical Studies
Gina Hens-Piazza (Coordinator)

Devorah Schoenfeld
Biblical Exegesis in Twelfth-Century France: A Comparison of Rashi and the Glossa Ordinaria
History
Christopher Ocker (Coordinator)

Kenton M. Stiles
Creativity and Beauty in Christ and World: Aesthetics in John B. Cobb, Jr.’s Christology and Ethics
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
Alejandro García-Rivera (Coordinator)

Susan Sutton
The Estates of Nature: On the Theological Origins of Anglo-American Suburbia
Art and Religion
Michael T. Morris, O.P. (Coordinator)

Jeanne Choy Tate
Culture and Caregiving, The Untold Story: Cultural, Developmental and Theological Challenges to a Psychology of Individualism
Psychology and Religion
Archie Smith, Jr. (Coordinator)

Julia Watts Belser
Between the Human and the Holy: The Construction of Talmudic Theology in Masekhet Ta’anit
Jewish Studies, Joint Degree with the University of California, Berkeley
Daniel Boyarin, University of California, Berkeley (Coordinator)

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Doctor of Theology

Gerard Reid
“What is Joke to You is Death to Me”: African Jamaican Praxis and the Signs of the Times—A Christian Theological Perspective
Systematic and Philosophical Theology
George C. L. Cummings (Coordinator)

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Master of Arts

Jonathan Barber
Solitude and Vulnerability in Dialogue: The Poetic Journeys of Matsuo Bashō and John of the Cross
WITH HONORS
James D. Redington, S.J. (Coordinator)

Michael Bayer
Basic Goods and Public Reason
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Lisa Fullam (Coordinator)

Michael Davies
“Sins Voluntary and Involuntary”: John of Damascus, Natural Integrity and the Moral Vision of Eastern Orthodoxy
Patriarch Athenagoras Orthodox Institute
WITH HONORS
John Klentos (Coordinator)

Norma I. del Rio
The Influence of Latino Ethnocultural Factors on Decision-Making at the End of Life: Withholding and Withdrawing Artificial Nutrition and Hydration
Pacific School of Religion
WITH HONORS
Michael M. Mendiola (Coordinator)

Lisa Dirrim
Swedenborg and Newton
Pacific School of Religion
Randi Walker (Coordinator)

Lucas Dzmura
Androgynos, Intersubjectivity and the Performance of Gender
Center for Jewish Studies
Naomi Seidman (Coordinator)

Emily Garcia
One Event, Multiple Meanings: Rediscovering Life, Hope and Love in Theologies of the Cross
Pacific School of Religion
Mayra Rivera Rivera (Coordinator)

Jonathan David Garman
England's Impetuous Robert Barnes
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
Jane Strohl (Coordinator)

Shaina Judith Hammerman
Reconciling Selves: The Black Hat in Liberal Jewish Imagination
Center for Jewish Studies
WITH HONORS
Naomi Seidman (Coordinator)

Clifton Edward David Huffmaster
Knowing an Unknowable God in the Thought of Plotinus and Origen: A Case Study of the Interaction Between Greek Philosophy and Christian Theology in Late Antiquity
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Eugene M. Ludwig, O.F.M. Cap. (Coordinator)

Jin Su Hwang
Identity at the Margin: A Theology of Korean American Family Identity
Pacific School of Religion
Choan-Seng Song (Coordinator)

Sayaka Inaishi
The World and Spirituality: Towards a Harmony of Japanese Culture and Franciscan Tradition
Franciscan School of Theology
Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M. (Coordinator)

Michael Lake
Locating Krishna in the 21st Century
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
James D. Redington, S.J. (Coordinator)

Joo Hyung Lee
Hwa: Korean Anger
San Francisco Theological Seminary
Lewis R. Rambo (Coordinator)

Suk Yeon Lee
Pastoral Theological Study of Korean Goose Mom
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
WITH HONORS
Herbert Anderson (Coordinator)

James Patrick Leveque
Elisha, Jehoram, and Israel: The Dynamics of Prophetic, Monarchic, and Popular Power in the Siege of Samaria (2 Kings 6:24-7:20)
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
WITH HONORS
Gina Hens-Piazza (Coordinator)

