Aging with soul: a pioneering rabbi helps people learn to love their elders - Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi - includes list of resources and quotes about the aging process

Vegetarian Times, Feb, 1997 by Karin Horgan Sullivan

In a large, airy hall hidden among the rural highways that criss-cross the Hudson Valley, more than 100 people are dancing to a song called "Body Parts." Following the singer's command, we move our knees, then our hips and then our shoulders. The music booms out of the loudspeakers, a combination of jungle sounds, clanging metal and thumping drumbeat. Warehouse-party music.

The people shimmying around me aren't the bunch of young hipsters in black that you might expect. Comfortable shoes and T-shirts are the fashion of choice for these folks, a good many of whom are grandparents. They've come here to the Omega Institute, a pastoral adult learning center in Rhinebeck, N.Y., for a five-day workshop called From Age-ing to Sage-ing: The Practice of Spiritual Eldering. With the exception of myself and a handful of others, everyone is at least 50, half the group is over 60 and a few participants are in their 80s.

This may not look like the avant garde, but the group gathered here is on the leading edge of a cultural movement to change the way we age. Certainly, these men and women are not the only ones grappling with what it means to grow older; with the first baby boomers turning 50 last year, it's become a generation-wide obsession. But the participants here are after a more transformative experience than that offered by the boomer model of keeping old age at arm's length with a busy program of physical and social activity. These seniors want to stay active, but they also want to learn to embrace their elder years, not back into them full of fear and anxiety.

Leading them in their quest is Rabbi Zalman Schachter-Shalomi, professor emeritus of religion at Temple University and founder of the Spiritual Eldering Institute in Philadelphia. Drawing on a background that includes studies with Sufi and Buddhist teachers, Native American elders, consciousness researchers and humanistic and transpersonal psychologists, the rabbi, 72, teaches people to harvest the wisdom they've unknowingly accumulated over a lifetime. "Many of us are rich without knowing it because we have not permitted ourselves to examine and take delight in the successes that we planted in the past," explains "Reb" Zalman, as he is affectionately known. "When we harvest our lives, we see that our work wasn't in vain; that our relationships have brought forth rich fruit; that our struggles for meaning and value have been worthwhile and that even our failures, stumblings and ill-conceived actions unwittingly have led to unexpected successes."

Reb Zalman believes old age offers greater opportunity for self-knowledge than any other stage in life, but he emphasizes that aging consciously is more than a self-serving endeavor. Essentially, what the rabbi calls for is reviving the tradition of tribal elders, sages who are revered not only because they are wise but also because they act as mentors, developing relationships with younger people and helping them to become fully realized human beings. "Once elders are restored to positions of leadership, they will function as wisdom-keepers," predicts Reb Zalman, "inspiring us to live by higher values that will help convert our throwaway lifestyle into a more sustainable, Earth-cherishing one."

DAY ONE

Before we can change the social order, though, we need to change ourselves. That's the premise behind "Approaching Eldering," an exercise we learn during the first day of the workshop, led by Shaya Isenberg, a member of the Spiritual Eldering Institute staff. (The rabbi, we're told, is "doing eldering work for the next half-hour." In this case, he's taking a nap.) Shaya poses a series of questions designed to help us sort out the positive and negative images each of us has about aging:

When I think about aging, what do I feel? What am I looking forward to? What do I fear? What negative images have I internalized, and where do they come from? What positive images have I internalized, and where do they come from? What's my image of the ideal elder? If I were my ideal elder, what would a typical day be like?

We partner up to exchange answers, and in the group session that follows, one woman stands up to say what a relief it was to share negative feelings that she had been keeping to herself. In general, though, most people say they're surprised to find they had more positive images than they had realized, and a number of these images -- surprising -- have to do with death. One woman talks about her feisty mother, who had a stroke and spent the next two weeks in the hospital. Her vital signs finally started to improve, but she told her daughter that she had decided she didn't want her life prolonged by artificial means and was ready to pass on if necessary. She asked her daughter to disconnect the respirator. Instead of trying to talk her mother out of it, the woman honored her desire; a short while later, she died. "I was happy she was in charge of life until the end," the daughter recalls.

Someone else brings up a point I had noticed in my own responses, that my negative images tend to be broad concepts generated by media and movies. Old people are feeble. Old people are lonely. Old people, especially men, must search hard for fulfillment after retirement. Positive images, on the other hand, center on specific people: My 82-year-old grandparents, side spry enough to cut the grass and paint the living room. Grandma Moses, who didn't start painting until she was 75 after having decided she was too old to continue farming but too young to retire. An elderly couple I encountered while traveling in Greece who toted around huge backpacks and practically gamboled up a rocky cliff, then sat calmly at the edge watching my husband and I gasp our way to the top.