Fifteen Minutes a Day

Following the example of my father and father-in-law, who wrote weekly letters to us for years, I started writing a weekly letter to each of my children many years ago. I’ve lost copies of the ones written before 1993, but since then I’ve kept them in the hard drive of my computer, transferring them whenever I bought a new one. Since each child receives a separate letter, there are from 1,200 to 1,300 letters to my children in my computer's hard drive.

Our children tell me that they’ve saved each of these letters but, if their repositories are like the archive we’ve kept of our parents’ letters to us, the letters our kids have kept are disorganized, piled helter-skelter into one or more boxes. So towards the end of 2009, I started printing out copies of my letters to each child on paper punched for three ring notebooks, and as these letters began to accumulate, I thought it would be nice to print out all the letters written before that. Not that they have any particular literary merit, but I thought some of my descendants might like to dip into them from time to time to see what some of their ancestors were doing during a vanished era. Besides, it would, I thought, give me a sense of accomplishment to see them all neatly bound together.

But the job seemed monumental – all those letters! So I decided to devote 15 minutes a day six days a week to the task, printing out five letters per child every day, on the theory that you can stand to do just about anything for 15 minutes a day. The theory proved correct.

The job turned out to be more interesting than I had expected. By looking at the letters as they were being printed out, I recalled incidents that I had totally forgotten, people entertained at dinner, conversations held, films seen, books read, illnesses suffered, rallies attended, and so forth. The letters also gave me a chance to review the development of our children, as they graduated from university, married, began careers, and produced children of their own. Reading these letters was an exercise in nostalgia.

With judicious editing, the letters would provide a history of Israel, as seen through the eyes of a liberal academic, during a tumultuous period of wars, burgeoning settlements, Palestinian resistance, Israel’s repressive response to this resistance, the two intifadas, the withdrawal from Gaza, and the peace process, which dashed hopes more often than it raised them. My wife has suggested that I try to publish a selection of these letters, but many contemporary accounts of the period have already appeared. There’s no a market for another, especially when written by a person less qualified than the writers who have preceded me. But if the letters survive, they might be useful to a future historian.

Last week I completed the job. The letters now stand in three very large red three-ring binders. It does give me a sense of satisfaction to see them, just as I supposed it would. Unexpectedly, though, I feel sad at the loss of this occupation, albeit one that usually took just fifteen minutes a day.