“Ben Azzai taught, ‘Dismiss no person and disregard no matter, for every person has their hour and everything its place.’”
—Pirkei Avot 4:3
Today is Seward’s Day, an annual celebration observed by Alaskans on the final Monday of March in honor of William Seward. Seward was the Secretary of State who negotiated and signed the Alaska Purchase Treaty in 1867, a treaty that transferred the Alaskan territory from Russian to U.S. control in exchange for $7.2 million.
Ironically, Seward received national ridicule for his part in negotiating the purchase. Most Americans felt that the United States had vastly overpaid for the mostly useless territory, calling the sale Seward’s Folly. Seward died in 1872, his principal treaty still considered a gaffe.
Opinions swiftly changed, however, once gold was discovered in the Klondike River in 1896. Subsequent discoveries of oil and natural gas reservoirs, coupled with the growth of Alaska’s strategic value in the northern Pacific, ultimately changed the minds of Americans, who recognized that the territory—which became a state in 1959—had proven its value many times over.
Seward’s Day reminds us to consider which ideas we dismiss out of hand, for as our sages suggest, contemporary wisdom may easily prove fleeting.
—Rabbi Josh Knobel