My Birthday, circa 1967

Did you miss it? Yesterday was the 40th anniversary of the start of the Six-Day War. It was all over when my seventh birthday arrived the following week. I didn't know anything about it at the time, it was lost in the background of Vietnam, civil rights demonstrations and Russian nuclear hegemony, broadcast by the ever friendly Walter Cronkite on the little black-and-white television in our living room. I was just an ordinary 2nd grade kid learning reading, writing and arithmetic, and being terrorized by Italian sons-of-mafioso on my twice daily round-trip walk to PS 216.

I wonder how different things would have been if I had been living in this small country on the sunny shores of the Western Mediterranean. I have a 7-year old boy somewhere here in the house! I'll have to remember to ask him when he grows up.

I caught this article on the war from the June 19, 1967 edition of TIME Magazine. It's worth reading if you have time (no pun intended :-). In this modern era of historic revisionism, it's refreshing to go back in time and see how things really were.

So here we are 40 years later, the world is no less dangerous as it was back then, intelligent people stumble around in the dark and still refuse to use their G-d given powers of free-choice for good.

See you all soon in Jerusalem!

Here's the link to TIME Magazine:

http://www.time.com/time/printout/0,8816,843937,00.html#