Yizkor: Yom Kippur 5776: Preparing for Later Years

Rabbi Mark H. Levin, DHL

Congregation Beth Torah

September 23, 2015

Some of us enter this sanctuary raw to the bone in grief.  For all of us grief makes us painfully aware of life's brevity, and so often causes inability to plan for severe changes in our lives.  It's as though grief nails us to the floor and clouds our heads!  Grief fogs our minds, as though we are emerging from a deep and unsatisfying sleep.

We jokingly use the Yiddish expression, "Man plans and God laughs.  Mensch tracht und Gott lacht"  Those we love share life's path, and too soon they are gone. We not only lose someone we love, we find life's course narrowed, our choices constrained; ourselves unprepared for the new, uphill climb. While still there in memory, we can no longer interact with a person whose very existence gave meaning to our lives.

On Yom Kippur we come to repent our sins, to introspectively ponder our choices over the past year, and to plan for how we might improve in the coming year. Yom Kippur encourages painful realism in reviewing our lives, and only we and God know the truth. And yet, so often we look at our actions, but not at the larger choices we made which led to those actions.

What are the larger choices? The big decisions we've made: where we live: what region of the country, what city or county, what kind of home? With whom will we share our lives: spouses, children, friends? Whom will we invite into our lives and whom will we exclude and how? What shall we do day by day? Shall we have jobs, raise children, volunteer, all three?  In what contexts will we choose to live our days? These are the big decisions, so often foisted upon us. We may make them with considerable gravitas and solemnity, or in just a moment as a whim, but how do we choose?

When we are young these decisions are virtually thrust upon us, like some adult to child game of catch where you may get surprised with the ball: Here! Catch! I'll live in this city. I'll choose this house. Sometimes we plan for a year and stay a lifetime.

And how do we decide? Most often we ask, "What will make us happy?"

But the truth is that "happy is not really the key." Rather, we should ask, and perhaps this seems to you like the same thing, what would be meaningful to us?

We have members of the congregation who chose occupations they thought would make them happy because they earned a significant amount of money, but they weren't happy with the money because the occupation was not meaningful. The work did not seem to matter enough although the money was good. I've met many of lawyers who say this about practicing law.

We've had business people change occupations to something they find more humanitarian and therefore, in helping people, more meaningful.

But we fail to explain something very significant: to get through life, your big choices must create meaning for yourself.

We have just read these words from our mahzor:

Let us treasure the time we have, and resolve to use it well, counting each moment precious – a chance to apprehend some truth, to experience some beauty, to conquer some evil, to relieve some suffering, to love and be loved, to achieve something of lasting worth.

Each of these activities – "apprehending truth, experiencing beauty, conquering evil, relieve suffering, to love and be loved" – intrinsically creates substance in our lives. When we are young, most often we do not have a meaning issue. Simply surviving is meaningful because so much is thrust upon us, the gale winds of just living. Choosing and practicing an occupation is meaningful. Finding a spouse with whom you hope to spend your life is meaningful. Choosing a home, having children, making friendships. All of these add meaning to our lives and so, most often, we do not notice until very late that they were meaning choices we made; but they were choices.

Yet, as we get older, often beginning in our mid-sixties, we lose those sources of meaning. The hurricane winds of youth turn first to a breeze then to a breath. Each of us is here because we have lost a dear person we loved mightily. Relationship and meaning lost. At some point we're likely to retire from working: a source of meaning set aside. Our friends may die or move away, or get sick and be inaccessible to us. Compansionship, a source of meaning diminishes. And little by little, the older we get, the more we find that the activities and relationships that gave our lives the significance we need to get out of bed in the morning have fallen by the wayside, chiseled away by loss of physical strength or simply, as we mourn today, the death of someone we loved.  So many people in aging feel deep within that there is little meaningful left for them to do, and too few friendships and love relationships remaining to keep their lives motivated and moving forward.  They may even despair, and yet they do not know why. It's because human beings are the only animals we know of that need not only air, water, and food to continue to live, but also a relationship or activity that gives them a reason to live. 

Now you likely have never been told these things before. And yet, in volunteering at Village Shalom, the Jewish community's home for the elderly, people discuss the meaning of their lives all the time. Every person living there has suffered deep losses: often a spouse, occupations,  some of their friendships, the athletic activities they enjoyed, mobility both physically and loss of a car to drive them places.  We reach a point where meaning issues surround us, and for some choke them daily.

