Rabbi Marc Boone Fitzerman
August 23, 2009
HILLEL OF NORTHEASTERN OKLAHOMA DEDICATION
For most of us standing together this evening, our lives unfold in an already furnished world. The institutions that support us and shape our experiences were created by others in a distant past. Our efforts may give life to some new improvement, some variation on an essential theme, but the heavy lifting has been done by others. In the Jewish community of this good place, the Temple and Synagogue are almost a century old. The fundamental forms were already present—stable features of the local landscape—by the time that most of us came on the scene. We are rarely privileged to create something new, to do the fascinating work of real innovation.
This evening is all about that rare exhilaration. For many years, Jewish students in Oklahoma have been served and supported in a number of ways: affinity groups on various campuses, informal gatherings as interest coalesced, the Brandeis Club at OSU and, most importantly, OU Hillel. This is the sixty-fifth anniversary year of that group, of an official presence at the University of Oklahoma. Along with you, I celebrate that achievement: after many years of struggle and challenge, OU Hillel is a powerful presence on campus. But Eastern Oklahoma has had a different history, with little in the way of organized effort.
All of that, of course, is about to change, the result of a fateful and positive convergence. For many years our Jewish community has been in a fruitful conversation with the University of Tulsa, We have been thinking together about growth and development; about cooperative ventures, recruitment and expansion. How can a university with a rich heritage of faith create a new space for minority students with all the essential supports and openness? How to fashion a multicultural campus so that students from a great variety of traditions might feel at home on the green, in the classrooms, in the dormitories?
The University of Tulsa has taken these issues seriously and responded with a robust and inspiring enthusiasm. Together we’ve sent letters to Jewish day schools in our region, inviting potential applicants to think about Tulsa. The university has established a Jewish certificate program, the prelude to a program in Jewish studies. Four years ago, the University Housing Office made over a space to serve, experimentally, as the very first home for Hillel on campus.
In that sense this evening is a step along the way. Hillel of Northeastern Oklahoma will now be based in the space in front of you, a second great gift of the University of Tulsa, offered as a contribution to Jewish life in this state. Furnished and supported in every way by the University, it is the outward sign of a very rich relationship.
For all of this, I am deeply grateful. President Upham and his immediate predecessors, along with Roger Blais, Provost, and Roger Sorochty, Vice President for Enrollment and Student Services, have credentialed this effort and led the way. We’ve gotten focused attention from Melissa France and Mark Bernhardt, and the entire staff of the Department of Housing and Residential Life. The same is true for the Department of Admissions and staffers throughout the University community. It would be impossible to overstate this generosity and the genuine mutuality that has taken shape in this relationship. I ask you to join me in thunderous applause as we offer thanks to the University of Tulsa.
The other necessary component in all of this has been the philanthropic support of our own community. Out of our first experience with informal leadership, all of us who have been involved along the way realized that we needed a Director of Jewish Student Life, a point of contact for Jewish students, someone who could spark and stimulate and inspire. No volunteer chair can do this work, and our faculty advisors have many other responsibilities.
Enter the family foundations of Jewish Tulsa. A conversation about part-time, then half-time leadership quickly gave way to a full-bore initiative, capably led by a full-time staffer. That’s just one of the spectacular positives about our city: imaginative, risk-talking, philanthropic leadership, willing to bet on a good idea and get it up and running without fretful nervousness. It’s the difference between a lively culture of change, and a dead, hamstrung, bureaucratic inertia.
Thanks to all this, we created a board, an independent group of Hillel partisans, passionately committed to Jewish campus life. We then qualified our Hillel for official membership in the international Jewish collegiate effort in the shortest amount of time on record. And then we engaged a marvelous new director, Eric Cohn, who has abundant experience with Jewish students, and who carries himself with great maturity. What came before this was tentative and preliminary. This is truly our official birthday.
Let me express my thanks to everyone involved: The Anne and Henry Zarrow Foundation, the Maxine and Jack Zarrow Family Foundation, the Charles and Lynn Schusterman Family Foundation, and the Ruth Kaiser Nelson Family Foundation. Staff and volunteer time and resources have come from the Synagogue and Temple Israel, and gifts in kind from the Jewish Federation of Tulsa. Several of our supporters are with us this evening. Would you join me in thanking Henry Zarrow, Maxine Zarrow, Stacy Schusterman, Steven Dow, Judy Kishner, and Gail Richards, together with those who could not be present this evening.
Along with all of you, I feel part of a blessing, a circle of aspiration and promise and good will. Based on this green and pleasant campus, Hillel of Northeastern Oklahoma will serve students everywhere on this side of the state. It will help convene and organize and connect, so that university students here and elsewhere have an opportunity to explore culture and faith, and all the components of Jewish civilization. It represents an important new idea: Jewish life is many different things and a place like Hillel is not a place at all, but a radically open opportunity to define and express Jewish thought and feeling without privileging a single form over others. It has nothing to do with dogma and denominations, but is determined to meet everyone within its orbit with unconditional acceptance and eager excitement. Hillel asks students here and everywhere: what will happen next in Jewish life? How can we achieve sturdy identities, and at the very same time, with the same enthusiasm, serve the university community as a whole with energy, focus, and heartfelt commitment?
I believe, with you, in the rightness of those questions and in the worthy goals that are embedded within them. On this new day of new beginnings, I ask for blessing in our partnership with this university. No institution could have offered more, or expressed its fundamental commitments more seriously. And I offer my thanks to our many supporters. The marvelous Jewish community of Tulsa says to every student who comes here that we are ready to embrace you and call you our own. Our love and our care are yours without condition. Zeh ha-yom asah Adonai. This is the day that Adonai has made. May it point toward joy and satisfaction and success. And let us all say, amayn, amayn.
