Two Harvard University commencement speeches, delivered 17 years apart, both got one thing wrong.
The talks to students—one from Conan O’Brien, who just returned to his alma mater to address the graduating class of 2026, and the second from Jamie Dimon, who stood before Harvard Business School’s class of 2009 at a moment when the global financial system was on its knees—were eloquent, well-thought-out and entertaining.
Two very different men. Two very different rooms. But both got something wrong.
Conan put it this way: “Refusing to see how luck has played a role in anyone’s success is simply ignorant.” Dimon said something remarkably similar: “A lot of what’s going to happen the next 25 years to you, it’s not just your skill. There’s luck involved.”
They’re both brilliant. They’re both right. And they’re both missing something essential.
The world calls it luck. But for people of faith, we recognize it as something else entirely: God’s hand.
Look at Jewish history with clear eyes. Every civilization that rose to power and tried to destroy us is gone. The Babylonians. The Assyrians. The ancient Greeks. The Romans. They built empires that shook the earth, and today, they are memories. We are still here. One could look at that record and shrug and say: lucky people, those Jews.
After the Holocaust decimated European Jewry, after the murder of 6 million of our brothers and sisters, we somehow found the will and the strength to establish a state in 1948—three years after the ovens went cold. In the middle of a hostile region that wanted us dead from the first day. Lucky timing?
In 1967, Israel faced the combined armies of Egypt, Syria and Jordan. In six days, it was over. Lucky generals?
The miraculous history continued for years, and then came Oct. 7, 2023.
I was in Israel that morning. The confusion was paralyzing. A nephew of mine who served in the Gaza Envelope that day described driving south and seeing Israeli tanks burning and bodies on the road. He told me he understood immediately that this was something unlike anything he had ever seen.
The weeks that followed were some of the darkest I can remember. There was genuine fear that Iran and all of their proxies—Hezbollah, the Houthis, militants from Iraq and every terror group in between—would pile on Israel and the whole region would erupt into war on every front simultaneously.
Nearly three years later, the leadership of virtually every one of those proxies has been decimated. The axis that was supposed to finish what Hamas started has been taken apart piece by piece. Lucky outcomes?
People like Conan and Dimon can call it luck if they want. The rest of the world does. But people of faith have never believed that.
The faith-based worldview does not have a concept of random fortune that smiles on some and frowns on others without reason. We believe in a God who created this world, who loves his people with a love that is impossible to fully comprehend, and who has been our partner through more than 3,000 years of history.
Not a passive observer, but a partner. If one were to take an honest look back at the moments that should have destroyed the Jews, yet somehow didn’t, it would be difficult to see only luck. We are seeing His hand.
Conan is right that we should carry our victories lightly. Dimon is right that we shouldn’t let success go to our heads or failure crush our spirits. Those are wise words, and I mean that. But for people of faith, there is a layer beneath the humility they are describing. It is recognizing the relationship with God, and it changes everything.
When things break right for us against impossible odds, we are not supposed to quietly acknowledge our good fortune and move on. We are supposed to stop, recognize what happened and say thank you. Out loud. With gratitude that matches the miracle.
Oct. 7 broke our hearts. The days that followed were a test of everything we had. But what has unfolded since is a series of open miracles, and we have an obligation to call them that. Not in spite of the grief, but alongside it.
The nations of the world look at Jewish survival and reach for the word luck because they have no other framework for it. We do. We have always had one.
It’s not luck. It never was. It is something far more meaningful than that, and it is the one piece of Jewish identity that I believe cannot be left behind. You can debate culture. You can debate practice. But if you strip away the belief that God is in this story with us, you lose the thread that makes sense of all of it.
We are not a lucky people. We are a people with a God who keeps His promises. There is no comparison.
