Rabbi urges grads to be ‘ beggars, thieves, fools, arrogant and masters of destruction’
R[ Become] holy beggars … who learn how to ask and how to receive; and how to beg for knowledge, love and life.
RABBI YOSEF WOSK CONVOCATION ADDRESS TO SFU GRADUATING STUDENTS
abbi Yosef Wosk is one of the rare scholars who can inject spiritual values into both academia and the wider secular culture.
The Vancouver- born educator and philanthropist did so again this week in a soulful speech, laced with cheeky Muslim, Taoist and Hebrew wisdom, while receiving an honourary degree from Simon Fraser University.
Wosk had for 15 years been SFU’s director of continuing studies and founded the hugely popular Philosophers’ Café program, through which more than 70,000 people have engaged in lively discussions on important issues.
Along the way, Wosk has been teaching around the world and spearheading an incredible array of philanthropic endeavours – hundreds of projects supporting the visual arts, museums, libraries, heritage preservation, interfaith dialogue, medicine, rare books, public gardens and more.
Earning five postgraduate degrees in theology, psychology and other fields, the Vancouver polymath was once a teaching assistant to Nobel Prize laureate Elie Wiesel. He speaks several languages and has received the Order of B. C. and a Queen’s Diamond Jubilee Medal.
As one of the offspring of furniturestore owner and philanthropist Morris Wosk, who immigrated to Vancouver from Ukraine in 1928, Yosef has begun projects that link the Wosk name with many educational spaces and creative efforts at SFU and beyond.
The five other luminaries receiving honourary degrees this spring from SFU are South Asian community leader Jack Uppal, United Way director Saida Rasul, groundbreaking aboriginal lawyer Louise Mandell, former York University president Harry Arthurs and South African pediatrician Glenda Gray, acclaimed for her pioneering work in preventing mother- to- child HIV transmission.
Yet when it came Wosk’s turn to address the afternoon convocation ceremony in the outdoor plaza of SFU’s Burnaby’s campus, students and faculty appeared riveted as the rabbi gave them advice in the form of what he called five “surprising” blessings.
“Today I bless you that you all become beggars, thieves, fools, arrogant and masters of destruction,” Wosk began, acknowledging his pleas might seem shocking.
Since Wosk had said earlier at lunch that it is incorrect to believe a “secular” university should bar spiritual concerns, he went on to urge the graduates to become “holy beggars … who learn how to ask and how to receive; and how to beg for knowledge, love and life.”
Wosk said he trusted the graduating class to be honest and ethical. So he also called on them to pretend to be “thieves,” who avoid passivity to steal learning and accomplishment from their teachers.
Then Wosk — an active businessman who endowed the City of Vancouver’s position of poet laureate — urged the arts and social science graduates to not only become trained scholars – but “fools … who embrace crazy wisdom.”
A real fool turns things upside down and “may slip into a state of mystical union.” The path of the fool, Wosk said, is filled with poetry, humour, devotion and spontaneity and “electrified by an infinity of alternatives.”
The rabbi seemed to stun some in the audience with his fourth blessing: He called on them to not just proclaim their humility, but their arrogance.
Wosk described how the visionary Buckminster Fuller, moments before he was ready to commit suicide, “heard a voice urging him instead to embark on ‘ an experiment to find what a single individual can contribute to changing the world.’
“That humble man was saved by an outburst of arrogance and became one of the most original thinkers of the past hundred years.”
Finally, Wosk wrapped up his mischievously spiritual speech by urging the young graduates to become masters of destruction.
“This last blessing is that you become iconoclasts, breakers of false beliefs and destroyers of illusions,” Wosk told the crowd of graduates as they prepared to step into their futures.
“I’m not referring to violent destruction but rather to creative destruction that clears the way for renewal.”
Sometimes, he said, people are too impressed with so- called “civilization” as they know it. So they “sleepwalk” through life and society, barricaded in their own minds and habits. “I have learned that to fulfil my dreams, I must wake up,” Wosk said.