Clergy Sermons

Haazinu - Ask Your Elders

Between services on Yom Kippur, I will sometimes come into my office and pull down one of the big volumes of Talmud and look at certain sections that inspire me on the High Holidays. Studying helps ground, focus and inspire me. It is also meaningful that the Talmud belonged to my great uncle, Rabbi Zev Nelson, who was an influential person in my life.

I did not know grandparents growing up – they all died either before I was born, or when I was too young to have clear memories. Uncle Zev was the one person from that generation who I got to know – his stories, wisdom and example have shaped me. After serving a community in Massachusetts, he retired to Jerusalem and when I was studying there, he took me out to lunch every week. I grow up in a home where my mom instilled a deep sense of Jewish identity, but we were not observant in terms of keeping kosher or Shabbat. It was with Uncle Zev that I witnessed how being an observant Jew gave his life meaning and purpose. After each meal he would say the grace after meals and I saw how it created a spiritual connection to what he ate. I sang Shabbat songs at his table and felt the joy of Shabbat. We talked about mitzvah and study and how I was exploring these topics. He helped hand down the values of the past to me. And as I became more observant, we studied together in what is one of the most powerfully connecting acts that humans can do. 

He shared where the grandfather who I never knew came from and what life was like in the town of Lubin, which is in modern day Poland. He told how his father would teach him Bible – beginning a verse and have him quote the end. He came from a big family, and because his older brother Harry – who was my mom’s dad came to America and served in World War I was a veteran – the rest of the family was able to join him before the rise of the Nazis. One day I went to the restroom and as I came back, he had a shocked expression on his face like his had seen a ghost, and exclaimed, “You walk just like my brother – your grandfather.” Sharing the gait of a man I never met – who was exposed to mustard gas in World War I and was sick the rest of his life – yet worked tirelessly as a gas station he bought in Detroit and died too young – moved me. My mom remembers him coming home from work and not being able to get all the oil off of his hands, him sitting on the couch and reading the paper as he dozed off. His story is my story. His gait is my gait. His courage to leave home, serve his new country, adapt to care for his family connects me to an ethic I want to live in me. My grandfather stopped being an observant Jew as he adapted to America, but his Jewish soul, love of Hebrew and Zionism is a piece of him that lives in me. I have a series of Hebrew letters he exchanged with my grandmother that I cherish. Uncle Zev allowed my history to live, he showed me the beauty of an observant life and instilled a love of study and shared unconditional love with me.

 In this morning’s portion Moses is nearing the end of his life and worries that the Children of Israel will revert back to worshipping idols. He warns and rebukes them. He leaves them a poem and says this line (Deut. 32:7, p. 1186): Z’chor y’mot olam, binu shnot dor vador – Remember the days of old, consider the years of ages past; shal aviche v’yaged’cha, z’ken’echa v’yom’ru lach – ask your father (or mother) and he (or she) will inform you, Your elders, they will tell you. Connection to the past helps us know who we are meant to be and how we are supposed to live. Sadly, I believe American society and culture does not understand this. We are a culture obsessed with staying young. Maturity is not valued. Sometimes elders are utterly overlooked. My mother-in-law shares how often people don’t see older people. This is exacerbated by other realities of our time. We are the first generation where young people have skills older people don’t – particularly when it comes to technology. I am particularly befuddled by things the young generation does without a thought.

 Think about what it would mean to create a society, culture and personal ethic where we turn to our elders to learn from them. Age brings wisdom and insight that you don’t have when you are young. Arthur Brooks wrote an important book called Strength to Strength where he talks about crystallized intelligence – the stock of knowledge we accumulate over the years. He writes: “When you are young you have raw smarts; when you are old, you have wisdom. When you are young, you can generate lots of facts; when you are old, you know what they mean and how to use them. He counsels older people to teach and mentor. He notes that the oldest college professors tended to have the best teaching evaluations within departments. The experience that age only comes through the years that have been lived.

