“Our Annual Midlife Crisis”

Yom Kippur 5767/2006
Rabbi Schindler

This past summer, for the first time in my life, a birthday gave me pause. Six weeks ago, I turned forty years old. While it is not old, it is considered to be middle aged. In seeking wisdom on entering a new decade, I turned to Sid Cojac, the George Burns of Beth El for some advice. At the age of 92 he has experienced many milestone moments.

“Were any of your birthdays hard?” I asked him. “No,” he responded.

“Every birthday was a blessing. They may have made me move a little slower, but they always made me wiser.”

Even though Sid is a young 92, we know there must be challenges in growing older. The many jokes on aging hold more than a kernel of truth: You know you are getting old, when everything hurts. You know you are getting old, when the pharmacist has become your new best friend. You know you are getting old when you look for your glasses for half an hour, and then either forget what you were looking for or find that they were on your head the whole time. You know you are getting old when you have all the answers and no one asks the questions.

Another year has come and gone and we are all getting older. Tomorrow afternoon’s Torah portion teaches, “Mipinei sayvah takum, v’hadarta pnai zaken – you shall rise before the elderly and show respect for the old.” But in contrast to our Biblical commandment to honor those who are aging, our popular culture shuns the process. We are sold color for our hair and creams for our wrinkles so we can deny that reality. Plastic surgery, in its claim that it can remove the toll that time takes on our bodies, is a multi-billion dollar industry.

Judaism teaches that as we age, while our physical strength lessons, our spiritual strength increases. Each decade brings new and treasured gifts. It is for this reason that I was excited to turn forty. In Judaism, the age of forty promises wisdom. The forty days and nights Moses spent atop Mt. Sinai, gave him the deepest level of spirituality and the gift of Torah. The forty-year trek of our Israelite ancestors through the desert, gave us the faith to enter the Promised Land. And at forty, our tradition teaches, we are grounded enough to study the Kabbalah, the core text of Jewish mysticism. My hope is that during this 40th year of my life, I will be attain that wisdom, faith, and grounded-ness our tradition promises.

One of my seminary professors of medieval history, Dr. Michael Signor, taught that no one likes the middle anything: the Middle Ages between proud antiquity and enlightened modernity, the middle of our bodies that spreads more than we like to let on, or the middle of our lives, when mid-life crises are the norm.

These so-called “mid-life crises,” psychologists tell us, can begin anywhere from the age of forty to the mid—fifties and come with the realization that our lives are more than halfway over. The turning of decades jolts us into the reality of our mortality.

As Jews though, we need not worry about midlife crisis at the age of forty, or fifty, or even sixty, for we are fortunate to have a midlife crisis every single year. This day of Yom Kippur, is our annual midlife crisis, which forces us to take pause and ask the critical questions about our lives. On this day of Yom Kippur we ask ourselves how we need to change. On this day, we address the meaning of our lives. On this day, we confront our mortality.

Acknowledging that we need to change our course is difficult. An American warship was once doing a maneuver off the coast of Nova Scotia when on its radar screen it detected what appeared to be another vessel in its path. It sent a radio message to the ship. “This is the S.S. Goliath and we request that you veer your vessel five degrees to the south.

The reply was quick: “This is the Canadian Coastguard and we suggest that you veer your vessel five degrees to the north.”

The American ship responded with arrogance, “You probably did not understand. You are dealing with the American warship, the S.S. Goliath, and we demand that you veer your vessel five degrees to the South.”

To which the Canadians responded: “You probably did not understand. You are dealing with a lighthouse.”

There are times when we have no choice. If we do not change, our days will be diminished not only in length but in quality. Today, we need to be honest about the ways we fail to care for our bodies – by overeating, overworking, and neglecting to exercise, or how we fail to care our souls by neglecting those social and spiritual connections that sustain us.