When I first started out as a rabbi nearly 40 years ago the sainted Rabbi Gershon Hadas was the emeritus rabbi at Beth Shalom. Rabbi Hadas started around 1931 and retired around 1961, and he was well into his eighties when I knew him, nearly blind, and very much beloved by almost everyone in the city as far as I could tell. I was one of the many people who went to rabbi Hadas' home weekly to read to him.

Here's my youthful lack of understanding. I could not figure out why the rabbi studied so much. He had no job. He gave no sermons. He wrote no articles. He did nothing at all with all of that study except for improve his own mind and his own knowledge. I could not understand why this white-haired, old, doddering man, all 5 foot 4 of him, read and studied so much if he was not going to use the knowledge for anything I thought was productive.

Now I understand. Rabbi Hadas, whose brother, Moses Hadas was a famous scholar, had written a translation of psalms himself. He found comfort and INTRINSIC meaning in furthering knowledge. Now add to that the friendships of men and women who would come to his home to read and study texts. He was teaching informally, without telling anyone. He was socializing and furthering Judaism. He was adding knowledge for himself and the world. He had consciously, with forethought, planned significance in his life. He organized this meaning-making according to those aspects of life that would automatically give him a reason to exist in the world. He continued his rabbinate, that he loved so much, but in another form. He no longer made his living as a rabbi, but he made his life as a rabbi.

The only person we must please in this regard is ourselves. We are not punching a clock. There's no one to impress. But we must be content with our lives, and that requires activities and relationships we find intrinsically meaningful.  We always needed meaning. We just didn't realize it because it came so easily.

Some people have loving relationships with their children and grandchildren, but not sufficiently frequently to sustain them. So they need more friendships on a deeper level, someone who really knows and cares about them. For some people, reading might work, if their eyes hold out. For others listening to books might work, if their ears hold out. Yet, we must plan for later life, to create meaning when we may lose those meaning-making parts of our lives in our youth and middle age.

I feel a little like one of those television commercials that encourages people in their fifties to save for retirement, saying: the younger you are when you start the easier it will be.

We tell people to plan for advanced years with money, but frankly, having something that makes your life worthwhile is equally important. Some people love to travel, and that's expensive; but if you have a love of knowledge and a way to get to the library, you could be set for life. The point is, we have to plan for those things, for some it's a hobby, that will enable us to have a creative existence even if we live without a spouse, even if our children don't visit us everyday, even if our grandchildren ignore us, even if we are in a wheelchair or using a walker. Each person must possess something intrinsically meaningful within their own life. And we must plan to make this happen. We can't just leave it to chance.

Why discuss this today? Because each of us has been bereaved. We share that. Some are older, some younger. Some of us have resources for meaning, and some do not. No one likes to feel beholden to others, and so we are not likely to admit our neediness. Yet, we share this boat cruise together. If you don't believe that, head over to Village Shalom one day and take a look at the very vital, yet often alone, often formerly very active and influential members of the Jewish community who live their current lives in the physical comfort of Village Shalom. But did they prepare to have relationships or activities that will get them out of bed? Everyone I know has two things in common: they have something, but it's much diminished from earlier years.

This is why I urge all of us to ask ourselves early: what really gives our lives meaning, and how can I maximize that for myself now and in future years? What really gives your life meaning? If it's tennis, can you tranfer that to watching tennis when tennis courts are no longer your best friend? If it's friendships, can you hone your friend-making skill and teach yourself to become friendly with the people around you, wherever you are? One of the great skills that brings meaning to life at an advanced age is listening skills. People love to tell their life stories, and frankly, many of them are incredibly interesting.  A good listener who enjoys life stories will have lots to do that is meaningful.

Whatever your heartfelt meanings in life, develop them now so that you have them later. Get involved with a group at Beth Torah. Develop a skill that you can pursue alone and with others, so that you have something around which to socialize and an activity that you enjoy alone.

God gave us activities that make our lives meaningful: love, giving to others, creating something larger than ourselves, listening to other people and taking a sincere interest. Each of us is present today because of our grief at loss of a relationship. The older we get the more loss we experience, and the narrower our world becomes. Whatever your passion in life, find a way to adapt it to our advancing years. If we are fortunate, our bodies will last for decades to come. We must match that with meaningingful relationships and activities, and we will live fulfilled until God calls us home.