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“Education for Self and Others”
In his first Baccalaureate Address, Yale’s 22nd President encouraged graduates to continue to learn, to teach, and to serve.
Summer 1994
by Richard Levin ’74PhD
We celebrate this weekend a commencement, a beginning, the beginning of your lives as independent, educated citizens of this nation and the world. This celebration marks also an end, the end of your Bright College Years—so abounding with activity, so ripe with experiment, so full of hope. We the faculty celebrate with you as we loose you on the wider world—confident of your success and hopeful that your newly acquired knowledge and critical powers will be directed toward finding answers that have eluded us.
Yale tradition permits me this one last word, this one last opportunity to teach. I shall draw upon a tradition of teaching far older than Yale’s, a tradition that speaks powerfully to the choices before you at this moment. The Talmud is a compendium of oral law reduced to writing by rabbis some time around the third century A.D. It consists of laws or teachings (Mishnah) and a related set of rabbinical commentaries (Gemara). These commentaries are extraordinary examples of legal and literary interpretation. The methods of the commentators survive in the work of legal scholars and literary critics to this day.
Ten years ago, in the Baccalaureate Address to the Yale Class of 1984, my predecessor, A. Bartlett Giamatti, commented upon a passage drawn from a section of the Talmud known as the Pirke Avot, “the sayings of the ancestors.” Unlike the rest of the Talmud, the Pirke Avot is not a compendium of obligatory laws or prescriptions for ritual observance. It is instead a set of stories and maxims, the ethical teachings of the rabbis who lived in the period from perhaps 300 B.C.E. to 200 A.D. Today, I shall take inspiration from the ethical teachings of Hillel, a Babylonian rabbi who lived and taught in Jerusalem just before the time of Jesus.
The Pirke Avot records:
“[Hillel] used to say: ‘If I am not for myself, who will be for me? If I am for myself alone, what am I? And if not now, when?’”
“If I am not for myself, who will be for me?”
Hillel’s observation arises in the context of a discussion of self-improvement through study. Each of you has learned that the development of your intellectual capabilities (not to mention your aesthetic, emotional, and spiritual capabilities) requires effort that only you can apply. It is true that the Yale environment has provided you with extraordinarily abundant resources to facilitate learning: a distinguished and engaged faculty, library and museum collections that are among the finest available to students anywhere, laboratories and computing resources, a unique residential college system, myriad extracurricular activities, athletic and cultural events for both participant and observer. But your education has not merely been laid before you; you have worked hard to acquire it—in the classroom, on the playing fields, in extracurricular activities, in the community. You have learned to be for yourselves. You may have benefited from the support and encouragement of others, but they were and will be for you only to the extent that you responded to their support and encouragement by becoming independent, autonomous persons.
Two millennia after Hillel, I would suggest that being “for oneself” is still the principal object of study and reflection. Though discussion of what it means to be an educated person usually focuses on the content of one’s course of study, the essence of a liberal education is to develop the freedom to think critically and independently, to cultivate one’s mind to its fullest potential. What you have learned at Yale—the specific knowledge you have worked hard to acquire—matters. What matters more is that you have learned how to learn.
This is something you should not easily surrender. Tempting as it may be to conform to prevailing orthodoxies, resist them. Guide your daily lives by the same rigorous standards of critical inquiry that have been demanded of you in the classroom. Question every assumption and every argument, make them your own, be for yourself. Some of the commentators on Hillel observe that his teaching echoes Deuteronomy (30:15): “See I have set before thee this day life and good, and death and evil … Choose life, therefore,.” Choose, therefore, to keep alive your precious power of independent, open-minded, critical inquiry.
Hillel reminds us that self-improvement through study is not enough: “If I am for myself alone, what am I?” Our commitment to a life of learning must not diminish, it must indeed reinforce, our commitment to those around us. The rabbinical commentators provide various interpretations of this teaching. Some suggest that the learned, those who study the divine law, are obliged to transmit their learning, to teach and to encourage in others the habit of study and a disciplined approach to self-development. Other commentators find in Hillel’s question the suggestion of a more general ethical imperative to use one’s learning, one’s critical powers, in the service of others.
