There is a dumb joke that everyone who lives in Florida has heard. You go back up north for a visit and you mention Century Village or another local retirement community, and people respond: “Oh, that’s God’s waiting room.”
People who make that joke need to read the book “From Age-ing to Sage-ing” by Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi and Ronald S. Miller on spiritual eldering — or they need to attend one of the seminars the rabbi gives on how to live fully during the later stages of life.
For many years, “Reb Zalman,” as he is affectionately known among his many disciples, has traveled the land teaching college students that Judaism is a religion that speaks to the soul, not just to the stomach or the checkbook or the mind.
He taught that Judaism has the power to address and hear the spiritual insights of Eastern religions, Native American spirituality and Christian mysticism.
Now in the harvest time of his own life he has turned to providing guidance on how to age wisely.
There is understandable resistance to dealing with the issue. People would much rather put off and deny the fact of aging, if they could. Say the world “old” and it conjures up images of senility, weakness, infirmity, abandonment and decay. But Schachter-Shalomi has a totally different understanding of what aging can be. He sees it as a season in which to harvest the work of a lifetime and in which a person can have the joy and dignity of being a mentor.
Mentoring is a marvelous concept that used to be understood by Jews. Joel Grishaver has suggested that mentoring was one of the roles of the men in the daily minyan. A teenager would come to the minyan after losing a parent and would learn from the old men there how to daven, how to drink, how to put on the sacred garments.
In our culture, kids know the new math better than their parents do, certainly better than their grandparents do. They are much more adept with computers and VCRs than we are. If we have no wisdom that is deeper than theirs, then we are bound to be forever behind them, forever trying to catch up, forever “greenhorns in the land of the young.”
The reader should be forewarned that the proposals in this book all require some effort.
Some of our retirement communities seem like year-round summer camp. They seem to run on the premise that the retired are retarded, and that all they want to do or are fit to do is play. This book asks the old to be and do more than that.
It bids them to use this sacred time to make an accounting of their lives, to heal the wounds that they have let fester for so long, to come to terms with mortality, to go back over the defeats in their lives in order to learn from them, and to face the future instead of backing into it.
The book tells us that old age is not a lousy trick that God plays on us, but instead is a time when we are finally free of all the fears that have enslaved us.
The rabbi employs a freewheeling, often surprising imagination. One minute he quotes from the Kabbalah, and the next from Catholic or Hindu traditions. One minute he uses metaphors drawn from a recent movie, and then he evokes an image from the world of computers.
The author’s zest is itself the best proof of his thesis, which is that a person can live joyfully, fearlessly and richly till the very end.
Those who are old and those who someday hope to be old can learn much from him.