Straight From The Pulpit (And Heart)
Shabbat Hukkat 2024: Is 80 the new 40?
The two central characters in the biblical record and by biblical record in particular I refer to the Torah itself, the five books of Moses, the two central characters on some level could not be more different from each other and they are of course Moses and Avraham, Moses and Abraham, in the respect that their personal stories have very little in common one with the other, but on the other hand there is, I believe, a significant string to draw between the two of them from which we can derive an important lesson from. We hear of course, in the Torah we are told, that Avraham begins the great journey of his life when he is commanded by God famously so in the book of Genesis, "Le Chacham-mei-art-sicha" that he should pick up and leave his home and he should add on to a journey, the final destination of which is not yet revealed to him and at the age that we are told that he does that it is 75 years old. Moses, accordingly in rabbinic tradition, is given the command by God to bring the Israelites out of Egypt. In other words, the moment when Moses, this simple now-assumed Midianite shepherd, stumbles we are told upon a burning bush and from there he hears the call of God for him to go back to Egypt where there is a bounty on his head and take a people out for rabbinic tradition accords but he was 80 years old. In other words, what Jewish tradition is seemingly trying to tell us is that the two great characters of the biblical record are people who are beginning the great journey of their life at the very moment that most people are hanging up their skates or cleats or golf clubs, whatever term you want to use. I am not particular to this but in short, roughly around the time when most people have long moved past contemplating what their retirement is going to look like they are already entering if not already inside their retirement and get Moses and Aaron to take these great journeys in their life at the moment when most people feel that the sun is already setting on them. One of the things that COVID unleashed on the earth in hindsight now that we look at it is not simply from a medical or scientific perspective but I believe that there is some angles that we can appreciate and understand from an anthropological and sociological level. Now one of them certainly is well appreciated by us at this time and that is the effect that lockdowns had on children. We did an article this past week that teenagers and university students who want to go and have work. One of the ways that employers are enticing these people to come into their firms to work even for summer jobs is to promise them a social experience. In other words that they are not working alone but they are going to be working in teams and there is going to be programs for them to go at the end of work and there will be drinks on Friday and coffee clutches during the work day. In other words one of the things that we understand that people who experience COVID particularly for young people was is that the things that we often took for granted about interactions with other human beings spending time with other human beings to the point that maybe you want some quiet time to yourself. These were all lost things to a wide swath of a generation over the past five years and so they are craving it understandably in their life. I am looking around at the crowd I am talking to almost all of us grew up in a period where we didn't have distractions that we were able to remove ourselves from contact with other human beings and feel what we were preoccupied. We were cell phones that weren't computer games that were none of those things. If you wanted to be preoccupied you would walk out of your door and you look for people to play with or to talk to and so one of the sociological effects of COVID was that but I think that there is another one amongst certainly a constellation. One of the things that COVID exposed in its cruelty and fairness was that our society's championing of youth in fact led the most vulnerable to be the most affected by COVID. In other words it was the elderly, the people who were older, who were most liable to be the victim of a serious bout of COVID and one of the things that we saw repeatedly throughout America but much throughout the western world was an utter disregard at times for lockdown protocols, for concerns about containing the spread of the virus and we were told over and over again reminded that in particular the most, the people who were most vulnerable to the effects of COVID were in fact the elderly and then people looked at themselves and said well I'm not an elderly person, what do I care? This championing of youth, of believing that the younger is better, that newer in fact is to be desired is we understand is a long embedded idea inside of western society but it is important to note that it wasn't always that way. NATO famously writes that no one under the age of 50 should be elected to public office. Chinese philosophy and certainly Jewish tradition but Chinese philosophy says that if someone gets older that they are drawing themselves closer to wisdom and to deeper understanding and that you shouldn't trust young people, in Jewish tradition it is well understood and deeply appreciated that along with age that one garners deep respect and that famously in the story in the Passover Haggadah, at the very beginning right after the four questions and it's not a mistake that it comes after the four questions because the people who read the four questions are the youngest at the table but right after the story of that is the story of Rabbi Shimon Ba'ochai, sorry, Rabbi Yohannan Benzakai, my apologies, Yohannan Benzakai opens up his little story by