I am not a Reform Jew, but I confess that I am often envious of the publications of the Reform movement. Whether I agree with their answers or not, I am impressed by the fact that they ask the right questions, the questions that are on the minds and hearts of our people today.
So, for example, some years ago the movement published a book for children on how to cope with their parents’ divorce. It was ahead of the curve in realizing that this was a real issue in many Jewish homes, and in providing a Jewish perspective on it. And last year the Reform movement’s UAHC published a book in which the editors asked many different rabbis to respond to the questions that young people need to think about when they enter college
And now, the movement has published “That You May Live Long: Caring for our Aging Parents, Caring for Ourselves,” which contains both spiritual and practical advice for those whose parents are reaching the age when they need care. Edited by Richard F. Address and Hara E. Person, it is a book that, once again, is on target for the Jewish community is aging. Nineteen percent of the Jews of America are over 65, and the median age in the Reform community is now 48, due in part to the fact that we are having fewer children and that we are having them later.
There are few greater spiritual challenges in life than caring for parents in their old age. As the old Yiddish proverb has it: “When parents feed children, they both laugh; when children feed parents, they both cry.” And so this is a much-needed book.
What makes this book so helpful is that it contains different kinds of writing: both practical and spiritual. In the essays by Rabbis Ruth Langer and Michael Chernick, we are taught what the Jewish tradition has to say on these subjects. In the essay by Rabbi Sheldon Marder, the spiritual adviser of San Francisco’s Jewish Home, we are given practical guidelines on how to choose a nursing home. And in the essays by Person and others, we are given intensely personal descriptions of how difficult, and yet, how meaningful, caring for those who gave us care can be.
I found the essay by Rabbi Jonathan Kendall called “Growing Old Is Not For the Faint of Heart” the most moving. He begins by telling how he now takes his mother to the barber for her monthly haircuts, and, as he sits and watches the barber, he ruminates on how their positions have been reversed, on how he now sits where she once sat. Now he is the one who smiles and encourages and she is the one whose spirits need to be buoyed up.
Now she lives in what is euphemistically called “an assisted-living facility.” Kendall writes: “the day we moved in…” instead of “the day she moved in” because, as he says, “a piece of me was going with her.” He confesses that he made the arrangements with a mixture of remorse and relief: remorse that he was not able to do for her what she had done for her mother; relief that she would be in a good place, with like-minded people, and with those who could care for her better than he could himself.
As Kendall heads for the elevator after helping his mother move in, his mind goes back to when he took each of his children to college, helped them unpack and then headed for the elevator. Each of those experiences was a rite of passage — for them and for him — but how different this one is! The birds are supposed to leave the nest — that is the way of the world. How different this leave-taking feels from those!
The essay is heartening because it tells of how his mother was still feisty enough to complain about the food, the surly staff and the superficiality of the program, yet was still capable enough to start a painting program in the “old folks home,” as she called it. And yet, he wrestles with the mixed feelings of helplessness and guilt, of pain and shame, of admiration and ambivalence, of devotion to her and sense of exhaustion in himself, that go with this last task. And these are the thoughts he struggles with as the two of them “venture out to the beauty parlor to have the ninja work his samurai magic once again.”
One essay, by Rabbi Barbara Rosenthal Berliner, deals with who decides when a parent can no longer make the great decisions about the limits of medical care and other such matters, and with what happens to the spiritual health of the family if the decision is not made properly.
Which is the most difficult of the Ten Commandments to observe? Honoring father and mother must surely be one of them. When we are young, it is hard to observe because we want to find our way to independence and parents seem to stand in our way. When they are old, it is hard to observe because it is so hard to care for those who cared for us and because, when we care for the young we see progress every day; when we care for the old, we see deterioration every day. But observe this commandment we must — otherwise we are not civilized human beings. And so this book will be a very valuable resource for the generation that must somehow learn how to observe this mitzvah, on which human life depends.