Rabbi Aliza Berk has a suggestion for how to respect your elders: Switch on a video camera.
“Videotape the story of your grandparent’s life,” she recommends. “People love to tell their stories. Each person has a story to tell.”
Besides helping a senior feel honored and important, the recording will document valuable bits of information for future generations, says Berk, a rabbi at the Bay Area Jewish Healing Center who often provides spiritual counseling to older people. The elderly are “storehouses of our history. You’re going to want to share the story with your children.”
On Sunday, May 5, Berk will share those and other views in a panel discussion addressing “Cultural Perspectives on Aging” at the 3rd annual “Healthy Futures Forum & Fair” sponsored by the Jewish Community Center of San Francisco.
Joining Berk will be Darrick Lam, director of the San Francisco Office on the Aging, and Lawrence Cohen, a professor of anthropology at U.C. Berkeley. Berk will reflect on the Jewish perspective toward the elderly, while Lam will offer a glimpse into Chinese viewpoints and Cohen on those from India.
“I think a spiritual revolution is under way in the Jewish community in the way we respond to our older population,” observes Berk, who notes that the movement is partially driven by the sheer force of numbers. One-third of this country’s Jewish population is older than age 75, she said.
As a result, people are seriously weighing how they want to give meaning to the last third of their lives. And society, she said, is starting to respond with programs and support targeted to an older population.
One example, she said, is a growing body of Jewish rituals that recognizes pivotal events in the life of an older person, just as baby-naming ceremonies and b’nai mitzvah address significant milestones of the young.
“It’s also important to acknowledge those major life changes in the latter half of our life,” she said.
She points to special prayers that have been developed in recent years, such as one for people moving from their homes into nursing homes. A ritual called simchat chochmah, or rejoicing in wisdom, is now being performed when a person reaches the age of 65.
As with Jews, the Chinese have a long tradition of honoring their elders, said Lam. But he cautions against stereotypes. Attitudes toward the elderly vary from one geographical area to another, he said, and also differ greatly depending on “the degree of acculturation” in this country.
“You need to understand all the dynamics,” said Lam, who was trained as a social worker. “You need to understand regional differences.”
Elderly immigrants from China who arrive in this country with high expectations that they’ll be lavished with respect by their children may be disappointed, he said. Many move to an American home where their offspring are busy with jobs and raising children.
“We need to bring out that Chinese basically are not just one group of people,” he said.
Cohen, a medical anthropologist, has found that Indian and American families have sharply contrasting attitudes about the causes of senility. His scholarly findings are described in his 1998 book, “No Aging in India: Alzheimer’s, the Bad Family, and other Modern Things.”
Americans, according to Cohen, tend to view senility as a biological problem, often blaming the mental deterioration on Alzheimer’s disease. “We’ve reached the point where we tend to look to Alzheimer’s to explain everything,” Cohen said.
Many Indian families, on the other hand, blame family troubles for senile behavior exhibited by older relatives. The attitude is, “if someone is acting funny, it’s because we’re not taking care of them as well as we used to,” said Cohen, who studied families in the northern India city of Banaras for two years.
While Cohen doesn’t advocate one culture’s position over another, he does recommend better understanding of the different perceptions. Like Lam, he notes that attitudes are fluid and evolving.
Berk, for her part, is encouraged by the Jewish community’s shifting approach to the elderly.
She points to new activities offered by synagogues and other Jewish agencies aimed at meeting the intellectual — as well as the social — needs of seniors. Other promising signs, she says, include elder hostels, mentoring programs between seniors and younger people and the advent of ethical wills, in which older people sit down and document the values they want to pass along to their heirs.
Still more effort and coordination by the Jewish community are needed, according to Berk. “Often we become rather territorial and I think this is an issue of such importance that we ought to find a way to come together,” she says.
On a smaller scale, she says that lending spiritual support to older people can be as simple as sitting down and listening to accounts of their life. “It gives them a sense of importance and a feeling that one’s life matters. It’s really life affirming.”