My Fellow Classmates:

Though I am accustomed to addressing hundreds—and occasionally thousands—of people in my congregation every week, and do so without feeling particularly nervous, I must confess that coming to this reunion has had me in a state of anxiety for weeks. For one thing, it is literally true that I have not seen almost all of you since we were 17 or18 years old. I wondered if I would even remember anyone at all by name, or if anyone would remember me. After all, we have all changed radically in appearance. I was always large in size, and I haven't exactly shrunk over the years.

But I also remember the physical appearance of young men who were then in their physical prime and who now (at least based on the video of our 40th reunion which I did watch) bear witness that muscle does often yield to adipose tissue and that wavy hair often disappears as the years roll by. The bitter, jealous truth is that nature is not always fair—just look at the women in our midst, who age so gracefully and skillfully and remain so radiantly beautiful. Damn it all to hell!

I also feel that the passing of so many years that I have not been in regular contact probably suggests that I have been out of touch with the experiences of the many who have continued to live in this community.

And so I feel in many ways like a stranger.

Yet, there are some comforting thoughts that come to me. For one, we are all the products of a moment of history when a series of social and political and moral revolutions began in America, the consequences of which have defined our era and our lives. I am therefore glad to be speaking to a group of people who share with me the memories, however diverse they may be, of the tumultuous half-century that has seen so many transformations in American life. I'd like to invite you this morning to join me in reflecting upon the many mini-revolutions that have defined our evolved adulthood. As we reflect upon these events, let us try for a moment to look back upon our own youthful hopes and dreams, what we wanted to be and to become, and to calculate seriously our successes and our disappointments.

Let us consider how the world changed us, and how we changed ourselves as we matured in life. Has the path that brings us here today been in any way an extension of our youthful visions?

Let us begin these reflections by reminding ourselves of the world we entered upon in the Summer of 1961. If I recall correctly, our Senior year saw the Winter Park Wildcats football team have a very unimpressive record, but the upshot was that a larger number of students than ever before excelled in the national Merit Scholarship Exams. Only the scholarly nerds (I presume I was one) accepted this with delight. America, however, was in a youthful mood and was just starting to get used to a new President named Kennedy whose brief tenure in office led to a series of transformations in our national life. In retrospect, it was an era when things really began to change in America.

Having matriculated in Boston through the 9th grade, I found life here in Central Florida to be very problematic, especially the painful indices of racism—the signs at Herndon Airport which said "Colored Only" on the water fountains and other such racial distinctions. If we would tell our grandchildren that that was the way it was, they might not even believe us, so far have we come from the world of colored hospitals, hotels and restaurants. But it was only the beginning.

The civil rights movement came as we entered our early adulthood, and divided much of the country. Some of us resisted its inevitability. Others pressed and fought for the changes that could not be stopped. For many of us that period defined a part of who we were.

Before long, America found itself in a tragic war in Vietnam, a war which deeply divided our nation. Some of us served our country in Vietnam, some (even among our classmates) died for that cause, and many others fought to stop the war, all of which left behind many scars that have still not healed.

Then a new era began for adolescents and young adults as the sexual revolution began to make itself felt. I recall a time in my senior year of college, when I was the editor of the campus newspaper, asking in an open forum how young women felt as to whether the college infirmary should distribute the birth control pill then known as Enovid, which would make possible sexual relations without the fear of pregnancy. The result was interesting: most women wanted not to have such easy access to that medication lest their ‘loving' boyfriends would pressure them to a greater intimacy than they wanted to experience. I think that they were probably right, because the infirmary did make the pills available and the sexual world has not been the same since.

We now live in a sad era when young people do not even define conduct as sexual, no matter how personal, unless it involves intercourse (thank you, President Clinton). The interesting reality is that this all began with our generation, as the nexus between sex, love and loyalty became unraveled, and the impulses leading to marriage began to diminish. As a rabbi, I recall in the late 70's encountering young couples who married not at all for love but merely for the sake of giving children a patrimony, as well as other couples who started their married lives by pledging not to have children in the name of Zero Population Growth. The notion of an enduring marriage relationship began to weather hard times, and we became the generation that brought divorce back into fashion. Probably it was a partial corrective to those who stayed in untenable marriages "for the sake of the children" but also an excessive response to the growing spirit of the "me" generation, which was also ours.

A third revolution that has been coterminous with our adulthood is that of feminism. I am willing to bet that many of the females who graduated in 1961 were still able to envision marrying someone they had met in high school and living happily ever after. Today, if someone 19, 20, 21, or thereabouts, comes to my study and tells me they want to marry, I am sorely tempted to shake them firmly and ask if they are out of their minds. As the famous psychiatrist, Bruno Bettelheim, pointed out in the days of our early adulthood, adolescence had been redefined psychologically as not ending in high school but was now an extended phenomenon as many young people placed the needs of career ahead of the impulse to marry and have children.

One result was the movement that liberated women from both the expectations of society and the expectations of men. No longer did women define themselves in terms of marriage and procreation, but equally in terms of professional skill and recognition in the marketplace. One consequence that no one could miss was that women no longer needed husbands if they wanted to be independent. They no longer had to depend on a man to sustain them, and were less compelled to stay married unhappily, if they were.

Today, no aspect of society remains untouched by the feminist revolution, and even theological schools are now half-male and half-female.

Another aspect of the revolutions that we have shared together is that of a shrinking world. When we went to college, few people were as yet heading overseas for a junior semester abroad. One sad consequence of the lack of such opportunities was that we in America remained largely unaware of the wider world beyond our borders. Today, thankfully, our children and grandchildren are far more cosmopolitan than we were encouraged to be. I felt cheated for years because I was unable to travel until I was 25 years old, and then determined to make up for my lost chances.