Taeck-Dong Lim
Imagination, The Spiritual Exercises, and Korean Protestants
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Mary Ann Donovan, S.C. (Coordinator)

Emily Lyon
The Spiritual Implications of Interpersonal Abuse: Challenges to Church and Clinician
Church Divinity School of the Pacific
David T. Gortner (Coordinator)

Richard A. Lyon
For the Kingdom of God Belongs to Such as These: The Child-Welfare Legislation of Constantine I
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
Jane E. Strohl (Coordinator)

Bryan K. Mason
Faith Beyond Symbols: Christian Teaching Symbols and the Iemoto Process of Shu Ha Ri
American Baptist Seminary of the West
WITH HONORS
Keith A. Russell (Coordinator)

Sean McNeal
Francis of Assisi: A Case Study for a Contemporary Psychological Hermeneutic
Franciscan School of Theology
Kenan B. Osborne, O.F.M (Coordinator)

Ethan Moore
An Alliance of Necessity: Coming to Terms with Religion in Political Discourse
Pacific School of Religion
Inese Radzins (Coordinator)

Heather Chase-Myers
Preparing Congregations for Times of Crisis through Preaching: Strategies for Using the New Homiletic
San Francisco Theological Seminary
Jana Childers (Coordinator)

Ki Jung Nam
John Wesley as a Spiritual Director
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Bruce Lescher (Coordinator)

Nili Nesher
Mashiach Ben-Yosef—Ke’existentzializem Meshichi: Ba-Talmud Ha-Bavli Be-Masekhet Sucah 52a Ube-Mishnat Rabi Nachman Me-Braslav
Center for Jewish Studies
Naomi Seidman (Coordinator)

Sara Nesson
Standing in the Shadow of God: The Sacred Path of the Artist as Portrayed by Rabbinic and Contemporary Voices
Center for Jewish Studies
Deena Aranoff (Coordinator)

J. Peter Nixon
A Crisis of Reception: The Constitution of the Sacred Liturgy and the Debate over the English Translation of the Roman Missal
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
WITH HONORS
T. Howland Sanks, S.J. (Coordinator)

Anthony Nguyen
Vietnamese Catholic Sacred Music: Faith Challenged by Socio-Political Change, 1533-1986
Franciscan School of Theology
Mary E. McGann, R.S.C.J. (Coordinator)

Naoyuki Ogi
The Challenge of Revitalizing Buddhism: Learning from the Engaged Buddhist Movements of Thich Nhat Hanh, Shinran, and Takagi Kenmyō
Institute of Buddhist Studies
Eisho Nasu (Coordinator)

Irene A. Quesnot
Adopting Perichoretic Trinitarian Epistemology: An Exposition of the Degrees of Mutual Indwelling for an Economically Globalizing Society
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
T. Howland Sanks, S.J. (Coordinator)

Cassandra J. Ridenour
Complicating Ecumenism: How the Early Jesus Movements Challenge the Equation of Christianity with Conformity
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
Jane E. Strohl (Coordinator)

Eva Natanya Rolf
Why Emptiness? Towards a Christian Understanding of Madhyamika Thought
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Marianne Farina, C.S.C. (Coordinator)

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Master of Arts with a Concentration in Biblical Languages

Joy K. Church
San Francisco Theological Seminary
Robert B. Coote (Coordinator)

Curt Dederick (Br. Joseph Seraphin), O.F.M. Cap.
Dominican School of Philosophy and Theology
Barbara Green, O.P. (Coordinator)

Sean Felix
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Gina Hens-Piazza (Coordinator)

Stephanie Ann Gameros
Pacific School of Religion
Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan (Coordinator)

Christopher Harrison
American Baptist Seminary of the West
Judy Yates Siker (Coordinator)

Zachary Johnson
Pacific School of Religion
Aaron Brody (Coordinator)

Nathan Krause
Pacific Lutheran Theological Seminary
David Balch (Coordinator)

Sung Uk Lim
Pacific School of Religion
Tat-siong Benny Liew (Coordinator)

Stephen D. Louy
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
Jean-François Racine (Coordinator)

Eun-Joo Myung
Pacific School of Religion
Kah-Jin Jeffrey Kuan (Coordinator)

James Perrin
Church Divinity School of the Pacific
Donn F. Morgan (Coordinator)

Matthew R. Schaeffer
Jesuit School of Theology at Berkeley
John C. Endres, S.J. (Coordinator)

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President’s Greetings

by James A. Donahue

Welcome to this most special gathering of the 2008 graduates of the Graduate Theological Union.