Crystallized intelligence is not just sharing accumulated learning, it is also generative - often marked by undertaking new projects, volunteering or learning new skills. Its marks are openness and care. Often creativity continues as you age. So many thinkers, artists and writers thrived into their 80’s and 90’s. Mozart and Beethoven were both child prodigies, yet they wrote their greatest music in the last years of their life. Claude Monet painted his shimmering landscapes of water lilies in his garden in his eighties. Judith Kerr who came to Britain when Hitler came to power in 1933 and wrote the children’s classic; The Tiger who came to Tea, won her first literary award in 2017 at the age of 93. Benjamin Franklin invented the bifocal lens at age 78. The architect Frank Lloyd Wright completed designs for the Guggenheim Museum at 92. Michelangelo, Matisse, and Picasso and so many others all remained creative into their 90’s. Jane Fonda is leading protests and continuing to exercise at 87. And so many of you here are doing amazing things in these years. What elders have to share enriches us! Are we learning from our elders? Are we seeking elders to learn from? That can be one of the greatest blessings of a synagogue community.

 Elders can often see a big picture that we can’t even imagine when we are younger. They no longer have to manipulate or conquer the world which leads to insights. There is a letting go of things that used to drive us when we were young. John Wier Perry in Zalman Schacter’s book Aging to Saging writes: “In our later years, we feel connected to the world through bonds of tenderness and empathy. Life becomes more poetic. The ordinary objects that surround us – trees, houses, clouds, animals – shimmer with metaphoric insight, revealing depths of meaning that normal elude our practical mind….When we look at the world under the aspect of eternity, life is animated in ways that constantly astound us.” We need that wider vision and perspective.

When you are young, you are often very focus on how others see you. I know that has been a theme throughout my life. When you are older, often you realize you don’t have to care as much – I continue to try to internalize this lesson. In a sermon about aging when he turned 65, Rabbi David Wolpe brought the famous poem by Jenny Joseph that I will read pieces of:

When I am an old woman I shall wear purple

With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me….

I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired

And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells

And run my stick along the public railings…

What a beautiful message to say learn from elders - just be ourselves.   

And what about those who no longer have the capacity to share their wisdom? Earlier in Deuteronomy, we learn that the tablets Moses shattered as he hurled them down in anger after witnessing the Children of Israel dancing around the golden calf were placed in the ark of the Covenant next to the whole tablets Moses later brought down. The broken is as holy as the whole. The rabbis teach that this teaches that we honor someone who has forgotten their teaching in the same way we honor the person who has all their faculties. When my Uncle Zev cognitively declined, I wish I understood how to do that better. It upset me when he would constantly say the same thing over and over. I needed to learn that just being present was the best way to honor him. And now, because I have tried to learn how to better honor one who has cognitive decline, I face my father’s condition in a much different way that I did my great uncles’. I have learned that music, stories from the past, just sitting and patiently hearing the same story or allowing silence allows for holiness. When he is awake, my dad and I sing the Michigan fight song or the shaving cream song. I ask him about serving on the aircraft carrier Intrepid during the Korean conflict and he has vivid memories. Even amidst cognitive decline, our elders are holy.

We need to create a culture of honoring our elders.

Rabbi Wolpe asked us to see the beauty in aging. He brought up the art of Rembrandt, whose iconic portraits captured wisdom and beauty in aged faces. Beauty is who person is – what shines through faces and bodies. Let’s embrace that beautiful picture of the stages of aging having enormous beauty.

Every age has changes, challenges, losses. Let’s make aging a time when we honor each of these things. I close with a final story about my great uncle. After a meal, Uncle Zev and I used to walk around Jerusalem together and if he would see a piece of garbage on the ground, he would pick it up. When I asked him why, he replied that it is our duty to leave the world a better place – and where else to start than by cleaning up a Jerusalem street. Maybe that was also his way of staying young as he aged. May we learn from our elders and create a society full of honor and appreciation. Shabbat Shalom.