Grace with Aging
Judaism calls life like it sees it: humans possess two seemingly antithetical statuses. On the one hand they are masters of the earth (God commands them in Genesis “milu et ha’aretz v’kivshuha” to fill the earth and dominate it), little less than God, imbued with the Divine spark, not with just a mind and body, but as William Faulkner put it “He [man] has a soul, a spirit capable of compassion and sacrifice and endurance.” A human soul reflects our creation in God’s image, at God’s hands; and it allows us proximity to God our creator. On the other hand, life reveals us to be weak and helpless, capable of moral corruption, cruelty and indifference, beings that defiles ourselves and the world God created for us. The sages taught that if we deserve merit, we’re told “you have preceded the angels,” and if not, we’re told “a mosquito preceded you.” (Bereishit Rabba 8:1).
Most of the year we affirm life, and our status as great beings, covenantal partners with God. For this reason we stand and recite the Shemoneh Esreh, rather than prostrate ourselves; we dress appropriately, as beings fit to confront God and engage Him in dialogue, familiarly and intimately.
But today we come face to face with our smallness and our finitude, morally and biologically. We say She’hechyanu right after hearing Kol Nidrei, why? Because as a friend of mine put it, today we have a sneak preview of ourselves as old and waning, on a day when we confront our life and our death. And when we make the she’hehyanu, we’re saying “thank you God for my life, for extending my life, for enabling me to reach this time and place, with the knowledge that other people didn’t reach this time and place.”
Aging often seems to dominate our lives, along with how we cope with the process of living and growing and declining and dying all at the same time. Given the size of the baby boomer generation and its progressive graying, this topic hits us all hard, as individuals and as a society. Rabbi Harold Kushner once said that loneliness might be the worst scourge of all. Elderly who live alone watch so much t.v., he believed, sometimes just to hear the sound of another person’s voice.
In the selihot, a section of prayers unique to Yom Kippur, predicated on our smallness, we plead with God to remember us, not to forget us in spite of our misdeeds and abuse of our powers. We cry out “Al Tashlichenu l’at ziknah; kikhlot kochainu al ta’azveinu” Do not cast us off in old age; when our strength fails, do not forsake us.” We want God to hear us, to remember us, not to forget us when we grow old and weak; we want not to be alone; we want not to be lonely. But why does that plea belong here, in Selihot, on Yom Kippur, a day when we assert that God’s mercy will forgive us our sins as long as we possess the courage to confess them and repent for them—when we insist that God the merciful sovereign will meet us half way on our journey and continue on with us. How can it be that we have sinned just by living to be old enough to be afraid of dying, or growing old?
We can read this verse in several ways. Cast us not off—i.e. the Jewish people—we’re old, the weight of Jewish history exhausts us, we’re tired of fighting to survive, whether in Diaspora or in Israel, don’t dismiss us we shout to God or forget about us. This matches our mood, I dare say, as we consider the challenges facing the Jewish people at present. Remember, God, the covenant You forged with us—as the midrash says we pray that if we go out to meet the King, the King will come half way to meet us. Today we affirm this by contemplating our deficiencies, by voicing our regret, by resolving to change, and by prayer. The rest is in God’s hands.
Another way to read this plea is interpersonally—someone is crying this out to another person. Forget me not—they say. We’re all so afraid of dying that we don’t want to go to the hospital to visit the sick, fear of illness constitutes a taboo that dominates and often overcomes our moral knowledge that we must do the right thing. Old people, sick people, people in decline freak us out because that will be us and we fear that outcome and hence we avoid them and it, as if we can dodge the biological verdict of our bodies by dodging those more advanced in years and in ill health than us.
This outlook, however understandable, flouts Judaism’s embrace of the old as a repository of wisdom and a worthy object of veneration. If we look at life as a process and project of adding chapters to our life as we age, then the book of life of the elderly contains so much more life, so much more history, so many more stories and insights than younger people could possibly know. Judaism’s veneration of age I might add stands as an important rebuke to this societies fetishizing of the “new new thing”—that may work for science and technology but when it comes to human relationships it fails utterly. Aging confronts us with not only our material but our non-material reality—our souls and the souls of others. We are non-fungible beings who cannot be replicated, replaced, recycled, abandoned; we’re each of us singular and precious and built to be that way. Our greatest moment of spiritual intensity may be when we see the human dignity of another, when we permit no taboo, no fear of illness or death to prevent us from doing so.
The final way to read this prayer of “Al tashlichenu” comes from Hasidism. For the Hasidic masters this cry of the heart comes from within each of us, reflecting our wavering sense of self-worth. The BESHT taught “let these words not grow old for us” These words mirror our hopes of overcoming our fears about our mortality. Physical weakness overpowers us all, rendering most attempts to rationalize our pain and fear vain. Modern medicine and its miracles aside, our material lives take a path of their own, immune to our efforts. So what else is there to say, but to face our demise with humor and courage, with a nod to Ecclesiastes who wrote in his realistic way so long ago, “there is nothing new under the sun.”
