Amnon Rubinstein’s speech on the occasion of his 70^th birthday, as celebrated in the Interdisciplinary Centre in Herzliya

Dear Friends,

Thank you for all the warm and kind things you have said about me. The truth is that all this is very embarrassing and reminds me of the somewhat premature announcement of my death in the Knesset some two years ago.

To Hans Van Baalen, a true friend, who came especially from Holland. We’ve been through many things and I do appreciate your coming here to this country in days in which every visit has a special significance. To Dr. Blanke of the Friedrich Nauman Stiftung: thank you for your initiative, a true friend and colleague.

I would like to content myself with three notes about age and one ageless comment. Firstly, to reach the age of 70 is against all laws of probability. To reach the end of this trail of disease, sickness, natural and man-made catastrophes is highly improbable and, for an Israeli Jew, borders on impertinence. Secondly, the only trouble about age is the discrepancy between hardware and software: the software is renewable, the hardware is not. Were the two to age simultaneously, everything would be all right. Thirdly, you reach 70 all of a sudden – despite the fact that the clock ticks and the calendar pages turn, one day you discover that 70 years have gone by. You wake up in the morning and look in the mirror and suddenly you see your father staring back at you. If you are a public figure it is much worse. Only yesterday you took your hat off to respectable elders; today, people take their hats off to you. The transition from being an enfant terrible to becoming an eminence grise is so swift that it is frightening.

One ageless note about liberty. You start with elementary things: freedom from authority – from parents, teachers and rulers. Then you grow up and realize that there is more to liberty than freedom from yokes; that you have to free yourself from the rules of fashion, correctness, of categorizations, of routine. It is not easy. You have to wake up each morning and think afresh. Decide for yourself what is right or wrong – not easy. I have searched for words which will represent this complex sense of freedom and found it in far away Bengal in the words of Rabindranath Tagore – actually, not that far away as there is a street named after him in Tel Aviv – and with your permission I shall read the English version of his poem which, I think, encapsulates my sense of liberty and my perception of Israel.

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high

Where knowledge is free

Where the world has not been broken up into fragments by narrow domestic walls

Where words come out from the depth of truth

Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection

Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way into the dreary desert sand of dead habit

Where the mind is led forward into ever widening thought and action

Into that heaven of freedom, let my country awake

Thank you all for being here.