Dartblog

REMARKS BY DAN NELSON AS PREPARED FOR DELIVERY. 5/7/07.

Thank you for the invitation to share this meal with you, and thank you in particular for the honor and opportunity to say a few words as we begin.

I understand this Shabbat dinner is special and unusual because it brings together those who normally attend Hillel with those who attend Chabad, and that it also includes others – Jews as well as non-Jews like me – who would not normally attend either.

I also understand that the relationship over the decades between Hillel and Chabad at other campuses has sometimes been strained. I would like to convey my sincere admiration and appreciation to all of you, but especially to Rabbi Gray and Rabbi Boraz for you commitment here at Dartmouth to collaboration and mutual respect, of which this dinner is only one reflection.

Someone once said, “I love humanity. It’s people I can’t stand.” It is easy to be tolerant and respectful of a distant abstraction. It’s much harder when it comes to those we know, and who know us all to well – our immediate families, our friends, our families of faith. Because we are so close and share so much in common, our differences are often all the more apparent and important to us. But you seem to have succeeded, at least most of the time, in maintaining your own identities and purposes while also mutually appreciating your different approaches, recognizing that students are best served, supported, and educated in a community that aims to find ways for people to feel included, rather than excluded.

So this dinner is both a celebration of Jewish diversity as well as Jewish community. I think there is a wonderful and important lesson to the rest of the College in this example. You are not called upon at Dartmouth to give up your identity, your beliefs and values — that which distinguishes you from others — as a condition of your membership in this College community. We certainly hope that your experience and education here will challenge some of those beliefs and values, but it is precisely your individuality and differences that create the necessary conditions for the kind of learning to which we aspire. At the same time, it is indeed a condition of membership that you allow others the same opportunity to enrich Dartmouth by their own distinctiveness. And although we can’t formally require it of you, we fervently hope that in sharing and learning from those differences, you will also find much you have in common. Thank you again for your example and inspiration.