Graduation Address at the University of Aberdeen

Chancellor:

Given a moment of silence, I should now like to ask the Chief Rabbi Lord Sacks to address the graduates, please. 

Rabbi Sacks:

Chancellor, Principal, graduates, Ladies and gentlemen, First I want to express my thanks for this honour that I cherish coming as it does from one of Britain's oldest and most distinguished universities. I feel a special sense of connection with Aberdeen because it was here that the great moral philosopher, Donald MacKinnon, was Regis Professor between 1947 and 1960. And it was he who examined me for my doctorate.

I will never forget that moment. I had written my 80,000 words on the concept of collective responsibility in Jewish law and not knowing what he would ask about, I was full of trepidation. The day came. Professor MacKinnon held the bound volume of my collective thoughts in his hand, was silent for a long time, and then said “On page 157 you use the adjective ‘Kantian.’ Now would that be early Kantian or late Kantian?” I didn't have a clue. So with a wild guess, I said “Late Kantian.”

“I thought so,” said MacKinnon. And that was it. The ordeal was over. And he then proceeded to tell me about the delights of Aberdeen, with special reference to its herring fishery.

So I thank the University of Aberdeen for the generosity of its teachers then and now.

The convention in speeches like these is to share some thoughts about life after university and I will limit them to three. 

The first and most important is, keep learning. Getting a degree is not the moment when your learning ends. It's the moment when real learning, the learning that comes from life and leads into life, begins. 

I spend much of my time travelling, going from kindergartens to old age homes, and it was in one old age home that I met Florence, then 103 and a half. Never had I met anyone so old who was so young. Her body may have aged but her facial expressions, her energy and enthusiasm, were those of a young woman. 

“What's the secret of eternal youth?” I asked her. She gave me a smile, this 103.5-year-old, and said, “Never be afraid to learn something new.”

That is when I discovered that if you keep learning, you can be 103 and still young. But if you stop learning, you can be 23 and already old.

I remember the day I achieved my rabbinic ordination. I was acutely conscious of how much I still had to learn. I said to my teacher, “It feels very strange. Yesterday, I was a layman. Today, I am a rabbi, but yesterday I was an ignoramus and today I am still an ignoramus. What's changed?” 

My teacher turned to me and said, “What's changed is that yesterday you had an excuse. Today you have no excuse.”

So keep learning, keep reading, keep exposing yourself to new ideas, new disciplines, new perspectives, because those who learn, stay young. 

Rule Two. The easiest to say but the hardest to live. Our most profound learning experiences come not from our successes, but from our failures. It was George Bernard Shaw's failures as a novelist that led him to write plays, Beethoven's deafness that lifted him to his greatest compositions, especially the late quartets. Several - and I say this in particular to our business graduates today - several of the most successful business people I have ever met, were told on leaving school that they were failures who would never amount to anything. 

Success gives us satisfaction, but it's failure that makes us grow. 

Rule Three. Faith in Judaism begins with God's call to Abraham to leave his land, his birthplace, and his father's house, and travel to an unknown destination.

Faith does not mean playing it safe. Faith is the courage to take a risk. 

Not all faith is religious. My doctoral supervisor, the late Sir Bernard Williams, used to talk about Gauguin, the man who left his home and his career as a stockbroker to travel to Tahiti to paint. There was - Williams used to say - nothing he knew at the time that could have given him a rational justification for that decision. He only knew he was a great painter when he became one. He could not have known it in advance. 

Williams called that luck. I call it faith. Not religious faith, but still faith. Faith means courage in the face of the unknown and constitutively unknowable future.

In 1977, Natan (then Anatoly) Sharansky, the human rights activist, was arrested by the then Soviet Union and sentenced to 13 years of forced labour. Just before he was taken away, his wife, Avital, gave him a book of Psalms. Somehow, the KGB sensed that this book would give him strength, and they confiscated it. For three years, he campaigned to have it given back and eventually it was. Sharansky was not a particularly religious man and knew only a few words of Hebrew. So he took the book as a code and set about de-encrypting it. Little by little, words, phrases, verses, began to make sense until he came across a line, which he later said, seemed as if it had been spoken by God directly to him there in prison. It was the famous verse from Psalm 23, “Though I walk through the valley of the shadow of death, I will fear no evil, for You are with me.”

That is the purest expression of faith I know. Life is a journey full of risks toward a destination we will only know when we get there. And faith is the courage to undertake that journey, not because it's safe - it isn't - but because somehow we know that in our greatest strivings, we are not alone.

You, the graduating students - graduated students - are about to undertake that journey. And your years here in this great university have been a large part of the preparation. 

You have learned how to learn, so keep learning. 

Never be afraid of failure, because God always gives us a second chance and a third, and never ceases to believe in us, even if sometimes we don't believe in ourselves.

And always, have the courage to take a risk. Because we can travel without fear when God is with us. And God is always with us, whether we know it or not. 

May God be with you in all you do, and may all you do bring pride to your teachers and blessings to the world.