In an interview a few weeks before his death, Heschel expanded on his disagreement with Ecclesiastes. He embraced the vitality of creation, or as he put it “I would say there is nothing stale under the sun except human beings, who become stale. I try not to be stale. And everything is new. No two moments are alike. And a person who thinks that two moments are alike has never lived. The secret of it is a very profound principle of philosophy. And that I would call the sense of the unique. Do you know that among a billion faces in this world, no two faces are alike?” Embrace every moment, Heschel reminds us, every experience, in spite of the challenge of aging.
Without relativizing the stages of life, the fact remains that we all age, at every stage. We all confront transitions that challenge and pain us, and we all react to them in our own way. Think of all the wrenching changes that come just in the course of our schooling. The six year old entering first Grade is older than the five-year-old who last year was in Gan. The challenge of life is to deal with that moment when we suddenly realize we have become something different. And for the elderly all the more so—often in the wake of a physical trauma like a broken hip, or one who sailed along and then suddenly begins to fail precipitously, or when one loses a spouse setting in motion one’s own decline. All of a sudden one feels oneself to be “old” hence “stale” to use the BESHT’s language.
Seeing oneself as fully alive, however physically limited, contains religious truth, not just psychological “I’m ok you’re ok” pop wisdom or even the ethical importance of treating the elderly with the decency and respect that they deserve. Feeling fresh, feeling the uniqueness of every moment of life, reminds us of the wonder of life, the miracle of creation. It infuses the mundane every day with that sense of the miraculous, as we praise God prior to reciting the morning Shema as “HaMehadesh be’tuvo be’chal yom tamid ma’aseih v’reisheet.” “God, in His goodness, renews creation every day.”
Heschel taught that one could understand the Bible only if one understood that in it God takes humans seriously. He creates Adam and Chava; they disappoint Him, as did their children, yet He keeps trying to work with us. As Heschel put it, God says to Himself in effect, “I’m waiting. Maybe someday there’ll be a righteous generation.” And so He waits, witnessing our triumphs and our calamitous defeats, age after age, as we try to live by the light of justice and compassion. In Heschel’s famous phrase, God remains “in search of man.”
We show that we “get that” when we feel our own lives to be a kind of sacred vessel, when we feel ourselves to be a created being loved by the Creator, remaining fully alive however many challenges life thrusts upon us, materially and physically speaking. When we glimpse that spark of God in ourselves, indifferent to our fatigue and pain, when we treat others that way, we truly imitate the Creator, who according to Maimonides (Guide III:53) demonstrated for us the highest level of hesed/grace by His act of creation.
That is why we must today contemplate our life and our death, our greatness and our smallness, our triumphs and our failures. Our defeats humble us, challenging us: can we yet recall how amazing life is, to be alive? Can we remember our Creator, in spite of our failings? Can we praise Him, for the life given to us, however fleeting that gift may be? The centrality of death, and therefore life, to YK teaches us too that underneath the awesomeness of the day lurks a subtle thread of joy, joy at the reality that our near death brings us that much closer to embracing fully our life, and our Creation, and therefore our Creator.
William Sloane Coffin liked to say that we have too many old turks and young fogies, too many youth with too much hubris, too many whippernappers who think they know what God wants and what God should do, too many who don’t know what they don’t know, and have yet to learn that age brings renewal as well as new kinds of problems.
At minhah we’ll read the prophet Jonah, a cautionary tale if ever there was one. You can read him as young and callow and shallow, sure of himself and utterly clueless about life’s vagaries, or middle-aged, well accomplished and sure of all things yet nagged by the doubts creeping in about the verities, one who who fears that things aren’t as simple as they once seemed.
Either Jonah leaves us with an endlessly relevant teaching: he thought he knew it all, believing life to be a simple proposition of linearity: cause and effect, reward and punishment. Boy did he have a learning curve. God –working through the Ninevites—needed to teach him about humans writing new scripts for their lives, or at least new acts in the drama, featuring not just sin but regret and repentance and change. At any and every stage of life change remains possible; people who can change add quality to their lives, rather than just declining with age.
We live, we grow, we decline, we die, in not such a neat segmented fashion. We grow even as we decline. The Torah tells us that Sarah lived until 127, and that she and Avraham loved each other until the end of their time together. A midrash says that at the age of 20 sarah retained the innocence of a 7 year old; at the age of 100 she remained as beautiful as she was at 20; the point being, her inside determined her outside. The world saw her spirit, not her physical age.
Psalm 8 lies close to my heart. The psalmist exclaims, “When I behold Your heavens, the work of your fingers, the moon and stars that You set in place, what is man that You have been mindful of him, mortal man that You have taken note of him, that You have made him little less than divine, and adorned him with glory and majesty.” We possess the ability to thank God for the gift that keeps on giving=the gift of life==the ultimate hesed that we experience every day; the fact that we will expire physically makes it all the more precious to enjoy/experience it while we have it. May we all remain fresh and alive to the miracle of Creation, and to the Creator who struck a covenant with us, who waits for us to understand and embrace the gift of creation, for our own sake, for the sake of our fellow human beings, and for the sake of our world.
Ketivah v’hatimah tovah