As it turns out, I now travel overseas three or four times a year, in large measure because it gives me a better sense of the totality of the human family. It also pleases me that Winter Park High School today has an option for students to matriculate in the International Baccalaureate program in their junior and senior years, which focuses upon education for living in an increasingly diverse world.

But what really shrinks the world is the revolution in communications. Do you all remember the need for pay telephone booths which were once ubiquitous but are hardly available anymore? Aren't we all fully accustomed to driving on a highway and dialing on a cell phone someone important to us, who may be living in France or Russia, as if it were the most natural thing in the world.

I recall going to college with a typewriter. Today our grandchildren go off with a laptop computer and reach us in a moment via E-mail and can google knowledge to themselves is a moment. The changes in communication and travel have shrunk the world dramatically.

They have also challenged us to find better ways to help our children and especially our grandchildren to find their place in the world. In his recent book, The World Is Flat, Thomas Friedman has warned us of hard times ahead as the technological revolution exposes the weaknesses of our society in terms of public education, the outsourcing of jobs to other countries such as India and China, and the intense determination of those who have grown up in the world of have-nots decide to take on those of us who have grown up in the midst of plenty.

Civil rights, the war in Vietnam, the sexual revolution, the feminist revolution, the shrinking of the world, the challenges of an uncertain future—all these we of the class of 1961 have shared in our lifetimes, with more to come, undoubtedly.

What, along the way, did our experience in this High School building (now a middle school) give us that has helped to shape our lives? For one thing, the very notion that all of us, who formed a remarkably diverse constituency, could walk these halls together and feel a mutual sense of sharing in the enterprise of education was a civilizing reality. We learned that though we were all different, yet we did have many mutual concerns as young people. It gave us a sense of security as we grew up.

We also had the opportunity to interact with teachers, many of whom were very dedicated to us as their students, some of whom had extraordinary influences on our lives. Permit me to remember two: Dr Harold Bender and Mrs. Miriam Blickman. Dr Bender had a Ph. D. in Chemistry from Yale but he chose to teach in high school because he felt that teen-agers were pure learners and were capable of being inspired, that they were not grade-grubbers as undergraduates often are.

I have no interest in science, yet in his class I scored in the 98th percentile on the national Chemistry Test. Mrs. Blickman was an inspiring teacher because she taught us how to read, how to REALLY read, how to study a text and how to analyze its message, how to think about the ideas that were presented, and, in the reading of fiction, how to hear the inner voices. I recall that our class read the then-contemporary novel, DR ZHIVAGO, a major accomplishment for teen-age readers. She opened a world for me and my classmates. I recall other members of the faculty who had messages to deliver, and the decent soul of Osburn Wilson, our Principal, of blessed memory, who truly wanted to make ours a quality high school. I hope that he felt that his dreams were realized in his lifetime, but now, as we, sexagenarians all (which is as close to sex as many of us get these days) look back on our lives, I believe that we are challenged to make sure that public education (which is besieged on all too many sides) is not left to wither on the vine, because it was the leavening agent which enabled the diversity of our population to get to know each other even as we lived simultaneously in our own particular cultures.

There is one other challenge that our generation has had to deal with, and, in my opinion, the area where we have failed to realize our better selves, and that is how we relate to people who are manifestly different from each of us in crucial ways—ethnically, racially, culturally and religiously.

The past century saw the consequences of human depravity and indifference raised to a high level. The ethnic brutality visited upon the Armenians by the Turks, the cruelty of Tutsis and Hutus in Rwanda, the mass slaughter of Cambodians in the name of Communist ideology, the butchery of 6 million Jews in the Holocaust and millions of other souls wiped from the pages of history because of ancient hatreds and ethnic jealousies are all staggering. The message of our years of maturation was sadly clear: nothing is cheaper than life, especially if you are different.

We now live in a dangerous time, complicated by the tragic realization that the force which commands our deepest devotion—faith—is itself becoming a source of danger to the world. Religion is something akin to the medical concept of radiation—it is a bright shining beam of concentrated light that can illuminate the inner world of the human body and, when harnessed properly, can heal the deepest neoplasms that threaten our very survival. But it is also a force that, if abused, can destroy lives as no other force can, and can destroy both flesh and culture forever.

Religion is meant to be a positive force, to bring us closer to an awareness of God, to inspire us to live in proper relationship to each other, to help as assign meaningful value to the things that matter. It is also the most personal relationship we will ever have with ourselves as we seek to find the path of life that gives us a sense of ultimate meaning.

But it is just this sense of personal meaning that is what makes religious life so dangerous, because it sometimes leads us to transfer our own personal certainty as an agenda for all others. A truly religious person can never lose the yearning for humility, because if we assume that our own intellectual and spiritual conclusions are the only true ones and that everyone, no matter who they are and what they believe, must agree with them, then we have betrayed God by our arrogance and our insistence that what speaks to our soul is an absolute necessity for the entire human family. This kind of certainty has afflicted our nation and robbed us of the kind of mutual respect and friendship that many of us experienced in this school 45 years ago.

Winter Park High School was our home for 3 of the most important years of our lives. We are all who we are, in part, because of those years. God has blessed us with the privilege of long life (certainly compared to past generations). May we continue to grow in spirit and joy in all the years that lie ahead.

I thank you for inviting me to be a part of this gathering, and I pray that when our 50th anniversary rolls around, that we can all be here to celebrate together.

Till then, God bless us all.