c. 2006 Religion News Service

(UNDATED) Despite the best attempts to immunize myself, each December I contract the dreaded MEGO (My Eyes Glaze Over) illness.

MEGO is brought on by reading the many year-end neatly typed single-spaced “Family Letters” received from friends. These cheery familial reports usually feature overachieving whiz kids accompanied by warm fuzzy Norman Rockwell images that only intensify the disease.

The letters represent a literary genre with enough rich material for a Ph.D. thesis and therapeutic conversations in a psychiatrist’s office. The missives are more revealing than the authors intended, and that is why I avidly read each one.

Outwardly, the letters are a convenient way to stay in touch. But they are also an upbeat report to stockholders (friends and family members), and an unspoken plea for readers to validate the letter writers’ personal values. The holiday greetings frequently include a glowing pictorial record of three, sometimes even four generations.

But, sadly, few such letters contain any mention of spiritual explorations, religious quests for meaning during the past year in the face of aging, death, sickness and natural disasters, religious doubts in a turbulent world, or personal disappointments in careers or love.

While politics, sex, and religion are the only three things worth discussing with colleagues, family and friends, I understand why the first two rarely appear in the year-end letters. But why no religion? Currently, it’s the hottest subject in America, indeed in most parts of the world.

I do not expect my friends to send a Benedict Spinoza-like treatise on reason and religion or an Abraham Heschel-inspired paragraph on the joys of religious mysticism, nor even a Harold Kushner explanation of why bad things happen to good people. Nor do I anticipate reading a biblical Psalm of thanksgiving.

But not a word about religion?

Instead, the letters always cover a predictable terrain:

1. During 2006, my friends’ extraordinary children and even more exceptional grandchildren are excelling in education, athletics, the arts, hobbies, and employment. Reading about these illustrious achievements, I think it’s only a matter of time before Nobel, Pulitzer and Kennedy Center Honors prizes will be awarded to such gifted offspring. Roger Federer and Tiger Woods are in danger of being displaced by the teenage tennis players and golfers whose victories are enthusiastically recounted.

2. The Latin terms “summa cum laude” and “magna cum laude” dot the annual letters reflecting the academic heights my friends’ children have scaled at America’s most prestigious universities and colleges.

3. Each letter describes some exotic part of the world the family visited during the past 12 months. An unspoken competition is clearly under way for families to outdo one another in geographical audacity, physical courage and travel innovation.

4. No one, it seems, actually read a book while sitting quietly on a beach during a vacation. In fact, I eagerly scan the letters hoping to learn which books, fiction or nonfiction, might have stirred the emotions of my friends or taught them something new. Alas, nary a mention of any publication, not even my own book that was published in 2006. Oh well. …

5. The letters project a tranquil self-satisfied view of a halcyon America during the first decade of the 21st century. Not being Ebenezer Scrooge, I rejoice that “everyone is doing so well.”

But this year no letter mentioned our wars in Iraq and Afghanistan. There was not a word about contributing to what Americans decades ago called “the war effort.”

Is the cost in blood and treasury so painful that Americans avoid the subject in their jolly holiday letters? Has the spirit of Voltaire’s Dr. Pangloss (“This is the best of all possible worlds!”) captured a permanent place among America’s families?

Maybe next year’s letters will be different in tone, but somehow I doubt it. Happily, the New Year always brings a rapid recovery from the MEGO malady.

KRE/JL END RUDIN

(Rabbi Rudin, the American Jewish Committee’s senior interreligious adviser, is the author of the recently published book “The Baptizing of America: The Religious Right’s Plans for the Rest of Us.”)

Editors: To obtain a photo of Rabbi Rudin, go to the RNS Web site at https://religionnews.com. On the lower right, click on “photos,” then search by subject or slug. If searching by subject, designate “exact phrase” for best results.