saying Harei Aneekhevenshiv Imshana, in English the translation in the yellow Haggadah by Golden, he translated saying "Verily I am like a man of seventy years of age." What does that mean? It means that Yohannan Benzakai was elected to the Sanhedrin to be the head of the rabbina court at the age of eighteen years old and he was nervous that people wouldn't respect him even though clearly he was a genius. So the day, the night before he goes to bed and the next morning he's supposed to awake and be formally installed in his office when he wakes up the next day his head of hair that had been completely black and now turned entirely white and he looked in the mirror and what did he say? I looked like I'm seventy years old. In other words, the story, whether or not it's accurate, I certainly don't know but it communicates a value and the value is that someone who is aged, someone with experience and time, that being great and wrinkled, is a reflection of the things that you have earned and gained in the world, that when you look at someone like that there should be someone that you should in fact turn to with respect and admiration, not denigration or mitigation. But one of the other things that certainly comes along with, let's use the term properly, ageism is a melancholy. What's the melancholy of ageism? The melancholy of ageism is the sense that all the good things that in my life have already happened, that you're like a professional athlete, that when you turn twenty eight years old, what did I say to you? You've hit your peak already. You're twenty eight years old. But they understand that. The problem with ageism, with the neglect or ignoring of the beauty and the importance of aging, the sanctity of aging, is that with every birthday you have, it becomes a sadder and sadder moment in your life. And that's a horrible and difficult thing to come to reconcile yourself with. On a cultural basis, we live with this terrible burden that weighs upon all of us. And it's not a good thing. Why am I talking about this? I suspect you know why. I am not certainly capable of determining whether or not the president of the United States, who is an 81 year old man, is capable or not of executing the duties of his office. None of us are for that matter. I mean, that's within the confines of a privileged relationship that he has with his team of doctors and maybe his immediate family. But the immediate assumption that because someone is 81 years old, that they can't hold public office is a mistake. And more often than that, what I would say to you is, is that the assumption or the feeling that simply because someone has reached a certain number in their age, that we assume things about them is also mistaken. Because it is important to understand that everyone ages in their own particular way. I even met ninety five year olds who are sharper and far more interesting than any 20 year old I have ever met in my life. My self included by the way. And I have met 81 year olds who are clearly not all capable of doing much in their life. For that matter, I've met 30 year olds who are pretty much the same too. So, what I'm basically saying is, is that stereotypes, stereotypes are the weakness of weak minds. We are called to assess people on an individual basis. You know, I remember years ago, I went to a rabbinic convention in Atlanta, Georgia. And the synagogue, the show that the convention was being held out was called the Agudath Israel. It was right off Peachtree. And it was this congregation that dates back from before the Civil War. Beautiful congregation, immensely large building, all with clapboard painted white. It was a classic kind of southern building. It looked like a southern mansion. And when you walked inside the building, close to the sanctuary was an entire wall filled with the pictures and names of all of the rabbis who had steered and led the congregation starting from I think 1851 or 1852. As you can well imagine, this wall was quite large. And there are many, many pictures on. Some of the rabbis had served maybe for a year or two. Some of the rabbis have served for decades, but over the course of the life of a congregation at that point, it was nearly 160 years old, 170 years, you can imagine that there were quite a large number of people that had made their way through the building. And one of the things that occurred to me was that how humbling it is, to look at those pictures and realize that there are things that come before and the things that come after, which reminded me of something that a dear friend of mine wrote. It's a beautiful, beautiful article David from the past week he wrote an article similarly about Joe Biden. And he said that inside the walls of the House of Representatives of the Congress of the United States are many, many pictures, portraits of politicians from the past. And one of the abiding lessons that one should take by looking at these pictures, one that I certainly drew from when I saw that immense wall with all these rabbis who had passed through the story of the congregation, and also for politicians who walk into the House of Representatives and to the Congress of the United States is a sense that our time on this earth is very short and that we're all fragile, broken creatures. And the humility that we draw from that is the understanding that when we encounter someone who's older than us, rather than being repelled by their age and what we think is weakness, we should be drawn to them because of the strength of what they have come to learn about life. In other words, when we see people with age, we shouldn't be afraid of seeing our weakness in them. We should hope to be able to become the deep, the experienced, the knowledgeable that we hope to see in them. Shabbat shalom.