Rabbi Charles P. Sherman
May 23, 2003
Women’s Secret for Successful Aging
I want to speak with you this evening about a subject which I believe is very important for every person here to think about. The question is: how do you age well? How do you maintain not only your physical strength, but your mental and spiritual agility as you grow older? This question has baffled scientists and gerontologists for many years. How come women seem to age so much better than men do? Why do women not only live longer than men do, but also seem to live better lives in their old age than men do? What is their secret? And, is it a secret that men can learn from?
I want to begin with this week’s Torah portion . The last chapter of the Book of Leviticus deals with the subject of vows. At the beginning of Leviticus 27, the Torah discusses a simple vow – to contribute a sum equivalent to the valuation of the donor. Now the amount to be contributed was determined by the age and sex of the person evaluated according to a fixed schedule. If it is a male, 20 to 60 years of age, then the equivalent valuation is 50 shekels of silver. But if it is a female, the equivalent is 30 shekels. If the person is from age 5 to 20 years, then it is 20 shekels for a male and 10 shekels for a female. And if the person is from one month to five years of age, for a male 5 shekels of silver and for a female 3 shekels of silver. But at the age of 60 years or over, the equivalent is 15 shekels in the case of a male and 10 shekels for a female.
Now our first reaction may be – Ah, the Bible discriminates! It says that a man’s worth is more than a woman’s. I do not really care to defend gender discrimination, but even today – two thousand plus years after these verses were written – even in this supposedly equalitarian society in which we live, all studies show that women still make less than men do for the same work. So before we point a finger at the Bible, we ought to take a long, hard look in the mirror and acknowledge how much gender discrimination still exists in our own world.
And let’s admit that there is a lot less justification for gender discrimination today than there was in biblical times. In those days, productivity was achieved primarily by means of physical strength. You earned your living by the strength of your body, and men were better at hunting or farming than women were. Therefore, men were economically more valuable than women were. Today, when productivity is achieved primarily by means of intelligence, how can we permit gender discrimination to continue? But, frankly, that is not the main point I want to make this evening.
What I would like us to recognize about this chart is that, according to the Torah, the value assigned to women declines more slowly than that of men after age 60. A woman’s worth goes down to one-third of what it was – from 30 shekels to 10 shekels; whereas a man’s value decreases to less than one-third of what it was – from 50 shekels to 15 shekels. Why should a woman in her old age maintain more of her original value than a man does?
If you analyze the percentages I put in the right-hand column, over 60-year old women are worth a higher percentage of what a man is worth than at any other age. Evidently, our Torah believes that old age takes a smaller toll on women’s strength than it does on men’s. If you think about it, you recognize that this is true not only in the time of the Bible, but in our own time as well. Women in their old age seem to do better than men do.
Let’s take the Bible first. Isaac is pictured in old age as weak and blind and unable to make good decisions. His children have to bring him food because he can no longer go hunting. But Rebecca, who as far as we know was not much younger than Isaac, is bright, cleaver, and decisive in her old age. She is able to make plans and to persuade her son to follow them. She is able to find a disguise for Jacob and to prepare a meal for him to bring to his father. Observe the difference between the two of them – Isaac is weak, feeble and blind; Rebecca is bright, active and clever.
Consider the difference between David and Bathsheba in their old ages. David is fragile and sickly; he shivers from cold and lies in his bed helpless and confused. But Bathsheba is able to concoct a whole plan by which to make sure that her son, Solomon, will inherit the throne instead of his rival. What a contrast there is between the two in their old age. David is weak and feeble; Bathsheba is physically and mentally agile. How come? How do we explain the difference between men and women in their old ages then and now?
If you want to consider now and you do not know personal examples, then I suggest that you visit the Kaiser Health Care Center or even Zarrow Manor which, thank God, our community is so fortunate to have. First of all, you see that there are at least three times as many women there as men because women live longer than men do; that is an established fact. But if you look at the difference between men and women who are there, with some exceptions, men are dull and listless. They sit at their tables silently, especially in the health care center. In some cases they have to be helped to eat their food. Whereas many women chat with each other as they eat. Some of the women, not all, are still vibrant and energetic.
Why? How come women evidently age so much better than men do? How come women not only live longer than men do, but seem to be more vigorous and more vibrant in their old age than men are?
Some of you may have read an excellent book by the late Barbara Myerhoff called “Number Our Days.” You recall that Myerhoff was an anthropologist. She earned her doctorate by studying Indians in a remote village somewhere in Mexico. But then she said to herself, “Why am I doing this? No matter how much I study them, I’m never going to be an Indian in Mexico. But if I’m lucky, some day I’m going to become an old Jewish woman in California, so why don’t I study old Jewish women in California and find out what I can learn about them.”
So she went to a senior citizen facility in Venice, California, and studied the people who lived there. This is what Barbara Myerhoff found. All of these women were either themselves immigrants from Eastern Europe or the daughters of immigrants who had come to this country from Eastern Europe. All of these women were mothers of children who were upwardly mobile and who were, therefore, either too busy or who lived too far away to come visit them very often or to pay their mothers much attention.
