Daily Life Lessons from Rabbi Heschel
Year 3 Day 235
“Old age often is an age of anguish and boredom. The only answer to such anguish is a sense of significant being. The sense of significant being is a thing of the spirit. Stunts, buffers, games, hobbies, slogans -all are evasions.” (Insecurity of Freedom pg. 77)
Continuing to immerse ourselves in Rabbi Heschel’s paper given at the White House Conference on Aging in 1961, many people of ‘a certain age’ can relate to the teaching above. People who are in “old age” and those of us who remember how we ignored the anguish and boredom of our ‘older relatives’ including our parents! This was not a willful ignorance, it was an ignorance born out of being oblivious to the plight of people once they were no longer ‘productive’. Once we asked them to leave the workplace, stop adding to the society, because we wanted them to enjoy their “golden years” as Del Webb coined the phrase, we had no understanding of what a loss of dignity, a loss of purpose meant to people. “Anguish and boredom” have interesting definitions, anguish comes from the Latin meaning “narrow” and boredom is the state of “feeling weary because one is unoccupied”; bored also means “make a hole in something”. Using these definitions/roots we can hear Rabbi Heschel saying “old age often is an age” of narrowness and weariness from being unoccupied and a time of feeling like there is a hole in my soul. This experience is, unfortunately, happening at an alarming rate for ‘senior citizens’.
The “anguish and boredom” that often happens in “old age” is, as Rabbi Heschel says, from a loss of “a sense of significant being”. We strip people of their dignity and tell them in a myriad of ways they no longer are worth as much as they were to society and what else can happen except “anguish and boredom”? We have been seeing an uptick in addiction in older adults, more use of Marijuana and THC, we also see more illness, more falls, etc precisely because they are bored and alone-even if family is around, even with their spouses loving them, many people feel the loss of dignity and worth so acutely “anguish and boredom” are their daily spiritual temperatures.
Why do we have to define any person as young or old, why do we have to define “golden years”, “senior citizen”, etc? Because once we define someone, something, it gives us power over them, power to know how to ‘deal with’ them, power to demean or extol them, etc. Once we use any terms other than “human being” to describe someone we are making a judgment about them, we are categorizing them and we are revealing what we think they are ‘worth’. We steal the dignity of an individual by categorizing them, we rob people of their worth by saying: time’s up. While there are some people who need to take a rest from their work, this doesn’t mean “putting them out to pasture in an ‘old home’. It doesn’t mean that everyone should stop working at a certain age or everyone over a certain age doesn’t need this particular r medical test, or that the arm of an 80 year old is worth less than an arm of a 30 year old as actuary tables believe. Yet, society has narrowed the path for people ‘of a certain age’ and purposely tries to make a ‘hole in their soul’ by telling them they are not needed anymore.
How can we combat these lies, how can we change societal norms? I believe we can be serious about the term “senior citizen”. Instead of this term meaning “older person”, we can understand and use this term to mean: “holding an authoritative position”. When we turn the dial of our thinking and seeing, when we allow our higher consciousness and our ‘third eye’ as well as our inner knowing to be our eyes, ears, and actor, we realize the infinite value of our elders to guide us, to relate their failures and their successes to us. The wealth of knowing that “older adults” have is unmeasurable. It is like the story of the man who wandered in the forest so lost he was sinking into despair and then he saw another person and was overjoyed. When the lost man asked for the other person’s help in getting out of the forest, the second person said: ‘I don’t know the way out, I do know the ways that don’t work and between us we can figure the way out because of our knowledge of the ones that have proved futile”. Using the experience of “older adults” in navigating our way out of the forest is crucial for the next generations to improve our world and not spend too much time on old ideas that “result in nil” as it says in the Big Book of AA. Doing this allows us to relieve the “anguish and boredom” and honor the spirit, value and dignity of everyone!
These words, teachings of Rabbi Heschel are giving me more compassion for myself, my daughter, my siblings, my wife and everyone around me. I have a greater capacity to forgive people for not seeing “older adults”, for people believing someone is “past their prime”, that “they are the past”, and other defenses for the mistreatment of “people of a certain age”. I have more understanding of my mother’s plight when she would want everyone to call her and know everything about our lives along with always giving me, at least, her opinion of what I should and should not do. She was ‘lashing’ out in her “anguish and boredom”, in her seeing herself diminish in her own eyes and losing her dignity. This is why, after she had an accident at age 88, my siblings and I helped her lease a new car so she would not be trapped. It is also why, two years later, we helped her move into an “Independent Living” situation. I did not realize the “anguish” she was in at having lost her identity. I am sorry Mom! I also understand the “anguish” of people around me in the “Over 55” community I am living in-none of us want to experience being irrelevant, none of us want to lose our dignity, and all of us still believe we are valuable. I write, I pray, I study, I help those who want my help and I love-these are the ways I hold onto my dignity and worth. God Bless and stay safe, Rabbi Mark