A Heart of Wisdom

Description

Shows us how to understand and meet the challenges of our own process of aging—and the aging of those we care about—from a Jewish perspective, from midlife through the elder years. Over 40 contributors offer their insights and experiences through personal narrative, text studies, poems, ceremonies and stories about aging, retiring, growing, learning, caring for elderly parents, living and dying.

Sujets

• Santé et bien-être
• Santé du quotidien
• Spiritual Growth
• Philosophie et théologie
• Heart of Wisdom
• Hebrew school
• Wellness
• Judaism
• Religion

Informations

• Publié par: Turner Publishing Company
• Date de parution: 13 septembre 2014
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781580237239
• Langue: English

Extrait

A Heart of Wisdom
Making the Jewish Journey from Midlife Through the Elder Years

Edited and with Introductions by
Susan Berrin
Foreword by
Harold Kushner
J EWISH L IGHTS P UBLISHING
Woodstock, Vermont
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C ONTRIBUTORS


MarthaJoy Aft
Phyllis Ocean Berman
Susan Berrin
Paul Citrin
Thomas R. Cole
Ruth Daigon
Eliezer Diamond
Maggie Dwyer
Ben Engelman
Linda H. Feinberg
Linda Knaster Feldman
Dayle A. Friedman
Everett Gendler
Mary Gendler
Muriel E. Ginsberg
Hillel Goelman
Lynn Greenhough
Suzanne Hodes
Barbara D. Holender
Judith Magyar Isaacson
Norma Baumel Joseph
Marc Kaminsky
Cary Kozberg
Gloria Levi
Sheva Medjuck
Kerry M. Olitzky
Victor Hillel Reinstein
Carol Rose
Joel Rosenberg
Rosie Rosenzweig
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
Jonathan Segol
Alice Shalvi
Danny Siegel
Rachel Josefowitz Siegel
Elizabeth Anne Sussman Socolow
Marcia Cohn Spiegel
Savina J. Teubal
Mickey Teicher
Anne Tolbert
For my mother and father, Vera and Harry Berrin, who have given me the ageless gifts of patience, compassion, and love.
C ONTENTS
Acknowledgments
Foreword
Introduction
I. T EXT S TUDIES
Crown Me with Wrinkles and Gray Hair: Examining Traditional Jewish Views of Aging
Dayle A. Friedman
Do Not Cast Us Away in Our Old Age : Adult Children and their Aging Parents
Eliezer Diamond
Passages: The Commentary of Moshe ibn Yehuda HaMachiri on Pirkei Avot
Hillel Goelman
Alternate Paths to Integrity: On Old Age in the Hebrew Bible
Joel Rosenberg
The Mitzvah of Bringing Out the Beauty in Our Elders Faces
Danny Siegel
II. M IDLIFE P ASSAGES
Empty Pockets: Beginning Again in Midlife
Linda Knaster Feldman
You Never Knew What Powers Lay Within You
Thomas R. Cole
Redigging the Wells of Spirituality-Again
Kerry M. Olitzky
Cycling and Recyling
Mary Gendler
III. I NTERGENERATIONAL R ELATIONSHIPS
A Table with People: Storytelling as Life Review and Cultural History
Marc Kaminsky
Even to Your Old Age: Reflections on Aging
Victor Hillel Reinstein
A Letter to My Children
Gloria Levi
Imaging My Mother (Essay with Charcoal Drawings)
Suzanne Hodes
IV. W OMEN AND A GING
Behind the Rhetoric of My Yiddishe Mama : The Status of Older Jewish Women
Sheva Medjuck
Honoring Motherhood: Getting Beyond the I-It Relationship
Rosie Rosenzweig
Commencement Beyond Fifty
Norma Baumel Joseph
My Mother and I: A Daughter s Role in Caring for Her Aged Mother
Mickey Teicher
V. J OURNEYS AND D ISCOVERIES
From Age-ing to Sage-ing
Zalman Schachter-Shalomi
My Body, My Self: Waning and Waxing
Alice Shalvi
Have You Seen Sarah?
Savina J. Teubal
Until God Says Come, I ll Make the Best of My Life
Ben Engelman
Participating in the Holy Burial Society
Muriel E. Ginsberg
VI. M EETING THE C HALLENGES OF A GING
Saving Broken Tablets: Planning for the Spiritual Needs of Jews in Long-Term Care Facilities
Cary Kozberg
Growing Old on an Israeli Kibbutz
Susan Berrin, photographs by Aliza Auerbach
Who Will Lead the Seder, Now That I Stand Alone?
Rachel Josefowitz Siegel
Consenting to Age
Jonathan Segol
Not Tired, Merely Retired
Everett Gendler
Still Surviving
Judith Magyar Isaacson
VII. P OETRY AND S TORIES
40
MarthaJoy Aft
in my own image
Carol Rose
Abishag Says His Hands Were Cold
Elizabeth Anne Sussman Socolow
Dinah Goldberg, of Blessed Memory
Linda H. Feinberg
Erasures
Ruth Daigon
Bathsheba Watches Abishag
Barbara D. Holender
Ruth and Naomi
Lynn Greenhough
Lot s Wife
Maggie Dwyer
VIII. C EREMONIES
A Testament to Growing Older: The Av/Em Eitza Program
Paul Citrin
An End to the Body s Silence
Phyllis Ocean Berman
Havdalah: A Time to Acknowledge Growing Old
Marcia Cohn Spiegel
A Personal Seder to Celebrate Aging
Anne Tolbert
Let Your Heart Take Courage: A Ceremony for Entering a Nursing Home
Cary Kozberg
Older Adult Confirmation
Dayle A. Friedman
A PPENDICES
I. A Guide to Jewish Textual Sources on Aging
II. Selected National and International Organizations Serving Jewish Elders and Their Families
III. Resources: Publications
IV. Glossary
Notes
Index