Both these interpretations—that we are obliged to teach and to serve—resonate with the history of this great University. Yale has been a mother of great teachers. Our graduates have taught with distinction at all levels, sharing the benefits of their Yale education with students in New England schools and colleges in the eighteenth century, across the United States in the nineteenth century, around the world in the twentieth. Yale alumni served as the first presidents of Princeton, Columbia, Williams, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, the University of Chicago, and the Universities of Georgia, Mississippi, Missouri, Wisconsin, and California. At this time of year, blue gowns are in abundance, not only here at Yale but in commencement processions throughout the land.
Most of you will not choose teaching as a vocation, but all of you will teach—in the workplace, in the community, in the family. Take this opportunity seriously. Others have much to gain from what you will make of your Yale education. Nurture in others what Yale has encouraged you to develop for yourselves—the capacity for rigorous analysis, for critical reflection, for independent thought.
Hillel’s teaching can also be interpreted as a call to service. If we are for ourselves alone, we overlook and neglect the needs and aspirations of others. There is a famous story about the student who came to Hillel seeking conversion to Judaism, but only on the condition that Hillel would teach him the entire divine law, the entire Torah, while the student stood on one foot. Hillel replied with his distinctive formulation of the Golden Rule: “What is hateful to you, do not do to another. That is the whole Torah, the rest is commentary. Go and learn!”
The idea that a Yale education should be used in the service of others is as old as the University itself. Our charter of 1701 describes Yale, then called the Collegiate School, as a place “wherein Youth may be fitted for Publick employment both in Church and Civil State.“ For nearly three centuries Yale has fulfilled this founding mission, supplying leaders to serve the nation and the world. In politics, religion, business, law, medicine, and the arts, as well as in education, Yale alumni have served the public with distinction. Countless Yale graduates have served their communities—not only in their primary careers, but through selfless involvement with voluntary associations of all kinds.
Heavy though the burden may seem, you will be among the leaders of your generation. The world you will serve presents you with more than a few challenges: the resurgence of nationalism and ethnic struggle around the globe, the desperate condition of the inner city poor here in this country, the degradation of our environment. You bring to these challenges more than the mere enthusiasm of youth. You bring the ability to see these problems in a new light, to think them through again, using the critical intelligence that you have developed for yourselves. Rise to these challenges; be not for yourselves alone.
Your experience here at Yale encourages us. Many, perhaps most of you, have found time, despite the demands of a rigorous academic program, for a serious commitment to community service. The recent dramatic increase in the number of Yale students engaged in community service gives hope, not only for the city of New Haven whose residents have benefited from your involvement, but for the communities in which you will live and for the wider world whose problems you must not shun.
“And if not now, when?” In interpreting this last of Hillel’s questions, I have little to add to commentaries of the rabbis. Maimonides, a twelfth century philosopher, said: “If now, in the days of my youth, I do not acquire good qualities, when shall I acquire them?” The good qualities to which he refers are the habits of study as a means to self-improvement and service. A thirteenth century commentator, Rabbi Jonah, adds: “Let no one say, ‘Today, I am busy with my work; tomorrow I will turn to the task of perfecting myself.’ Perchance the opportunity will not present itself. And even if it does, that particular day has vanished utterly.; it can never be recovered.”
Self-improvement and service to others are tasks that require more than a lifetime, but they must be undertaken. Let me recall to you the teaching of Rabbi Tarfon, the second century scholar who inspired Bart Giamatti a decade ago and who reminds us of these obligations: “You are not required to complete the work, but neither are you free to desist from it.”
Women and men of the Class of 1994, the challenges you face are daunting, but you are magnificently prepared for them. Your Yale education has given you gifts that few possess. Use them well. Make your own lives full of continued study, reflection, and learning, and, through teaching and service, make better the lives of others.  |
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