It is the day we all get to acknowledge the courage, creativity, and many contributions of our graduates through their ideas, teaching, research, ministry, and service. I extend a warm welcome to the families and friends of the graduates and to the faculty and administrators of the GTU and its member schools and centers. And to the graduates I offer my heartfelt congratulations. You are an outstanding, talented, diverse, engaged group – a real, live example of the GTU as a place “where religion meets the world.”

The GTU is known as an institution and a community that bridges differences. From its origins as a center for ecumenical studies, to one in which study across disciplines has become the currency of our scholarship, to one is which dialogue across religious traditions has become a way of life in our community, we are here to celebrate our graduates who exemplify what it means to bridge differences. Your work here has been pioneered in bringing together diverse perspectives in the pursuit of discovering new points of view. We want to celebrate your creativity.

The theological and academic worlds of which we are a part has most often attempted to define issues or arenas of life as dichotomies with a value put on one of these and a disvalue on the other:

• Theory and practice
• The academy and the street
• The church and the public square
• The Bible and the New York Times
• The Head, the heart, the Soul
• Faith and Reason
• Protestant, Catholic, Jew, Muslim, Buddhist
• The Academy and community
• Theology and other disciplines.

From the very beginning the GTU has been committed to bringing these dimensions together. We stand for religious pluralism, ecumenical dialogue, interreligious understanding and interdisciplinary scholarship –that preserve the distinctiveness and inquisitiveness of each of these aspects and yet create a discourse that relates, expands, and creates greater inclusiveness.

Your role going forward is to use your skills of making connections and relating pieces of life’s puzzle to one another. It is to bring not only ideas together but in doing so you bring people and communities together as well. This is a superb skill to possess. We celebrate this with you today.

The topics you have studied reflect the bridging of difference. You have considered preaching and class, world agriculture, intelligent design, end-of-life issues, American Buddhism, Jewish Theater, Black prophetic preaching, the global society. You’ve delved into gender, identity, issues in Korean culture, liberal Jewish perceptions, engaged Buddhism, Eastern Orthodoxy, Swedenborg and Newton, Krishna, Vietnamese Catholic sacred music, women of early Methodism, the sacred path of the artist, the spiritual implications of abuse and methods for healing. Our world needs you –and we are glad you are ready to venture forth.

You have worked hard and experienced much to get here today. In addition to the rigors of your academic endeavors, you have lived through church fires, identity theft, motorcycle accidents, divorces, break ups –not to mention advisor changes and challenges of program details. Happily, many of you have experienced wonders in life too –marriage, new partners, children and the joys of parenting. You have established great collegial friendships with your other students and your professors, and contributed much to the whole of the GTU community.

Many of you have held jobs and other professions as you completed this degree. You have been consultants, poets, artists, theater directors, teachers, preachers, pastors and priests. You have directed an admissions office, worked as a webmaster, an architect, a public health official, and a group of you served many roles at the center for Theology and natural Sciences. You possess an impressive range of skill sets, to say the least.

This year’s graduates first arrived here from all across this country, from Boston, Atlanta, Washington , DC, Nashville, Chicago and even Malibu. You ventured here from places like Texas, Wisconsin, and New York. And others of you came from Canada, Israel, Jamaica, Japan, Korea and Vietnam.

I’m happy to report that a number of MA graduates intend to pursue doctoral work. And some of the doctoral graduates have already secured the next job, heading to Florida International University, Holy Names University, Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary, Missouri State, Pepperdine University, St. Mary’s College of Maryland, the University of San Francisco, and Seoul Christian University, to name a few.

Congratulations on your perseverance, the strength of your commitment, and for your willingness to share your many gifts. We offer our blessings as you go forward today.