Some of you may have had this experience, you run into an old friend and they look at you and say, “Wow, you haven’t changed at all.” But the reality is – that may not be a compliment. For on this day we yearn to grow and to change for the better – to change our health, to change those parts of our personalities we dislike, to change the insignificant ways in which we may spend our time.

Like Jonah running away from his mission and then turning back to follow God’s command, today is a day for realigning our priorities and committing to support those causes our faith demands: caring for our families, supporting our community, and healing the world in which we live.

One Charlottean named Frank Reed changed the direction of his life at the age of 44, leaving his successful company to become a full time volunteer. In being named Habitat for Humanity’s volunteer of the year, he explained “What I am and who I am is a result of good fortune. At some point I began asking, ‘Did God really shower this good fortune on me just to live a rich life?’ Someone once said: I’ve achieved success, now I’m trying to achieve significance.”

Achieving significance does not require money and does not require us to be a certain age for according to Judaism, each stage of our lives has meaningful task. Pirkei Avot, the wisdom of our second century sages, teaches that at age five we should begin our studies of Torah. At age thirteen we should take responsibility for our actions, for mitzvot. At twenty-one we must embark on a career. At age thirty, we are at the height of our strength. At forty we attain wisdom. At fifty we can give counsel. At sixty we are given deference as an elder. At seventy we are considered a sage and at eighty we are of heroic strength.

Yet each of these achievements does not happen by default. Wisdom does not just roll of our tongues as we blow out the seventy candles on our cake. To become a sage, we cannot start learning about Judaism at the age of five and leave the Torah behind at thirteen, just as we cannot one day receive a professional degree and the next day give away our books and discontinue reading research. Wisdom is gained only through years of struggling to learn and to understand. Fortunately for us, the doorways to each of the stages that our rabbis prescribe are always open.

“No matter what age we are,” Rabbi David Wolpe notes, “We never lose the potential to grow. Rabbi Akiba began to learn Judaism at the age of forty and became the most renowned of all Talmudic sages. Immanual Kant began his famous philosophical writings in his fifties. Grandma Moses began painting in her seventies.” Rabbi Miri Gold, the leader of our sister congregation in Israel, at my age of forty, had just begun rabbinical school. As similarly, Cantor Bernard began Cantorial School at age 41. We are never too old to learn something new.

The seniors of Beth El have taught me how great aging can be. While I am in no rush, I, for one, think retirement will be wonderful. Our younger years are consumed by the advancing of careers, the raising of children, or supporting of families. The older years are for appreciating the trees of our lives that we have nurtured to be solid and strong, for finally enjoying the fruits of our many, many years of labors. The older years are for engaging in passions we never had the time to pursue – study, art, travel, Torah.

That is why at Beth El, we have revived a program called SPICE - Special Programs of Interest or Concern to Elders. Recognizing that sixty is an age of vitality, we hope that all of you who are that age and older will join us on Wednesday for the first of our engaging and entertaining bi-weekly luncheon programs with food, music, poetry, study, provocative dialogue, and more.
A man named Joe Kemp, who was turning only thirty, yet feeling unsettled about growing older, asked his counterpart at the gym, who was seventy nine years old and in terrific shape what the best time was of his life. He answered:

When I was a child in Austria and everything was taken care of for me, and I was nurtured by my parents -- that was the best time of my life.

When I got my first job and had responsibilities and got paid for my efforts -- that was the best time of my life.

When I met my wife and fell in love -- that was the best time of my life.

The Second World War came and my wife and I had to flee Austria to save our lives. When we were together and safe on a ship bound for North America, that was the best time of my life.

When we came to Canada and started a family, that was the best time of my life

And now, I am seventy-nine years old. I have my health, I feel good and I am in love with my wife just as I was when we first met. This is the best time of my life.”

His message mirrors that of the German philosopher Goethe who taught that, “Nothing is worth more than this day.” We can make each age and each stage of our lives the best we have yet to live.

