(RNS) — Sixty years ago today, my life changed.

Forever.

I am not speaking of myself alone, but for an entire generation — or two.

It wasn’t only the music, though that would have been sufficient. It was about hair (how many times did I tell my parents this was absolutely my last — I repeat, my last! — trip to the barber?), and clothes, and politics, and movies, and rebellion, and attitude, and …

Perhaps no other day changed contemporary culture more than this one — Feb. 9, 1964 — when the Beatles first performed on “The Ed Sullivan Show.” 

I bequeathed all that to my sons, as well — with almost as much enthusiasm and love as I bequeathed them Judaism.

In an odd and telling way, the Beatles pushed me in the direction of becoming a rabbi. Well, sort of. I decided I needed to learn to play guitar (oh, how I wanted to be in a band!). I did learn guitar, and I wrote songs, and I learned to play more than 100 Hebrew and Israeli songs, and taught those songs in the Reform youth movement. That gave me my first shot at being a leader and a teacher. From there, as it has been for countless other colleagues, it was the express lane to being a Reform rabbi.

Of course, as a rabbi, I would have been compelled to have given a sermon: “The Beatles and the Jewish Question.” Since I never got around to giving that sermon, here is a rather belated attempt at listing connections between the Beatles and the Jews and Judaism.

Actually, I was rather surprised at how many there are.

The Beatles performing at The Ed Sullivan Show on Feb. 9, 1964, in New York. (Photo by Bernard Gotfryd/LOC/Creative Commons)

The Beatles had a thing for Jewish managers. Their first manager, of course, was Brian Epstein, a Jew from Liverpool whose family had owned various businesses. Their second Jewish manager was the feared Allen Klein, who managed the Stones at the same time. Then, later, the Beatles brought in the very problematic Phil Spector to help produce the album “Let It Be.”

Which led to rumors about a line in “Baby You’re a Rich Man.” Over the decades, many people have sworn to have heard John Lennon singing “baby, you’re a rich fag Jew” in the song. This would have been a sardonic (and very Lennon-ist) poke at Brian Epstein, who was both rich and a closeted gay man.

Which makes you wonder about how John Lennon really felt about the Jews. Lennon was known to have made antisemitic remarks and jokes. But, then again, he was an equal opportunity offender and spared no one his satirical, cynical eye.

But there was that rabbi thing. You might remember the famous “bed-ins” in 1969, including one in Montreal, during which John and Yoko Ono took to bed as a way of promoting peace. (Yeah, that really worked.) During their stay in bed, Rabbi Abraham Feinberg, the then-rabbi emeritus of Toronto’s Holy Blossom Temple, the largest Reform synagogue in Canada, visited them. That merited him a shout-out in the song “Give Peace a Chance“: “Ev’rybody’s talking about Ministers, Sinisters, Banisters and canisters, Bishops and Fishops and Rabbis and Pop eyes, And bye bye, bye byes.”

The Israeli “version” of “Let It Be.” I had been listening to the Israeli pop song “Lu Yehi” by the iconic songstress Naomi Shemer for decades before I realized it was connected to the Beatles’ song “Let It Be.” Naomi wrote the song during the 1973 Yom Kippur War, and she had intended it to be a direct translation of the Beatles song. But she didn’t like the meaning of “let it be,” thinking that it was too “whatever,” too Zen, too, well, “let it be.” She realized that “let it be” could mean “just let it be,” aka “whatever” — or it could be translated as “lu yehi’ — truly, let it be, as in “let there be light” in the creation story.

That being said, there have been countless musical mashups of the two songs — especially this most recent one — and they work quite well together.

Paul McCartney’s two Jewish wives. Sir Paul’s late first wife, born Linda Eastman, was from a Jewish family. His third and current wife, Nancy Shevell, is also Jewish. Several years ago, a friend of mine told me she spotted the two of them waiting to enter High Holy Day services at New York City’s Temple Emanu-El.

Abbey Road is in a very Jewish neighborhood. That would be St. John’s Wood in London — filled with synagogues.

Perhaps I have missed some Jewish Beatlemania.

I could improve it “with some help from my friends.”

(Want to know what really makes me angry? When born Jews diss people who have converted to Judaism. Listen up here.)

(Please enjoy my new book — the first book to outline what a post-Oct. 7 American Judaism will look like — and how we can restore communal obligation to liberal Jewish life: “Tikkun Ha’Am/ Repairing Our People: Israel and the Crisis of Liberal Judaism.”)

(And, also, join the conversation about what it means to be Jewish and human after Oct. 7: “Wisdom Without Walls: An Online Salon for Jewish Ideas.” Learn with the most thoughtful thinkers in the Jewish world.)