At this time I also want to mark some special leavings:
John Dillenberger, deceased
Doug Adams, deceased
Edmond Yee, retired
Keith Russell, retired
Joe Daoust, retired
Sharon-Gay Smith, retired

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“There and Back Again”

by Randall Miller

President Donahue, members of the Board of Trustees and Faculty, fellow graduates, assembled families and friends, and other honored guests, I can not begin to tell you what a privilege it is to speak to this gathering for a just few moments about the importance of our course of studies here at the Graduate Theological Union.

For me, and I suspect most of my fellow graduates, our time at the GTU has been a powerfully transformative experience, a journey of not only of intellect but also of heart and soul. Though it was not always easy or pleasant, our time at this unique consortium of theological schools and institutions, representing various denominations and faith traditions, has moved each of one us from one important life-moment to the next – and this is cause for great celebration.

In her recent poem, “Theories of Time and Space,” Pulitzer-prize winning author, Natasha Trethewey, perfectly captures the rhythm of this particular cycle in our journeys as both students and teachers – the initial step into the unknown, the willingness to be led by curiosity, and the strange but grace-filled moments of encountering ourselves and others over and over again.

Trethewey writes:

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been…
Bring only what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages.
On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture: the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return.

I would be remiss if, in reflecting on the importance of our course of studies at the GTU, I failed to mention the transformative role of my own encounter with the writings and speeches of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. I have to admit that I began my research not with a focus on King’s writings per se but with the vague idea that his work would provide the perfect illustration of my argument that one could arrive at a universal understanding of justice while remaining firmly rooted in the hopes and aspirations of a specific community and a particular time and place.

In short, I wanted to demonstrate that King’s justice ethic was not simply color-blind, as is so often said, but color-full inasmuch King believed that people from various racial-ethnic backgrounds, religious traditions, and life circumstances could find common ground in the quest to establish a fully inclusive, multiracial society.

I’m happy to say that while there were a few dicey moments, I was able to successfully defend my central thesis. But far more importantly, in the research and writing process I found myself being drawn deeper and deeper into the subtleties of King’s thought. Over the course of my studies, I came to admire particularly King’s determination to bring formal reasoning and practical experience into greater conversation, his ability to hold complex ideas in creative tension with one another, and his firm belief that both faith and reason find their highest expression when one is engaged in loving action on behalf of the Other.

In this year which marks the 40th anniversary of the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr., I hope that his example will continue to inspire all of us who have been granted the gift and privilege of higher education. In a world cast so often in black and white, may we shine greater light on life’s complexities and nuances. In a time when religious life is so often focused on the self, may we hear again King’s warnings that a faith that has no public expression has lost its distinctive flavor. On whatever paths we are led, my prayer is that each person in this hall will like King bring a word of blessing and hope to a world that is hurting and torn.

To the staff of the GTU, mere words can never express the sincere appreciation that the graduating class of 2008 holds for your efforts to push and pray us through. From the enthusiastic welcome from the admissions staff, to Sharon-Gay’s and Maureen Maloney’s determined attempts to herd this particularly difficult pride of cats, to Gloria Motley’s patient juggling of way too many forms, to Judith Berling’s practical advice on how to actually teach, to the renewed vision offered by President Jim Donahue, we will remember it all and give thanks for your innumerable moments of kindness.

To our faculty mentors, co-conspirators, and surprisingly wise shepherds, again no words can suffice. As one of my former professors from another institution of higher learning once predicted, “one day your children’s children will have cause to rise up and call me blessed.” To this certain prophesy, we, your now-former students, can only add, “Amen. May it be so.”

Finally, to our partners, spouses, families and friends, perhaps our greatest gift to you is bringing this particular chapter of our lives to a close. Believe me each and every graduate is fully aware that in great part you have but the faintest understanding of what our dissertations and theses are about. And yet you still politely asked about our progress, listened patiently to our rambling explanations, and even attempted to read through multiple drafts of our work. There is no greater love than this. As one of the good books says, “Faith is the substance of things hoped for and the evidence of things not seen.” That you saw and were convinced that we could be scholars and teachers, even when we didn’t see this in ourselves, is one of love’s greatest gifts. Thank you… Thank you… Thank you.

