I started out at Harvard as a Music concentrator, but switched as a Junior to the less demanding concentration of Soc Rel when I realized that to practice enough to pass the piano requirement in Music, even with the incomparable Louise Vosgerchian teaching me, I would have little time for anything else.  In Soc Rel, I had a one semester course on social science research methodology, and there, in passing and without realizing it at the time, I learned the fundamentals of how computers organize information.

After graduation, it seemed that the only thing I knew that had any immediate economic value was that little kernel of computer stuff.  Thus, in 1969, I began working in the embryonic information technology industry.  I have grown up with that industry, and it has provided a stimulating trade, a decent livelihood, and sufficient capital gains to pay Harvard’s bills for my son David (A.B. 2005) without undue pain, and to be one of 68’s class-beating, record-setting Associate level givers to HCF.  One thing I did not learn at Harvard is that the business world provides an array of challenges and opportunities that exercise both the remarkably broad set of specific disciplines and the basic thinking and problem solving skills I did learn at Harvard. 

Thanks to the same information technology industry (as most of you probably know almost as well as your children do), you can Google me and get much of the other information about my life in a few milliseconds.  Some of the facts may be of interest.  But here I would prefer to say something about the life journey of my heart.

As an entering freshman in 1964, my aspiration was to become a rabbi in Reform Judaism.  Behind this was a feeling of wanting to be part of something good, and wanting to do some good in this world. 

In a sense, my Harvard experience secularized me.  It led me to believe that there was a much broader secular community of people who wanted the same things, and within which I could fulfill the same wishes.  At the time, that seemed even better. 

I now see that conviction as something of a mirage.  Harvard, alma mater, provided us a kind of shelter.  Graduation brings initiation into the every-man-for-himself struggle for individual achievement.  Meeting one’s basic needs is not that difficult, but the seemingly insatiable inner thirst for more and more, together with the uncertainties and unexpected challenges that arise in life, often impel us further and further down that every-man-for-himself road.

Our commencement speaker was the Shah of Iran, and he unashamedly called us to lives of “selfless service to humanity.”  He did not mention his vast personal wealth, the brutal secret service that protected his tenuous hold on power, and the geopolitical dynamics that had brought him to his place on the world stage and on our commencement stage.  I have often wondered since then what he was cooking in Washington while he popped up to Cambridge to speak about selfless service.

I’m not suggesting that I would have been better off pursuing the rabbinate.  The real world of religious organizations has its own elements of every-man-for-himself.  Still, to some extent, religion provides a respite and a community of a sort of goodness.  But it does so at the awful price of tribalism, which is almost inseparable from religion. I suppose that our species would not have survived if we did not tend to form tribes. But the primordial emotions that create the tribal bond and the conviction that our tribe is the best tribe, the one true tribe with god on its side, are destroying human lives daily as they have throughout history, and now threaten to destroy our species and all other life on the planet. There is not that much difference between every-man-for-himself and every-tribe-for-itself. 

So where is that elusive good?  Where can one quench the driving inner thirst for, let’s face it, we don’t really know what, but it must have something to do with goodness, with love, with a better kind of world than we have. Maybe. I hope.

Five years after graduation, Harvard played a part in helping me to solve this conundrum. In Lowell Lecture Hall, in May 1973, I first learned about a man named Prem Rawat and heard his message that the source of goodness and peace is something within every human being, and that he can help people to connect with that inner source.  Not religion.  Not philosophy.  A direct connection to an experience.

There is a simple logic to this message.  As long as our desires and ambitions are focused on externals, we will be locked in competition with each other.  But if what we want really is within us, we don’t have to compete.  That could make a difference in the world. 

Too simple?  I don’t know.  Look around.  What are we still fighting and killing and dying over?  Maybe we can negotiate the rules and the boundaries.  If there’s anyone left alive to negotiate.

But logic is not the main point.  The main point is to feel that good feeling inside.  Nothing I can write can give that feeling to anyone.  I wish it could.  The messages I received in Harvard’s lecture halls nourished my mind in many ways, but the message I received that May 1973 evening at Lowell Lec and the practical teaching behind it has nourished my heart ever since, and enriched my life beyond measure.