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On the occasion of the 40th wdding anniversary of Peter and Carol Jordan and the 80th birthday of Tony Leaf. (click here for photos)
Today I want to share with you two different and interesting Midrashim, rabbinic narratives, which are in a way connected.
At the beginning of this week’s Torah portion, which deals with Sarah’s death, we are told that she was 127 years old when she died. But the way the Torah describes her age is rather unusual. The first verse reads: “And the life of Sarah came to be one hundred years, and twenty years, and seven years – these were the years of the life of Sarah” (Genesis 23:1) . Why not just say that she was 127? The Midrash (Bereshit Rabba 58:1) therefore learns from here that when Sarah was 100 she was like a 20 year old, without sin, since it was considered that one became liable for one’s deeds and subject to punishment only from 20 upwards. And the Midrash continues by saying that when Sarah was 20, she was like a 7 year old in beauty – baby skin without a blemish, without a wrinkle. What – she wasn’t beautiful at 127 like a 127 year old? It somehow suggests that ageing is the antithesis of beauty. As we age, our beauty decades, our complexion changes, and we are no longer blessed with the perfection of youth.
Attitudes like this abound in our society, and have been with us since the time of humanity’s ancient quest for the fountain of youth. I think of Wilde’s The Portrait of Dorian Gray. Dorian, beautiful and young, has a portrait done by artist Basil Hallward. He then meets Lord Henry Wotton, a friend of Basil’s, who encourages hedonism and suggests that the only things to pursue in life are beauty and fulfilment of the senses. Aware that through the years his beauty will fade, Dorian expresses his desire to sell his soul in order to retain the beauty of youth. His wish is granted and Dorian never ages. But as he lives a life of debauchery the original portrait becomes disfigured and ages. In the climatic end, aware of the tolls of his excess, Dorian stabs the portrait, whereby a reversal occurs – he is found dead, stabbed and aged, whilst the portrait returned to its original form. Many of us fear ageing, and do our utmost efforts to restrain age from leaving its mark upon our body. Technology has helped us in our pursuit, and we can easily accommodate a botox session into our lunch break. I have to say that I myself have been a victim of such paranoia. Having just turned thirty, I must admit that I panicked for a minute, as ridiculous as that may sound!
A different Midrash (Bereshit Rabba 65:4) connected to our week’s Torah portion gives us a totally different perspective on ageing. Further in the Torah portion we are told “And Abraham become old and advanced in years” (Genesis 24:1). The Midrash tells a story filled with rabbinic fancy, and very much in contradiction to the first Midrash about Sarah. It says that even though Abraham was old, until his time no one ever aged – they all looked young until the time of their death. Since Isaac was very similar to Abraham, no one could distinguish between the two of them – they looked like identical twins. Abraham then prayed to God: “Sovereign of the Universe, if Isaac and I enter a place together, people will not know which one of us to honour. If you modify the look of a person when he or she is old, people will know who to honour”. God answered Abraham’s request and changed the order of the world, making Abraham the first person to age!
Old age is seen in the text as something to honour, and its effect on the body is now a sign of that honour. Wrinkles become something to revere, a life’s path which becomes embodied. In our tradition, the golden years were seen as an object of veneration – it was considered an obligation to rise when someone advanced in years entered the room. In Leviticus we read: “You shall rise before the aged and show honour to the elder; you shall revere your God: I am the Eternal One” (Lev. 19:32). Those who have treaded this world before us were to us the ultimate repositories of wisdom, people to learn from and emulate; people we should aspire to become. Jean-Paul Sartre was nonetheless critical of this view when he once said:
There's one thing I've always thought... and that is the idea that you don't have experience, that you don't grow older. The slow accumulation of events and experience that gradually create a character is one of the myths of the late nineteenth century and of empiricism. I don't think it really exists. I don't have a life, an experience, behind me that I can turn into maxims, formulae, and ways of living. So since I don't believe that I possess experience, I am the same at close on seventy as I was at thirty, as long as my body functions (in La Ceremonie des Adieux by Simone de Beauvoir).
The reality is that nonetheless, as we age, we are posited in a special place, with a life’s legacy unfolded before us. We are greatly enriched by our lived-experience. Barbara Myerhoff, in her study of a Jewish old age home (Number our Days), writes about how we live facing a set of fundamentally moral oppositions: success or failure, joy or pain, independence or dependency, and continuity or disruption. Myerhoff adds that the poignancy of old age lies in its comprehending both poles of each of these oppositional frames. The lives of those she studies were characterised by momentous struggles for dignity, survival, autonomy, continuity, and joy within such an oppositional universe. To me the beauty of old age is that one is able to stand at the pinnacle of life and from there one can clearly regard the tensions and oppositions of life, equipped with the tools to make solid choices when they present themselves.
Simone de Beauvoir, in her masterful work La Vieillese (Coming of Age), sees the fear of age as a cultural phenomenon and seeks to give voice to a silenced class of human beings. We often tend to think badly of old age, to see ourselves as we advance in years as separated from society, as a burden, no longer productive. Our technocratic society tries to see in its incessant discoveries the knowledge of the past as obsolete. She finds that we face a hidden conspiracy in our society, where we subject ageing to the “silence of shame”. Old age becomes a taboo. De Beauvoir sees ageism as directly intertwined to sexism, both imbedded in the ideology and the language of Western culture. The disgust and the fear provoked by the female body in Western discourses are related to similar effects provoked by old bodies. She therefore calls for a complete “reform of society, a revolution”, where we give back to old age its rightful “pride.”
In Abraham, we clearly perceive such a pride, and perceive the course of days as a blessing to be cherished. Today in our synagogue, we appreciate the value of the passage of time. In the special blessing we have made to the forty years of marriage of Peter and Carol, we come to realise how each year that unfolds contributes to create an even deeper bond that becomes more complex, rich, and unbreakable by the moment. In celebrating 80 years of Tony’s life, we are marvelled by a long trajectory of service, of good deeds, family life and responsibilities fulfilled. Today, as a community, we stand at awe and welcome each year as it comes and turns us into more refined human beings.
We are proud of age…
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