I will simply end my remarks where I began, with these words of blessing and encouragement:

You can get there from here, though
there’s no going home.
Everywhere you go will be somewhere
you’ve never been…
Bring only what you must carry – tome of memory
its random blank pages.
On the dock where you board the boat for Ship Island,
someone will take your picture: the photograph – who you were –
will be waiting when you return.

May each and every one of us, as we move from this important life-moment to the next, journey wisely and well. Amen. May it be so.

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"Blessings"

by Naomi Seidman

Brukhim habaim, blessings and welcome, graduates, colleagues, friends, family! It’s an honor to have been chosen to represent the GTU faculty here today.

Brakhot, blessings, opens the Mishnah and is the first of the Talmudic tractates. I have heard blessings described as a ramified system not only for praising the universe and its creator but also for categorizing and organizing reality, a kind of Jewish science, a periodic table of rabbinic elements. Last night my colleague Deena Aranoff recited an amazing blessing to be said on completing a tractate, a blessing that the relationship that is true study will continue after you close the book, in this world and the world to come. Today I’ll talk about another of my favorite blessings, the shehecheyanu, which is a kind of catch-all blessing recited on a variety of occasions; it blesses Eloheinu, melekh ha’olam, who has given us life and sustained us and brought us to this day. As far as I know, graduations are not among the occasions for which this blessing is traditionally said—no doubt because the rabbis lived in a world where it was possible to finish a tractate, but no one ever, ever graduated (I know, you also thought you lived in such a world). So when is this blessing recited? One occasion is the eating of a rare or new fruit. In Yiddish, the first cherries of the season, for instance, are called colloquially shehecheyanulakh, precious occasions for the shehechayanu. There’s a rush on exotic produce at the Berkeley Bowl around the Jewish New Year because not only do blessings mark occasions but occasions—in this case, new fruit—are pursued in order to make blessings (I hope you followed that); it’s in the service of this logic that I first tasted a dragon fruit, or a durian (not recommended). But I will say the shehechayanu today because it’s only a small midrashic leap from blessing new fruit to celebrating the first fruits of the GTU, vintage 2008, a taste of which appears in your program. So here’s to you, new graduates, to the star fruit and passion fruit and early girl heirloom tomatoes among you.

Among the reasons I love this blessing is the last phrase—lazman hazeh, this very moment. Religious traditions (I won’t name names) sometimes lose track of the here-and-now, peering dreamily into the future to spot the Messiah coming (or, for some, coming again). The rabbis certainly put in their time anticipating the perfect world in which justice would finally be done, but in this blessing, they also recognized and praised this day, this sun beating on our heads as we walked to this hall, and sat beside these people, none of whom (as far as I know) are the Messiah. Hard work brought you here, work that left scars and turned hair gray and added pounds. This day may have felt as if it would never come, or only at some mythical Endzeit. And there is certainly work ahead of you, and worries, whether you are beginning a new job or looking for one. This is not the perfect world: we don’t get what we deserve, and we don’t deserve what we get. The job market is capricious, the world generally indifferent to what people like us have to offer. But this day, among these friends and family and colleagues, is just for a moment as perfect as it needs to be, at least for long enough to say the blessing.

My own strongest association with the shehechayanu is a story I heard from my father, about a time he didn’t make the blessing. My father spent the last two years of the Second World War in hiding. One day, it became clear that the war was over, and he came out of hiding. My father said that he thought of making a shehecheyanu, but he didn’t. My father didn’t say that he couldn’t recite the blessing because he could no longer bless God—we didn’t talk about God that directly. What my father said was that he couldn’t make a shehecheyanu because it was in the first person plural—shehecheyanu, who has given us life, who has brought us to this day. My father was utterly alone that day of liberation. Had any other Jews survived? He didn’t know. It occurred to him, my father said, that he was the last Jew on earth. And to survive alone, to pick up his life without family or community, was no blessing at all.

