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Jewish World Review July 23, 2004 / 5 Menachem-Av, 5764 The road taken By Rabbi Avi Shafran Used to giving graduation speeches, this year the author found himself on the other side of the podium — enlightened by a high school senior
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We take our leave now, as summer unfolds, of graduation ceremonies — the recognition of academic milestones, the bestowing of diplomas, the conferring of awards and the delivery, to excess, of commencement addresses.
Having had the privilege for many years of serving as a teacher and an administrator of a Jewish high school, I probably imposed on captive audiences more than my share of shared wisdom, heaping servings of words that were likely lost entirely in the reveries of proud parents and squirmy students. Now, with graduates of my own and on the receiving end of graduation speeches, I find myself with a fresh appreciation for oratorical minimalism.
Still and all, an occasional graduation speech — sometimes even one delivered by an actual graduate — achieves memorability. That was the case at my daughter's recent high school graduation.
The custom at her school is to not designate a valedictorian or salutatorian. Instead, the class members themselves, by closed vote, suggest several young women (it's an Orthodox Jewish all-girls school) to briefly share their thoughts with those gathered for the graduation ceremony.
One of the seniors chosen to speak this year began with what seasoned graduation-goers immediately recognized, and dreaded, as a numbing cliché: a reference to "The Road Not Taken."
Oy, we collectively moaned. Another declaration of personal independence, another sweet paean to individualism. Although a careful reading of the poem reveals the possibility, perhaps probability, of an ironic intent in Robert Frost's haunting words, the poem has nevertheless widely come to be taken as a satisfied endorsement of individuality, a declaration of the existential value of the less-traveled road.
Now there's nothing wrong with individuality, to be sure. But all the same, the poem and its purported point are rather heavily traveled themselves, staples of countless literature classes, poetry recitals — and graduations.
So I sank in my seat with resignation, reassuring myself that it would all be over soon enough.
As it happened, though, where this particular young Jewish woman went with Frost's famous words was not to be missed. I don't have her words before me but I well recall their essence.
The poem's narrator, she explained, seems to take pride in having chosen from the "two roads diverged in a yellow wood" the one "less traveled by" — a choice that, looked back upon "somewhere ages and ages hence," would turn out to have "made all the difference."
The graduation speaker, though, begged to take issue with the idea that the less traveled path is always the more valiant choice. The life-path, for example, that she and her classmates had come to value most was a road pointedly well-worn, trodden by countless Jewish generations that came this way before our own arrival.
We hold our heads high, she declared, as we endeavor to walk in their very footsteps, filled with pride at the chance to follow such inspiring predecessors, and to wear as did they, the hallowed mantle of Torah and mitzvas (religious duties). Judaism, after all, she explained, is not about blazing new paths but about cherishing and preserving time-honored ones.
It was, ironically, a rebellious message in its own way. It boldly shunned the conformity proffered at every turn by an open, freedom-loving society that trumpets self-celebration, self-fulfillment, self respect, self.
What this seventeen-year-old was saying was that our undeniable value as individuals must be tempered by, even made subservient to, our value as links over history in a chain of life and family and peoplehood, as members of an eternal community of belief and commitment.
It is a message, truly, for our times. In an age of emotional alienation, marital discord, rampant consumerism and instant gratification, nothing could be healthier than to digest the fact that we have not only desires but responsibilities, that we were gifted with our lives in order to fulfill something more than ourselves.
Those who come to recognize that fact, and its upshot, will likely one day, ages hence, look back and realize that it really made all the difference.
Every weekday JewishWorldReview.com publishes what many in Washington and in the media consider "must reading." Sign up for the daily JWR update. It's free. Just click here. JWR contributor Rabbi Avi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America Comment by clicking here.
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