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Good morning.

My university, Cambridge, has just announced a two year inquiry into how the University may have contributed to and profited from slavery. One criticism which certainly can’t be made is that the university has rushed into this, since any monies which may be sitting in our account, so to speak, have been there for the best part of two hundred years or more. But there will be, and have been, other criticisms – the most caustic one I have read, that this is ‘really about making white liberal academics at Cambridge feel a bit better about themselves.’ The university, some have said, should be busy changing the future, not wringing its hands – or washing its hands – in relation to the past.

I am not one to knock cynicism – human nature being what it is, we are often moved to do good things for ulterior motives and not simply because they are the right thing to do. But that said, I do think this is a proper initiative, even if a bit overdue – and just because understanding the past, and shaping the future, are not necessarily separate projects, but are surely very often intimately related.

Towards the end of the book of Deuteronomy – one of those law books at the beginning of the Old Testament which can sometimes seem hard going – there is an old Hebrew confession of great power and beauty which is all about linking past, present and future. Moses tells his hearers that when they are in possession of the promised land – the land flowing with milk and honey - they must bring the first fruits of the harvest – a tithe - to the priest, and as the priest lays it before the altar, are to recite the following words: ‘A wandering Aramean was my father. And he went down into Egypt few in number, and there became a nation, great, mighty and populous. . . And the Lord brought us forth . . . with a mighty hand . . . and brought us into this place and gave us this land.’ And just in case being a ‘wandering Aramean’ sounds a tad romantic, one modern translation calls a spade a spade and has ‘A homeless Aramean was my father’.

The message is simple and clear. Whatever good things they presently enjoy, Moses is telling the people that they should live in the present, and in the future, conscious of the divine providence and favour which, in the past, raised up the wandering – homeless - Arameans and brought them into the promised land. Now the case with the University and slavery is, of course, radically different – the good things we enjoy here in Cambridge and which may have been derived from slavery, cannot be thought of as signs of particular divine mercy, but only as the ill-gotten gains of human greed and wickedness. But that said, in both cases, remembering our past history in the present moment maybe the key to living thankfully, and with greater integrity, in the future.

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