What is growing old all about? My grandmother knew:

I got home late from a party one night during a college vacation. My grandmother, aleha ha-shalom, may she rest in peace, was staying with us for a few days and since she was a life-long night-owl, was still up. We began to talk, and I asked her what her life was like back in Russia. “I remember”, she said, “looking at my parents and their friends and all the grown-up relatives with their work and their coming and going, and wondering what it would be like to be all grown up. Well, now I’m almost eighty years old, and I still wonder.” [My Own True Stories] 

My grandmother taught me, more by example than in words, that we all should still wonder at any age, at every age. But we often get it backwards. We talk so much about growing old, instead of talking about growing old. We spend far too much time trying to hold back the clock, instead of spending more time actively shaping what comes next. And there is so much that comes next!

[A study done in 1998 showed that] 35 percent of the world’s greatest achievements were by people in the sixty to seventy age bracket. A further 23 percent were by those between seventy and eighty. The octogenarian group accounted for a further 6 percent. No less than 64 percent of the world’s greatest achievements were accomplished by people over sixty years of age! [ Dynamic Illustrations, Seven Worlds Corp., Knoxville, Tenn., July/Aug/Sept 1998. ] 

This active growth in the decades between midlife and the end of life can be called Eldering, a term coined by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi. It means not hiding from age, but growing older on purpose. Eldering is purposeful aging:

n It involves attaining a level of compassion often impossible in our earlier years.

n It involves sharing our life wisdom – gently, non-judgmentally – with the generations that come after us.

n It involves embracing death, our own and the deaths of those who died before us.

Do you know what a krechtz is? Sure you do. It’s one of those many aches and pains and infirmities that plague us all as we get older. We just can’t do what we used to do. I used to run between 12 and 15 miles on the afternoon of Erev Rosh Hashanah to burn off some of my nervousness. If I tried to do that now you could visit me either in the hospital or in the cemetery. Age has taught me to be kinder to myself and to others.

If you’re blessed to become a grandparent you get to share your compassion with the most demanding critics: grandchildren. A class of eight-year olds was asked to comment on their grandparents. Here’s some of what they said:

Grandparents don’t have to do anything except be there when we come to see them.

When they take us for walks, they slow down past things like pretty leaves and caterpillars.

They show us and talk to us about the color of the flowers.

When they read to us, they don’t skip. They don’t mind if we ask for the same story over again.

They know we should have snack-time before bedtime and they kiss us even when we’ve acted bad. [Joke du Jour] 

The more we learn that life is less and less about us and more and more about others, the more compassionate we become:

Sam’s wife of 52 years had died recently, and one of the neighbors invited him over for Thanksgiving dinner so he wouldn’t be alone. “What’s that?” said the young daughter of his hosts as the turkey was being carved. “That’s the wishbone,” said Sam. “Two people hold it and make a wish and pull it apart. The one who gets the larger piece gets to have their wish to come true.” Eager to have her wish come true, the little girl was crushed when she wound up with the small end of the bone. 

“That’s all right,” said Sam with a smile. “My wish was that you would get your wish.” [King Duncan, Pastor’s Professional Research Service, Seven Worlds Corp. (Knoxville, Tenn., Jan/ Feb/ Mar 1989),”Family”.] 

Eldering is seeking to become more compassionate towards oneself and towards others.

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In the Torah, the Levites who did the work of the Temple were required to work from the age of 20 to the age of 60. From 20 to 30 they learned what they needed to know. From 30 to 50 they did their work. And from 50 to 60 they trained the 20 to 30 year olds.

That is our purpose too. More and more we hear of young adults taking “internships,” and not just those studying to be doctors. In order to join one of the trade unions there is a period of apprenticeship, sometimes as long as seven years, before you’re fully certified. In business, in politics, in teaching, law, medicine – everywhere – we hear of people succeeding because an older person mentored them.

We aren’t limited to teaching only the intricacies of a profession or a trade. Perhaps even more important is that eldering, aging purposefully, allows us to share what we’ve learned about growing.

One of our mystics writes:

I had a great teacher. I remember we learned one page of the Talmud for six weeks… But then, how long can you [do this] so we went on to the next page. One morning I came into his office, and I see he is learning the page we were just leaving… So I say to him, “Rebbe, we [already] learned this page for six weeks!” “The first thing,” he says, “if you ever want to understand anything, you have to know that what you understood yesterday has nothing to do with understanding today.” [Kalman Serkel, ed., The Holy Beggars Banquet, pg. 17]

Eldering means teaching that very same lesson. When I was younger I was absolutely sure. I was sure of what life was all about. I was sure of how I should act and how others should. I was sure of how the world should be, and how I was going to make it that way. Now I am no longer sure at all. I like it much better this way. I’ve learned I can teach that new knowledge may be found each new day, and that to be absolutely sure is to be at a standstill. I’ve learned that I can teach that growing throughout our whole lifetime is one of the most important things we can do.

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Yet the hardest part of eldering, and probably the most important, is to accept, even embrace death. Yes, embrace it. How much time do we waste trying to stave off something that is inevitably coming to us all? When we flee death we flee life. Strange as it may seem, to embrace death is to fully embrace life.

But how can we possibly embrace truly tragic deaths: a young parent, a child, taken before they’ve even had a chance to live?

I’ll tell you what one family in our community has done, and I’ll use their names because I know they want me to. I asked them. Freddy Gabler was newly married, just starting a successful career when those animals murdered him and so many others on 9/11. In their pain, and it was indescribable, his parents chose to embrace their son’s death by establishing a fund to send needy children to camp. In his memory and in his honor, others will be helped.

When a person dies in the fullness of life it is sad, but not tragic. We can embrace their deaths, too. We can help others in their memory. We can keep their legacy alive by passing their memory on to our children. We can perform the acts of kindness and commitment that we know they’d want us to do.

We can also, and we should, as strange as it may sound, embrace our own deaths. Why? Because death is the context that gives human life its meaning. The more we flee, always unsuccessfully, of course, the less meaningful is our life. In the words of our prayerbook:

Judaism teaches us to understand death as part of the Divine pattern of the universe… Mortality is the tax that we pay for the privilege of love, thought, creative work — the toll on the bridge of being from which clods of earth and snow-peaked mountain summits are exempt. Just because we are human, we are prisoners of the years. Yet that very prison is the room of discipline in which we, driven by the urgency of time, create. [Gates of Prayer, p. 625] 

Eldering is paying that tax with acceptance, embracing the urgency of our mortal existence, and using our time on this earth to do the very best we can.

Perhaps you recall that when I mentioned my grandmother a little while ago, I said “Aleha Ha’Shalom, May she rest in peace.” Where does she rest? Where do our loved ones rest? Where will we, when we die? Writes one of our mystics:

Life is eternal and love is immortal
Death is only a horizon,
And the horizon is nothing but
the limit of our sight.
[Shlomo Carlebach, Shlomo’s Stories, p. vi] 

We do not see beyond those limits. We cannot see. But even if our beloved dead didn’t know the term when they lived, how much easier they must rest knowing that we are eldering, that we are aging purposefully, that we are growing old, not just growing old.

And when the time comes, how much more peacefully we will rest knowing that we have acted with compassion, taught some of what it means to grow to those who come after us, and embraced the reality of life and death with calm acceptance.

Come, let us elder, let us grow old purposefully, and may the righteous acts of our loved ones help us on our way, as we remember them...