"What sort of man wakes up one morning, at age 53, and tells his wife that he is quitting his prestigious position as the Dean of Graduate Jewish Studies at Yeshiva University and going off to found a new college? What manner of man walks along the New Jersey shore with his best friend and has the chutzpah to declare: Our new school will someday be bigger than Harvard and Yale?' What sort of man, indeed?
The Lander Legacy is one that cannot yet be fully appreciated. It will take the passage of years to fully assess the impact that Dr. Bernard Lander's life had upon the future of our people. This much I can tell you today. He was a one-of-akind tsaddik. He saw himself, and the school that he built, as something akin to Havdalah. The dividing line between the sacred and the mundane. He stood with one foot planted on either side, a clear reminder that without the work week, there can be no Shabbos and vice versa. Torah and Parnassa. G-d and man. To understand the importance of this distinction, and to place value on both, is tounderstand Bernard Lander, the man and giant Jewish leader of our age."