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A CKNOWLEDGMENTS
When I first began soliciting material for A Heart of Wisdom , several people wondered why I had asked them to contribute to a book about growing older. This rebuff provided me with an opportunity to launch into a discourse about aging as a lifelong experience, not just as a phenomenon of our latter years. Growing older is a process that must be acknowledged because we spend more of our lives being old than we do being infants, toddlers, or adolescents. I hope that this anthology-which includes Jewish texts and thought on aging as well as personal, reflective essays, stories, and poetry-will encourage everyone, regardless of where they are along the continuum of aging, to engage consciously in this experience. While we are always growing older, our first awareness and acknowledgment of aging often comes at midlife. I have chosen, therefore, to include in this volume material from midlife onward.
With gratitude to those who have helped make this anthology possible, I welcome you along the path.
I want to thank Harold Reinstein for his photographic assistance and Nathan Ehrlich, who walked me patiently through computer crises.
Estelle Latchman acted as my extra set of eyes for pertinent aging resources, and Sam Seicol, Chaplain at the Hebrew Rehabilitation Center for Aged in Boston, provided support and assistance.
I am grateful to friends and colleagues whose suggestions have enriched this book: Mona Fishbane, Peninnah Schram, Suzanne Kort, Maxine Lyons, Barbara Moscowitz, Rosie Rosenzweig, and Victor Reinstein.
I would also like to thank Jewish Lights Publishing, especially Sandra Korinchak, whose friendly voice on the other end of the telephone has been a constant source of willing assistance, and my editor, Arthur Magida, whose insights have helped clarify and distill the meaning of this work.
I am sincerely indebted to each contributor to this volume, who so willingly joined me in exploring this uncharted terrain-a landscape of peril and promise.
My thanks also to:
My grandparents, who, although they died before I reached adulthood, and thus, before I could know and appreciate them fully, introduced me to the varied lives of Jewish elderly: Ida and Nathan Latchman, and Faigel and Israel Berrin. Rebecca Rabinovitz, who became my bubbe through marriage, died recently at age 95. Her indomitable spirit and sense of self challenged my earlier assumptions about aging. We often talked and cooked together during my weekly visits to Boston while commuting to graduate school from my home in Maine.
My children, Noa Chana, Yosef Chaim and Tzvia Raizel, who with patience, understanding and a great deal of pride have learned one of aging s most important lessons: adaptability.
My husband, Victor Reinstein; may we grow old together. In Rabbi Ben Ezra, Robert Browning wrote, Grow old along with me! The best is yet to be. So be it.
Susan Berrin
F OREWORD
Harold Kushner
As a rabbi, I come out of a tradition that venerates age and is sometimes uneasy with the immaturity and impetuousness of youth. (I recently ran across these lines in a poem: I look at the young in all their grace and beauty/And all I can think of is brown-and-serve rolls/Before they are cooked. ) So I was not at all troubled by the thought that youth was slipping away from me when I turned thirty. I also didn t feel I was getting old when I turned forty. On the contrary, I felt I was finally leaving an extended childhood behind. As a thirty-something rabbi, I had always felt uncomfortable being looked up to as a moral guide and surrogate parent figure by people many years older than I was.
But halfway between my fortieth and fiftieth birthdays, something happened. I calculated that, for the first time in my life, the years behind almost certainly outnumbered the years ahead. I began to write books instead of giving sermons, perhaps out of an unconscious need to be assured that something of me would survive in a permanent state. I not only had to confront my own mortality, I had to confront (somewhat belatedly) the American notion that life peaks between age twenty-five and thirty and begins to decline after that.
Do you doubt that? Try this little experiment. Go into a store where greeting cards are sold, and look at birthday cards for middle-aged men and women. They will almost all be about loss, about life slipping away, about the fact that we are losing our figures and our vigor.
There is perhaps no issue on which Jewish values diverge from American values more sharply than on this one: as we grow older, as we lose physical grace and gain wisdom, as our bodies sag and our souls ripen, does that represent a net gain or a net loss?
There is a story, probably apocryphal, of a reporter interviewing the mystery writer Agatha Christie, whose second husband was a prominent archaeologist, and asking her what it was like to be married to an archaeologist. Ms. Christie is supposed to have replied, Oh, it s wonderfu