It is very hard not to sound a bit over-sentimental and saccharine at a time of this sort. It is rather sad to close shop and call an end to our Seminar of 1968. These seven or eight days that we have been together at Camp Morasha have been a highly concentrated period, equivalent to a much longer time. We have gotten to know each other quite intensely. We have experienced much more in this week than people ordinarily do in weeks or even months. To an extent, this period may form a signifleant portion of our lives. I am fairly sure that there are people in this dining room tonight for whom this week represents a turning point in their lives. Something very decisive has happened to them. Henceforth their careers, their futures, their destinies, are going to be much different from what they would have been had they not been here today. So this evening is like the end of a chumash. When you end one book of the Bible and begin the next, there are three words that the congregation recites while rising: ”Chazak, chazak, ve*nitיchazek -- Be strong, be strong, and let us find strength in each other.” Chazak implies the strength of courage. That is going to be my theme for this evening -- the theme of courage, specifically three kinds of courage. The first form of courage that I recommend to you is the courage to grow up fast. There is no time to squander on leisurely -2- childishness in the world we live in. Socially, militarily, politically, and especially Jewishly, the stream of events flows too quickly to allow time for "kid stuff" for people your age. Our world is hungry for adult minds. Nature does not share our human prediliction for coddling people until they are eighteen or twenty. If the youngest of you here were a bird, by this age your mother would long ago have shoved you out of her nest and you would be on your own. If you were a member of any other species, nature would not tolerate that gap in age that we humans have invented and called "adolescence" or "tee…

The advance of science and technology has resulted in extensive harm to the environment. While there is considerable controversy as to the extent of this injury, and as to whether this artificial imbalance is significantly more than nature's own traumatic eruptions, it is widely accepted – ever since Rachel Carson's The Silent Spring – that there is indeed a very real problem that must be attended to. To take but one example – the elimination of species from the earth: In the next half century – less than one human lifetime – the Earth could lose blue whales, giant pandas, tigers, black rhinoceroses, and millions of lesser-known species. Entire ecosystem types could be damaged beyond repair. Humans are only one of the Earth's 10, 30, or even 100 million species. The world is always changing. We are now in a period of extraordinary biodiversity loss. In The Diversity of Life, Harvard University's Edward O. Wilson estimates that 5–20% of tropical forest species will be extinct in the next 30 years, or somewhere between a half million and 20 million species. A paper in the July 21, 1995 edition of Science estimated that current extinction rates are 100–1,000 times their pre-human levels. – from “Threats to Biological Diversity: A Scientific and Political Overview,” COK/L/Summer 1996As Jews we should be particularly sensitive to the disappearance of whole species, because one imperiled species of the family of Homo sapiens is – the Jewish people...The environmentalist movement, like all other high-minded and serious efforts to improve the lot of mankind or the world as such, tends to become overly fashionable, and falls into the hands of moralizers and cause-seekers who do not fear exaggeration or one-sidedness. As a result, there is developing a reaction against the alleged excesses of the movement – as, for instance, the advocacy of recycling garbage. In an article in the New York Times Magazine of June 30, 1996, John Tierney writes:Believing that there was no more r…