Yet, what about those times in which it is really hard to see the best: when our bodies begin to fail us, when our friends or family members or torn from our lives through death, when our resources are limited and we stay up nights worrying about our financial future.

As we age, milestone moments and holy days can become harder. Our children may be gone, we may find ourselves with fewer people with whom to celebrate.

To this, the experience of the renowned violinist Itzak Perlman can speak. It was 1995, when the world famous Perlman came on stage to give a concert at Avery Fisher Hall in New York City. Stricken by polio as a child with both of his legs in braces, just the walk onto the stage was a struggle. After Perlman painstakingly made his way to his seat, the conductor began. Yet after just the first two bars, one of the strings of Perlman’s violin broke. The snap could be heard across the auditorium.

Those in attendance expected him to painfully make his way off stage to find another violin or new string. Yet he did not. Instead Perlman signaled for the conductor to begin again and he played right where he had left off: modulating, changing, recomposing the piece in his head, so that he could play the symphonic work with just three rather than four strings.

As the piece concluded, the passionate standing ovation said it all. Wiping the sweat from his brow and taking a bow, Itzhak Perlman said in a quiet and pensive tone, “You know, sometimes it is the artist’s task to find out how much music you can still make with what you have left.”

That is the task. When life is hard, when loved ones have died, we need to make music with what we have. If, on this day, our lives are lives feel empty, we need to fill them with meaning. We need to take the notes we have been given and recompose them, making of our lives the symphonies we want them to be.

And finally, this day of Yom Kippur is for confronting our mortality.

A priest, a minister, and a rabbi were speaking at a symposium on death. Each of them was asked to consider the question: if you were lying in a coffin and people were looking at you, what would you like them to say about you?

The priest and minister spoke first. Each talked about how they would like the people looking at them to say that they were good men, men of virtue and that they performed their tasks on earth well, and that they left the world a better place.

Then it was the rabbi’s turn. “Let me get this straight,” he began. “I’m in a coffin and people are looking at me. What would I like them to say about me? I would like them to say – LOOK, HE’S MOVING.”

While we would all rather not die, this day has the goal of addressing our mortality. We stand before God, as if it were the end, with our deeds to speak for us. And we ask to be given more time: more time to write our legacy, to author through our actions our own autobiography.

Gail Sheehy, in her five hundred page tome on the passages of our lives, calls the age of sixty our time of integrity. The task for our final third of our life, she says, is for making the world better for the next generation.

But most of us will not live until we are ninety, and hence cannot wait until the final third of our lives to improve the world in which we live. We need to work towards that goal today. Even if we are high school students tired from our studies, young professionals working hard to start our careers, bleary eyed parents of infants, weary and worried parents of teenagers and young adults, or retired seniors, at each stage, we can work towards all the tasks of life: we can learn, we can grow and change, we can fill our days with meaning, and we can improve the world for those who will follow us.

What do I want someone to say about me when I have died? I want someone to say what my father once said about an old woman named Marion who died at the age of 103. He wrote that, “Marion taught us that growing old is a bad habit which a busy woman has no time to form. That nobody grows old merely by living a number of years; that people grow old only when they give up their idealism and their hope. She taught us that while the passing of years may wrinkle a person’s face, only cynicism and alienation can wrinkle her soul. And Marion’s soul was smooth until the very end.”

We plead on this day for God to write us in the book of life. We want to grow older. We want to age and we want to sage – to become wiser and more appreciative of life’s blessings with each passing year. “Gray hair is a crown of glory,” the Proverbs teach. We should proudly carry with us our physical signs of aging – for they are a blessing.

Tonight as confront our annual midlife crisis, we sit not with a therapist before us but with the prayer book, which like a magnifying mirror enables us to see both our blemishes and our beauty with more clarity.

On this most holy night of the year, may we find the direction we seek, filling our days with meaning and with wisdom. May we be blessed with length of days and with an ability to make beautiful music with lives that we have. And may the world be better, because we were here. Amen.