Abraham Joshua Heschel on how to be old

And not be someone who does not dream anymore

Called “a truly great prophet” by Martin Luther King Jr., Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel was a professor of ethics and mysticism at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America from 1946 till he died in 1972. He had escaped from Warsaw and came to American in 1939, but had lost his mother and three sisters to the Nazis. He marched with Dr. King in the third Selma to Montgomery march. Among his many influential books were God in Search of Man, The Sabbath, and The Prophets. This is taken from “To Grow in Wisdom” in The Insecurity of Freedom: Essays on Human Existence.

How to save the old from despondency, despair? How to lend beauty to being old? How to regain the authenticity of old age?

Old age is a major challenge to the inner life; it takes both wisdom and strength not to succumb to it. According to all the standards we employ socially as well as privately, the aged person is condemned as inferior.

In terms of manpower he is a liability, a burden, a drain on our resources. Conditioned to operate as a machine for making and spending money, with all other relationships dependent upon its efficiency, the moment the machine is out of order and beyond repair, one begins to feel like a ghost without a sense of reality.

The aged may be described as a person who does not dream anymore, devoid of ambition, and living in fear of losing his status. Regarding himself as a person who has outlived his usefulness, he feels as if he had to apologize for being alive.

The tragedy is that old age comes upon us as a shock for which we are unprepared. If life is defined exclusively in terms of functions and activities, is it still worth living when these functions and activities are sharply curtailed?

The tragedy, I repeat, is that most of us are unprepared for old age. We know a great deal about what to do with things, even what to do with other people; we hardly know what to do with ourselves. We know how to act in public; we do not know what to do in privacy. Old age involves the problem of what to do with privacy.

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