My father’s experiences are not mine or ours, but I think they can still speak to our own less dramatic truths. Our lives gain meaning from other people; our survival depends on other people. The work of a graduate student is often solitary, and these degrees are awarded to you as individuals. But today, in celebrating together, we recognize the appropriateness of blessing your graduation in the first person plural. The degree is yours, but it’s also whoever it was that pulled you from the bottom of the pool when you were three, whoever it was that sent a check to pay off the landlord, whoever helped you see that your rage at your advisor was a projection of childhood trauma, whoever put your kid to sleep to give you an extra hour to work, whoever brewed the double espresso that kept you awake a little longer, whoever grew and picked those beans, whoever shelved that book among the BS 2001’s, and whoever wrote the book and whoever raised the money for that shelf, and so on, in ever widening concentric circles. Sometimes that circle that is us is rendered a little more visible, because someone flew across the country or drove across the Bay Bridge to sit through a lot of speeches and snap your picture. This blessing is for that circle.

I am aware today, as I often am in such situations, of translating the Hebrew of my childhood into our Holy-Hill idiolect of English, of rendering a story about Jewish survival and community in more general terms. But it’s also true, after all, that my father’s survival and thus my own existence depended, for those two years, on three or four “righteous gentiles” whose names I never learned but who put their own lives in gravest risk to save a Jew. The term righteous gentiles is a strange and possibly offensive one—unsettling the boundaries between “us” and “them” but maybe also reifying these boundaries by suggesting that such righteousness is an anomaly. Taking this issue from another direction, the Holocaust unsettled Christian complacency, and I have no doubt that my own presence here and yours, the very existence of an institution like the GTU, owes something to the unsettling of the certainty that Christianity is an absolute and unshakable synonym for goodness. We Jews, too, later and within a different encounter, have found ourselves unsettled by the recognition, nearly unavoidable today—the sixtieth anniversary of the founding of the State of Israel—that our place in the sun has displaced our Palestinian cousins, that our national homeland is their national catastrophe. It is a truism at the GTU that encounters with other traditions and peoples only serve to deepen and strengthen our own faith, our own commitments. But sometimes a little shaking up is part of that process; and sometimes that shaking up is itself the important thing, the good thing. There may be things our traditions blind us to, alongside those riches so abundantly on offer.

But in this experiment that is the GTU, have we abandoned our old sense of what constitutes goodness only in order to inhabit a new sense of our own goodness more absolutely, more complacently? And what do I mean by talking about what we do as a good thing? Doctors without Borders—that’s a good thing. Are we doctors of philosophy and masters of arts just fiddling as Baghdad burns, as the planet warms? Does our academic proximity to goodness constitute actual goodness? From one perspective, this is the old quandary of thinking versus doing; and I’ve argued before that that quandary may be less acute for Jews, since study, Torah, is a good in itself, and not only a prolegomenon to it. This answer no longer seems adequate, in a world that imperils not Jews but earthlings. As my friend Jonathan says, no planet, no Jews. But perhaps the rabbis did intuit our quandary in the shehecheyanu. To say the shehecheyanu, this very day—depends on there continuing to be shehecheyanulakh, those new fruit of every stripe. The GTU was founded in a spirit of another kind of diversity, and all of us who have spent any time at all on Holy Hill know the pleasures of tasting the particular, peculiar flavors and colors and silly academic hats and just plain weirdness not only of other traditions but also of those we call our own. Maybe we haven’t—I hope we haven’t—just indulged our taste buds while our planet goes to hell. Maybe our planet depends on people like us, who root out occasions to taste rare fruit, to read arcane theologians, to immerse ourselves in obscure causes and unpronounceable languages. Our very survival, as the rabbis seem to have known, depends on the ever-new budding of fruit. As the Jewish science would have it: we need the biodiversity of a healthy planet, if only so we can keep finding occasions for making a shehecheyanu. And so maybe our survival also depends on someone remembering the rabbis, and the Church fathers and the Prophet Muhammed in the desert and the gurus on their mountain tops. Maybe we are more likely to survive, and not only more deserving of survival, if we praise and bless this world the way the rabbis did, and teach these blessings to whoever is crazy enough to listen: Baruch ata adonay elohenu melekh ha’olam, shehecheyanu vekiyimanu, vehigiyanu lazman hazeh. Amen

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