Shana Tova

Dear Friends,

Rosh Hashanah inevitably invites us to look backward before looking forward. And when I think about the year now ending, I find myself struggling with the usual language of a “year in review.” The past twelve months do not fit neatly into a list of accomplishments, challenges, or milestones: They were all of those things at once.

For two years, so much of our institutional life had been organized around absence: students and faculty serving in the reserves, members of our community killed, wounded, displaced or held hostage, academic schedules repeatedly disrupted, and the constant question of how to sustain a university when normal life itself had become abnormal.

Then the hostages came home. There was no sudden return to normality. Trauma does not obey ceasefires, and neither do the consequences of years of disruption. Many of our students and faculty were, and still are, serving in the reserves. But a wound that had defined Israeli life since October 7 had finally begun to close, and for the first time in years we could imagine that the war which had consumed so much of our lives might truly be ending, except, of course, it didn’t.

Once again we found ourselves under missile attack from Iran, or drone attacks from Lebanon, and daily life was dictated by sirens, cancelled plans, and the distance to the nearest bomb shelter. Like everyone in Israel, we became strangely adept at planning around the possibility of the next alert. At home, we still have not had the courage to dismantle our safe room. The water, flashlights and emergency supplies (many past expiration date) accumulated over these years are still there. Perhaps that says something about where Israelis find ourselves today: trying to move forward, but not quite prepared to believe that the emergency is behind us.

And yet, remarkably, the University did move forward in so many ways. Our incoming classes have grown dramatically, even as other institutions confront declining enrollment. Our share of Israel’s competitive research funding has risen beyond our proportional size, and our researchers continue to win major international grants and turn discoveries from our laboratories into technologies, companies, clinical advances and public impact.

I have written to you before about the particular character of BGU students: young people willing to leave the center of the country, build lives in Be’er Sheva, and embrace a university whose identity has always been tied to challenge and possibility. The Negev shapes them, and they shape the Negev in return. This year offered extraordinary evidence that our students are not merely surviving difficulty. They are succeeding through it.

Institutionally, we opened the Stein Faculty of Computer and Information Sciences, expanded entrepreneurship across the University, and deepened our commitment to the Negev as a central part of our academic mission. At the same time, we continued asking a question that I believe every university must now confront: what will make a university indispensable in an age when knowledge itself is increasingly available everywhere?

My answer has become clearer. Universities are not simply repositories of knowledge. They are communities in which people encounter one another, discover ambitions they did not know they had, argue, collaborate, fail, try again, and sometimes meet the people with whom they will spend the rest of their lives building something new. Artificial intelligence can transform how we teach and conduct research. It cannot replace that human encounter.

For BGU, that human mission is inseparable from being “of the Negev.” The strength of our research, the success of our students, the growth of Be’er Sheva and the wider region, Jewish-Bedouin relations, industry, healthcare, education and civil society are not separate stories. They are intertwined. That responsibility has become even clearer to me this year.

Our reach, of course, extends well beyond the Negev. Over the past year, I have met colleagues and friends across Europe, India, North America and elsewhere. At a time when some universities have chosen academic boycotts and disengagement from Israel, others have insisted that scholarship must continue to cross borders. Again and again I have been reminded that universities can create relationships where politics struggles to do so, and that BGU has an important role to play.

At home, meanwhile, our eyes increasingly turn toward October 27 and Israel’s elections. I hope it does not sound overly dramatic to say that these elections will help determine the character of the country in which our university will operate for years to come. At stake is something larger than the fortunes of any one party or politician: whether Israel remains a liberal democracy in which a parliamentary majority is constrained by institutions and principles, truth and expertise matter, education and research are valued, and disagreement is understood as an essential feature of democratic life rather than an act of disloyalty.

For a university president, these are not abstract political questions. Universities depend upon academic freedom, institutional autonomy, intellectual openness and a shared belief that evidence matters. We cannot be indifferent to the health of the democratic system that makes those things possible.

Through all of this, you have remained part of the story. When we were forced to postpone our Board of Governors meeting in May, I felt deeply the loss of that annual gathering. Traveling to meet many of you around the world reminded me how unusual our community is. We do not all share the same partisan politics or the same answers to the difficult questions confronting Israel. What we share is more durable: a belief in this university, in the future of the Negev, and in the role that knowledge, education and human connection must play in shaping Israel’s future.

Perhaps that is what I take most strongly from the year now ending. For much of the past three years, we have had to prove that Ben-Gurion University could endure. This year, we began once again to show what it can become.

There remains enormous work ahead. Our students continue to carry the physical and emotional consequences of war. Israeli academia faces serious challenges at home and abroad. The Negev still falls far short of its potential. And the technological revolution transforming higher education will require us to rethink assumptions universities have carried for generations.

But I enter the new year with something stronger than optimism. I have seen what our students can do, the work emerging from our laboratories, our graduates building companies and communities, our faculty protecting academic excellence under extraordinary pressure, and the strength of the global BGU family that continues to stand beside us.

In just a few weeks, we will finally gather again in the Negev for what promises to be one of our largest Board of Governors meetings. After the year we have lived through, I suspect that simply being together on campus will carry a meaning of its own.

Until then, Shira joins me in wishing each of you and your families a year of health, peace, curiosity, accomplishment, and, perhaps most importantly, quieter days.

Shana Tova U’Metuka,

Danny