My High School Graduation Photo – Fall, 1967

My brother saved 250 letters I wrote to him between 1966 and 1974, and he called me recently after finding them tucked away somewhere in his house and offered them to me. I thought about it but asked, “Why would I want them?” He answered, “John, you really ought to read them as they show a clear through-line between who you were then and who you are now.”

Persuaded, I said “Ok.”

Amongst those letters were also a few I wrote to my parents when they traveled to New York City on a vacation in April, 1957. I was 7 years old.

I read them all in date order over a period of a few days (some were quite long) and was stunned not only by how much I had forgotten about what I did way back then, about the people I knew, the way I thought as a teen and young adult in my relationships with friends, family, American and world events, about my identity as a Jew and Zionist coming of age in the 1960s and later studying in Jerusalem before, during and after the 1973 Yom Kippur War. Taken all together, those letters form a diary of my teen-age and young adult years.

The art of writing in diaries and letter writing, sadly, is long gone. In my teen-age years, the only ways to communicate with others were in telephone calls, but they had to be truncated because of the high cost of long-distance, and in long-form letters – postage was 5 cents. In those years only the legacy media (radio news, network television, and print media) was available. There was no modern technology as we know it today that young people take for granted in connecting in a flash around the world. Consequently, there’s a huge difference in how we older and younger generations think based on our different life-experiences and how we are used to communicating.

On a recent flight home from Washington, D.C. to Los Angeles, I sat near an older woman in her early 80s who said after we landed and taxied to the terminal, as everyone opened their IPhones and began checking email and text messages: “Those gadgets are awful, the worst thing that ever happened. I don’t have one and never will. Don’t you agree?”

“Actually,” I said, “there’s a lot of good, but also a fair share of bad that accompanies these remarkable devices.”

She drilled down. “I don’t understand them. I hate them!”

I didn’t feel like getting into a long conversation with her as her mind was obviously made up, but I thought to myself: ‘Technology passes by so many people quickly leaving them behind and bewildered in a culture dominated by the internet and high-speed communications technology. Those who readily and easily embrace the new technologies are part of an ever-evolving culture that influences how they think, emote, react, and interact with each other across great distances. Whereas change in society in all its components was far less rapid when I was young, now what was current even a month ago could be today already passé.’

Yes – the new technologies have brought us much closer to one another, but they’ve also driven us further apart making us less trusting, more suspicious, and quicker to react without thinking about the consequences of what we say and do. So many millions of people seem to be online everywhere-all-at-once-and-all-the-time watching, waiting, writing, and responding. The down side is that there’s such a strong tendency for us to hit send once we record our thoughts but before we filter what we’ve written.  

Over the past 20 to 30 years, with the massive advances in communications technology and the publication of a huge number of memoirs and self-health books, the lines have become blurred between what we once kept private and what we now share publicly. As I wrote my recent Memoir (link below), I had to consider whether to write about those stories that I thought might be far too private and personal to reveal in print, even though they were important seminal events in my life. I knew they could inspire greater interest and help sell books. But, as a public figure, I didn’t really want to tell everything that ever happened to me, however salacious and self-revealing they were. Though my memoir is deeply personal, I chose only to reveal that which I believed had universal takeaways, and I kept my most private thoughts and experiences to myself.

In reading those 250 letters from long ago, I was reminded of the many friends I once cherished, of my failures and successes, disappointments and challenges growing into adulthood, and of the influence my many teachers, rabbis, mentors, family, and friends had upon me during those years.

Those many missives, veritable documentary evidence of my young life, show how I became who I am. They tell of the origins of the choices I made in my life and the ideas, values and causes I championed then and still champion, as well as the decision that I took to become a rabbi. The seeds of everything I would become in my later years were already there planted within me. I’ve grown and developed since then, of course, but I haven’t changed all that much from who I was as a teen and young adult.

I’m grateful to my brother Michael for saving that treasure trove of letters, rediscovering them recently, and giving them to me thus enabling me to take a journey back into the past so many years ago.

Postscript – Last year I published a memoir that picked up where these 250 letters left off – “From the West to the East – A Memoir of a Liberal American Rabbi” – If you have not already acquired a copy, you can do so directly from my publisher – https://westofwestcenter.com/product/from-the-west-to-the-east/  or on Amazon.