A perfect footnote for the previous entry - from teenagers to the aged, a 90 year old Rabbi talks of the benefits of aging in the New York Times today
He distills 6 benefits:
1. Increased Tranquility. “You have achieved in old age what you have wanted to, if you are fortunate,” he said. The important battles have been waged, the decisions made. “You no longer have to do the pushing, the striving, the struggle.”
2. A kind of zen caring. "You don’t rush to quick action,” Rabbi Haberman explained. “You’re more likely to stop and think.” These days he’s hardly indifferent to the world’s problems, he added, but he’s less inclined to think he can solve them, or that they’re soluble at all.
3.“The art of submission.” Americans are activists by nature, but “more happens to us than we cause to happen,” he has found. “You have to accept the unalterable.”
4. Able to consider the possibility he’s wrong. He labeled “liberation from the compulsion to set everyone else straight.” He has loosened up since his more dogmatic youth.
5. Gratitude - “I’m more conscious of the little favors people do — the driver who stops and lets me cross the street, the newspaper man who brings my paper directly to the door,” Rabbi Haberman said. He feels more aware of humanity’s interconnectedness. “I am a zero by myself.”
6. Connectedness to Family and Community.
You can find the full version of his sermon here
Now if only we could figure all that out when we were teenagers, what extraordinary adults we might become!
undated picture of the Rabbi
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