It is clearly graduation season...and these ceremonies are coming at us these days at an amazing rate. Wednesday evening, I was at the Schechter Middle School graduation. Last night was both the Herricks High School graduation, which I attended-because my own daughter, Lucy, was one of the graduates-and the Schechter High School ceremony (with which I was in constant touch through one of the many miracles of modern technology.) I even attended the Nursery School graduation last Friday (and played Pomp and Circumstance on the piano as the boys and girls marched down the center aisle of the sanctuary, which, if you think you've seen cute before, believe me....) I'm sure many of you have been to many others of these graduation ceremonies in the last few weeks, including those honoring university graduates and medical school graduates and all sorts of other professional and graduate school graduates, and I know that several more are coming up next week. Poor Elgar must be spinning in his grave! (Sir Edward was actually a very accomplished, and very talented, composer who deserved far better than to be remembered by most of us solely for Pomp and Circumstance, his least distinguished composition. What can you do? The fates allot their gifts as they see fit, apparently, not as do we!)

At last night's Herricks High School graduation, John Bierwirth, the superintendent of schools for the Herricks School District, began his remarks with a comment that, for some reason, went right through me. In some ways, it was an almost banal observation: that this year's graduates, like his own grandparents, began life in one century only to reach the fullest flower of adulthood, with all that entails, in a different one. The same was true of my own grandparents too, of course, as it was for the grandparents of most of those of you about my age reading this. On the one hand, there's something just a bit contrived about the whole concept: a lifetime is a lifetime regardless of the specific number attached to the year in which one is born or in which one dies! But, on the other, it's an exceptional thought. My grandparents, all four of them, were born in the 1880s. Two died in the 1940s. Another lived into the 1950s. My mother's mother, for whom Lucy is named, made it into the 1960s, dying just a few months before my bar-mitzvah. (That's another story I'll tell you all some other time.) And so, Dr. Bierwirth's thoughts started me thinking-as we sat there in the rain-about my grandmother's lifespan. She was born in a world of horse-drawn carriages and gas-lit streets...and lived into an age so technologically different from the world of her childhood that it must have seen astounding to her....and, of course, she died before computers and color televisions were commonplace items in most people's homes, and when most people only had one telephone number. (Between home, work, fax and cell, my little family has ten different numbers. And I'm sure some of you have more.)

None of this is all that astounding to consider, but what got to me was wondering whether, someday, when the grandchildren of last night's graduates talk of them in the way Dr. Bierwirth chose to speak of his own grandparents, they will say just the same thing, that the world their grandparents were born into was so incredibly different from the world they themselves inhabit so as for the very thought to be mind-boggling? The simple way to imagine that being true is merely to imagine the future as an intensification of the present, thus a world of even more powerful computers, even more reliable space vehicles, even more destructive bombs, even more instant communications, etc. But that's not necessarily the right model-our world is not different from the world of our parents and grandparents because we have even more swift dirigibles, even more accurate telegraphs, even more well insulated iceboxes, or even safer gas lamps illuminating our streets! My grandmother was born in Pottsville, Pennsylvania, but the ways our world is different from Pottsville in the 1880s have almost nothing to do with us merely having bigger and better versions of what they had. Instead, our world is different from theirs in ways that they would have been incapable even of dreaming about, let alone successfully envisaging...and intensification would have been precisely the wrong model for them to use to imagine the future And that thought-that the same is true of us as we attempt to imagine the world in which the grandchildren of last night's graduates will live-is what I found so compelling in Dr. Bierwirth's offhand remark.

Who knows what the future will bring? I'm still amazed that I can send a text message to my son in Tel Aviv and have an answer back within a minute or two. I suppose the world is even greater than that...and will continue to develop along lines we have yet even to dream of. In a weird way, I hope that's what happens...that the future is not just more of the present, but something undreamt of, something golden, something fully expressive of human creativity at its grandest. The parents of my grandma's grandparents would have been born, not in colonial Pottsville, but nevertheless during the American Revolution. Would they have imagined their great-grandchildren's day along the lines that I'm proposing we use to look that far from here into the future? I suppose they might have...so the real question is whether the realization that the future will be different from the present in ways none of us can even begin to imagine is exhilarating or depressing, energizing or paralyzing. I myself vote for the former! (But then again, what do I know? Maybe I'll text Max in Tel Aviv and ask him what he thinks. I should have an answer in about 30 seconds....)

Sincerely,

Rabbi Martin Cohen