While many find coping with aging parents a challenge, Barry Barkan also sees it as a path to God.
The Jewish practices of tshuvah (return or repentance), tefillah (prayer) and tzedakah (righteous giving) can be useful tools to re-examine one’s relationship with parents, said Barkan, founder and director of the Live Oak Institute, a seniors facility in the Contra Costa County town of El Sobrante.
“When you look at a problem you’re having with your parents, you might start with tshuvah, what part of the problem you own,” he said. “If you’ve got a problem you can’t find an answer to, if you’re frustrated or worried, this is something to add to your prayer practice,” the Berkeley resident said.
Barkan and his wife, Debora, recently gave a workshop at Berkeley’s Chochmat HaLev called “Relating to our Aging Parents as a Doorway to God Consciousness.”
“We can’t be divided, [putting] our spiritual lives in one compartment and our relationships with our parents in the other compartment,” said Barkan, a founding member of Berkeley’s Aquarian Minyan and a longtime student of Jewish Renewal co-founder Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi.
Barkan likes to teach a mixture of the spiritual and the practical.
“As our parents grow older and, God forbid, are functioning at less than full capacity then we function for them as stewards. The key to that is respecting their integrity,” he said.
Navigating the changing parent-child relationship has become a central issue for many babyboomers who are now entering the “steward phase.”
“We have to develop an awareness of where we are now, break out of old patterns of relating,” Barkan said.
Instead of getting in touch with our “inner child,” he said, people need to access our “inner elder.”
“I think that each of us has within us a sage, a wise person, an elder, even when we’re really young. As we’re younger and more ego-driven and more driven toward materiality, the inner elder is more recessive. As you grow older and move towards a wisdom path, it becomes who you are.”
One way to access one’s inner elder is through meditation, using the name of God as a kind of mantra, Barkan said.
“I’ll hear the mantra, the name of God, and it’ll cause me to think twice and come from my higher self,” he said. “This is what spiritual practice is about, breaking out of habituated behaviors.”
When Barkan graduated from Vermont’s Goddard College in 1966, he took the “tzedakah route” to heal a strained relationship with his father.
At the time, he had moved to the East Village in Manhattan, rather than staying with his parents in Long Island.
“When I moved out, my father was very upset with me,” Barkan recalled.
After all, Barkan’s grandmother had worked three factory shifts a day to move out of Manhattan’s Lower East Side.
To heal the rift with his father, Barkan said, “I came home the next weekend and I just virtually indentured myself to him. I cleaned the basement. I scrubbed the windows.
“The first weekend he was very cold to me. The second weekend he began to get it, that it was about my getting my needs met, not about my rejecting his needs. My love and devotion was there. I just had different needs.”
Barkan began his mission for the elderly more than 20 years ago while ruminating on a majestic old oak tree in Berkeley’s Live Oak Park.
“The driving thing in my life has been tikkun olam [repairing the world]. I thought that working with elders and restoring…the role of elders is perhaps the most socially transformative thing I could do with my life,” he said.
As a young man, Barkan was upset by a visit to his grandmother in a Long Island nursing home, where he found the environment sterile and the staff unwelcoming and intimidating.
“It was an institution that was not human centered at all,” he said.
Calling “disconnection, isolation and lack of meaning the major diseases of long-term care,” Barkan was determined to find other methods of caring for the elderly — and one’s parents.
Something as simple as blessing your parents can be very powerful, he said.
“It becomes a way of addressing things you feel your parents need, developing a practice of wishing well. My mother called the other day and she’s having some laser surgery and I gave her a blessing that she should see with clear eyes for 40 more years at least.”
Too often, he said, people are quick to give their parents credit for negative things in themselves and forget to give them credit for the positive.
The foundation of the Barkans’ work is the Fifth Commandment, to honor one’s mother and father.
“It’s not only our parents we need to honor, but we need to honor our elders,” he said. “Why do we honor our parents? This is our way of saying to the future generation that as we treat our parents, so we want to be treated in our old age.”