What Barbara Myerhoff learned from studying these women was that they were remarkably successful in filling their narrow and lonely lives with enough meaning to master the process of aging. She writes: “As a group, the men at the Center seemed more worn out and weary than the women were. The men were quieter, vaguer and sadder compared with the women. The men were isolated from each other and were overwhelmed by the women before whose greater numbers and more intense vitality they paled.”
One analyst responded to what Dr. Myerhoff observed this way. “I think that this difference between men and women and how to deal with the difficulties of old age has more to do with how they have spent their younger years than it does with biology. Meaning for men comes primarily from their role in the public sphere, where they labor to provide for their families and struggle to make an impact on the area in which they work. Therefore, when they leave that area – either by voluntary retirement or by being pushed out – when the arena in which they have worked and in which they have found the meaning of their lives either collapses or is abandoned, men very often feel a decline in their self-worth and in the meaning of their lives. Whereas women – at least until this generation, when women joined men in the workforce in large numbers for the first time – women derived their meaning from home and hearth. Women derived their meaning from nurturing, feeding, teaching and raising the members of their family. Since a woman’s sense of self-worth does not depend on conquering the world outside, they are therefore spared the rupture that the passage of time inflicts on their husbands when they have to give up their place in the world outside.”
As Barbara Myerhoff put it, “The folk saying ‘a woman’s work is never done’ is usually understood to mean that she has to work all day. But, it also applies to the continuity of her work over a lifetime. A woman’s work is never done – even in old age. A woman is needed at home even when she is no longer needed in the business.” And to be needed is a blessing; to be needed is what keeps depression and despair away; to be needed is what gives zest, purpose and meaning to life.”
Friends, our Talmud got it right many centuries ago when it said: “An old man in the house is a nuisance; an old woman in the house is a blessing.” To be needed is the key to having a good old age and women, in the past and still in the present, seem to be better at being needed at home than men are.
It appears that our generation is going to live longer than previous generations. More of us are going to have more years of retirement than the generations before us. Men and women will be retired from the businesses, the offices, the factories, the companies in which we now find our meaning. The question we need to think about – not just then, but now – is what will I do and who will I be when I no longer have an office to go to or employees to supervise or a profit and loss statement to read or a product to sell or service? What will I do and who will I be when that day comes when I no longer have a title and a place in the outside world? I think we need to consider and plan for that day now and not just when the gold watch and the retirement party arrive. Otherwise we shall become like some of the people whom I know who have retired and when they meet other people at social gatherings say to each other “And who did you used to be?” That is very sad – “who did you used to be?” – as if the meaning of their lives was only to be found in the past, in what they used to do.
The answer that Leviticus 27 and Barbara Myerhoff give us is a much wiser one. They may push you out of being the CEO of your company if they want to, but nobody can push you out of being a loving spouse as long as you have a wife to be with. They can retire you from being the Chief Financial Officer of your company if they want to, but they cannot retire you from being a loving father as long as you have a child to be a parent to. They can retire you and take away your sales route and your satchel of samples if they want to, but they cannot take away from you the joy of being a grandfather as long as you have a grandchild to relate to. Life can even retire us from being a care-giver and turn us instead into one who needs constant care – that sometimes happens to us when we grow old. But even when this happens, life cannot prevent us from being a grateful and appreciative person who makes the care-giver who helps us feel wanted, valued and appreciated – which is no small thing we can do for another human being, even when there is not much else we can still do.
Rabbi Jack Riemer says that he went to a funeral of a man who died four months short of his 96th birthday. By the time he died, this man was blind, deaf and hardly able to do very much. Yet Rabbi Riemer noticed that the young woman who took care of him sat up front in the first row together with members of the man’s family. There were tears glistening in her eyes. When the Rabbi asked her privately why, she said: because he always made me feel so good whenever I took care of him. Whenever I bathed him or fed him or gave him his medicine or dressed him, he always said “thank you.” Think of that. Even at a time when he was so nearly totally helpless, when he could hardly do anything for himself – this man was still able to do something for someone else. He was able to make someone else feel worthy, important, appreciated.
And that is the secret which women bring into old age – the secret that we men need to learn from them – that even when you can no longer be a captain of industry, a teacher, salesman, physician, attorney, accountant or mechanic, you can still be a husband and a father and a grandfather and an uncle and a care-giver at home. And even after that, when you have to be taken care of instead of being the care-giver, even then there are things you can do that are really important to do – like saying “thank you” – so that the person who takes care of you feels appreciated.
Let me conclude with a bracha, a blessing. We said it this evening and we say it every time we finish a book of the Torah. Perhaps we should also say it every time we finish a stage in the book of our lives. We said to each other chazak, chazak v’nitchazek – may you be strong, may I be strong, may we strengthen each other. Perhaps what it means is: may we each be physically, mentally and spiritually strong as we reach the next stage of our lives. May we strengthen each other in this next stage of our lives by sharing our needs and sharing our strengths, by helping others and letting others help us. Because whenever we help another human being, we give meaning to our own lives. Whenever we let another human being help us, as we will have to do in our old age, we therefore provide a source of meaning to them. To be needed is the key to having a good old age. May that secret be learned by the men who are here today, as well as by the women. Chazak, chazak v’nitchazek. Amen
This message is based on the writings of Rabbi Jack Riemer to whom I am sincerely grateful.
