A Time for Everything: Reflections on Age-ing and Aicha

I just turned 71. How did that happen?  I am truly blessed…and grateful.

I pray “Modah Ani” every morning, honoring and thanking God for enabling me to wake up again to a new day. On a more secular note, I read the great Stoic, Marcus Aurelius, who said, “When you arise in the morning, think of what a precious privilege it is to be alive. To breathe, to think, to enjoy, to love…”

I know I won’t live forever.  For some perspective, I recall the words of a colleague of my hospice physician husband, who once said, “Life is a sexually transmitted condition that is inevitably fatal.” 

“Everybody does it,” Reb Nadya Gross says about mortality in her book, “Embracing Wisdom: Soaring in the Second Half of Life.” She then focuses on the wisdom that comes with age-ing, following the teachings of Reb Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, z”l. He wrote extensively on “Age-ing to Sage-ing,” of the need to accept our mortality and to use the wisdom we have garnered through our lifetime to ‘pay it forward,’ share it, and teach the next generation.

Rabbi Richard Address established this very website ten years ago to help make that wisdom accessible to many of us. In fact, it has been the focus of his rabbinate for decades.

My paraphrase of all these teachings is to ‘lean into’ the process of age-ing, and not to attempt to avoid it. Sheryl Sandburg, former COO of Facebook, coined that phrase for how young women should approach their careers. I like to use it for older women — and men — launching into the next phase of their lives.

The time is NOW to make the most of the life we have been given and the wisdom we have gained in the journey. We need to treasure each day. Psalm 90 quotes Moses praying, “So teach us to number our days that we may get a heart of wisdom.” 

The essential part of the wisdom that comes with age must be the acceptance of that very numbering process, the natural process of age-ing, and the willingness to follow its flow. Not easy to do, especially in our American culture that celebrates youth. But essential.

With this wisdom, one must be able to discern ‘when to hold and when to fold’. It’s a critically strategic decision, both in poker and in life. When do we press forward with the game as it’s playing out, and when do we back off, and seek a different path?

The Torah teaches us this lesson in many places, notably Ecclesiastes, where we are told there is “a time for everything…under the heavens. A time to be born, and a time to die.”

We are not superhuman. Not even Moses, with all his wisdom, was allowed to press forward and lead the Children of Israel into the Promised Land. God said it was time to change leadership. Moses had brought the people so incredibly far, and at that critical point, it was time for someone else to take over.

President Biden has said he’d listen “if the Lord Almighty” told him to pass the baton. Sometimes God speaks to us in mysterious ways, very deeply into our heart of hearts, or through the mouths of other wise ones, or through signs and symbols. Especially when the stakes are high.

Tisha B’Av is coming in a few weeks, when we read Lamentations, Aicha, bemoaning the fall of Jerusalem. We have a burning country in so many ways. Maybe it is like the burning bush, with a message. Let us listen to it and pray that it is not consumed.