Jewish Visions for Aging

Jewish Visions for Aging
by Rabbi Dayle Friedman. Jewish Lights Publishing.

Reviewed by Allan Gould


A common advertisement for amusement parks and the occasional movie went like this: “FUN FOR ALL KIDS FROM 8 TO 80!” A rather ageist line, when you think about it (how dare anyone condescend to our elderly as “kids”?), so let me twist the phrase in the spirit of a lovely, meaningful, powerful new book by Rabbi Dayle Friedman, Jewish Visions for Aging (“A Professional Guide for Fostering Wholeness”):
“VITAL FOR ALL FAMILY MEMBERS AND LOVED ONES OF JEWISH MEN AND WOMEN BETWEEN 70 AND 120!”

We are all witnessing an extraordinary shift in world demographics: fewer childhood deaths, and men and women living longer than ever before. Perhaps surprisingly, the Jews are leading the way “[A]t least 19 percent of U.S. Jews are sixty-five years of age or older, compared with 12 percent of Americans in general. This growth of the Jewish aging population is seen even more vividly in the fact that 23 percent of American Jews (1.19 million) were already over sixty years of age even before the first baby boomers reached that milestone. Moreover, those seventy-five and older comprise half of Jews over sixty-five, and this is the fastest growing segment of the Jewish population.”

This is not a book about demographics, of course, but a profoundly insightful and deeply Jewish recognition that “The longevity revolution creates the possibility of both extended years of healthy living and prolonged periods of frailty and dependency at life’s end. These interrelated realities create unprecedented opportunities and challenges; they are both part of the new face of Jewish aging.”

Judaism, as we all know, has much to say about almost everything in our lives, from faith to food, from how to treat strangers to how to treat the elderly. This wonderful book is an essential look at both the scholarly (what did the rabbis say about growing older?) and the practical (“The proclamation of Jewish faith calls us to listen with reverence to the sacred stories of another person’s life, and to listen especially for the presence of Oneness”—the latter the first point from a remarkable list, “Ten Jewish Tools for Responding to Caregivers’ Spiritual Needs.”) Who of us has not seen a grandparent or a parent unhappily shipped off to a nursing home; sink into Alzheimer’s; suffer the daily, even hourly indignities of losing control of their bodies and minds? Our extraordinary religion has so much to say about this—and, because the author, Rabbi Friedman, worked with the elderly for years as a social worker and is the founding director of Hiddur: The Center for Aging and Judaism of the Reconstructionist Rabbinical College, she knows more than most the fundamentals for anyone in contact with our rapidly-aging Jews, from their nurses to family members.

Jewish Visions for Aging is not only filled with moving rabbinical stories and admonitions on treating the elderly with kavod (honour), but with dozens of exquisite anecdotes of how much our aging loved ones long for companionship, respect, and often spiritual connection with their community and God. (And this is not only relevant for Jews: how good to discover in a footnote that there is a website and blog called “forgetmemory.org” which reflects on the possibility for quality of life amid memory loss.)

Let the last words of this review be the last words of this indispensable book, which Rabbi Friedman calls “My Prayer”: “May we all work to realize these old and new visions of aging. May we both fulfill and experience the promise of the psalmist, ‘I will satisfy [you] with length of days; enable [you] to experience My salvation.’”