PROF. LEO LIEBERMAN, Jewish Times Staff Writer Hardly a week goes by when one of the Ladies sitting in front of the building with the yellow awning doesn’t make the comment, “Things are just not the same. We are living in a different world.” This time it was Fat Rosie from Apartment 3C. I smiled when I heard her, because I had just gone to the Bar Mitzvah of the grandson of a friend – (Now I am talking about grandchildren of friends!) – and knew how true that remark was.

Now in those olden days, we knew that a very appropriate gift would be to give the young celebrant a fountain pen. After all, until we were in the third grade we didn’t use a pen and ink but graduated into this form of writing only after we had mastered the art of the pencil with the eraser, and it was then when we were third graders that we recognized the value of the little ink well that decorated each of our desks. We also had to bring to school a blotter so that if there was too much ink at the end of our pen and a drop spilled on our penmanship paper, we could mop it up. But now I hear that even penmanship has become old fashioned and I read that many schools are going to do away with teaching youngsters the value of cursive writing!

But back to the Bar Mitzvah. The old joke that the lad who ascends the bima and delivers his speech begins with the words “Today I am a fountain pen,” to indicate that he has passed through a very important step in the life cycle, no longer bears any significance, or perhaps even understanding, to the lad who has just celebrated his thirteenth birthday.

And I remember too in those halcyon days when my own children went off to college, they went equipped with a typewriter. But today our grandchildren go off with a laptop computer and know that they can reach us through Email, or if it is very important, they can even text message us, and we will respond with the batting of an eye. Also the term”google” has become one that easily flows from the brain to the computer because we tell our young people that they can google knowledge to themselves in a moment.

Changes in communication have become widespread. There are no deprived children today, children who do not possess cell phones. And it is commonplace to notice people both young and old talking to friends and relatives miles away. We no longer stare at the person who is standing alone and speaking to himself because we realize that he must have a tiny cell phone clutched in his hand or pinned to his jacket or a little something tucked inside his ear, and he is not in a fantasy world but is rather in the wide world of communication.

Our grandchildren are given all sorts of electronic devises from iPods to computers and we take it for granted that not to bestow these gifts upon the young would be to deprive them of the necessities of modern life. And sometimes I have to admit that I begin to worry a bit. Even though we want to find better ways to help our children and grandchildren to find their place in this shrinking world that has become technologically equipped, we worry too that this technological revolution may be warning us of the hard times ahead, as we see the weakness of our society being exposed. And we shudder when we think of the intense determination of those who have grown up in the world of have-nots if they decide to take on those who have grown up in the midst of plenty.

There is much here that may well become emotionally and physically charged, and we know that we must not give so much of the tangible to our young that we ignore the spiritual and the ethical values, and in doing so we also lose the joy that we once had when we were given our first fountain pen and we regarded it as a gift that indicated our growing up. I fervently hope that the clutching and the happiness that was accrued to us when we became thirteen will not be lost amidst all the technological advances that our “Modern Age” revels in – and that the “different world” that Fat Rosie spoke of will be an improvement.