Broken tablets and Practising wearing purple. Yom Kippur Sermon 2021
Zochreynu l’chayim melech chafetz b’chayim, Remember us for life, for you delight in life, inscribe us in the book of life, O God of Life….Remember us for well being, grant us this day continued life.
Our prayers on this most important of days focuses on life, we ask God to remember us for life, our Torah portion asks us to choose life and blessing. And yet, the rituals we do, the fasting, the lack of life nourishing water, abstaining from engaging with our bodies for 25hrs, the wearing of white like we do in death, all of this challenges us to look at that most difficult of things - the very end, death. On Rosh Hashana we sing the famous piyut Unetaneh Tokef - who shall live and who shall die, on Yom Kippur we dedicate a whole service to Yizkor - to remember our loved ones who have died. And throughout all of this, like a red thread we continuously implore Zochreinu l’chayim - ‘remember us for life’.
But thinking about death is difficult, it is hard, it is frightening. And so the liturgy tempers the harshness, and reminds us that the focus is not only on death but also on life. And this conversation about life and death is not only for Yom Kippur, the writer and doctor Atul Gawande’s book Being Mortal, has become a bestseller for a reason. He reminds us that;
Our ultimate goal, after all, is not a good death but a good life to the very end[1].”
The tension in our prayers and our rituals today are asking us, I think, to look at what it means to get older, rather than only trying to contemplate the very end. For aging is not only for the aged. Some studies suggest that life under Covid might have caused us all to age faster. We know anecdotally that many older people have ‘slowed down faster’ without daily activities and social contact. Though lockdown was experienced very differently depending on your job, your income and where you lived, we were all confronted with the same questions; what is a good life and what are the impacts on us as we grow older?
It is a conversation that we are having as a society right now - how do we relate to people in different stages of life, and how do we care for those who are aging and those who are less well or need greater care or support. The discussion is mainly framed in a financial and political context through Health and Social Care taxes and funding, but behind it lies a much deeper and elemental conversation about what dignity looks like, who is responsible for care and who should pay for it, should people have to face choices about the levels of care they can afford or should we all be entitled to the same?
There has been lots of discussion about the new tax for health and social care - taxing the young to pay for older people. It seems to almost be stoking a sense of us vs them between the generations. Is this right? Or fair? If we all have to lose a bit (to enable economic recovery/respond to financial pressures following the pandemic), how can we as a society do that fairly?
I don’t have the answers to these questions, I doubt many do, and today is not about that either. This day of days is about our own sense of what it means to age and our fear of what that might be like. It is about the humanity of aging.
And it isn’t all doom and gloom, nor is it particularly new. Whenever we approach a topic like this, I think we have to begin with a bit of irreverence and humour.
Warning
When I am an old woman I shall wear purple
With a red hat which doesn’t go, and doesn’t suit me.
And I shall spend my pension on brandy and summer gloves
And satin sandals, and say we’ve no money for butter.
I shall sit down on the pavement when I’m tired
And gobble up samples in shops and press alarm bells
And run my stick along the public railings
And make up for the sobriety of my youth.
I shall go out in my slippers in the rain
And pick flowers in other people’s gardens
And learn to spit.
You can wear terrible shirts and grow more fat
And eat three pounds of sausages at a go
Or only bread and pickle for a week
And hoard pens and pencils and beermats and things in boxes.
But now we must have clothes that keep us dry
And pay our rent and not swear in the street
And set a good example for the children.
We must have friends to dinner and read the papers.
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple[2].
This poem, Warning, which you probably recognise, was written by Jenny Joseph and is amongst the most popular post-war poems, in one BBC survey even beating Dylan Thomas’ “Do Not Go Gentle Into that Good Night.” It is the most well known of all Jenny Joseph’s work, and yet she wrote it not when she was 79 but 29.
It fits in with the times we are in right now, which Fran Lebowitz, the sardonic american writer terms as ‘the era of the old lady’[3]. Having turned 70 she and others like her, are finding that their work is more popular than ever. ‘The era of the old lady’. I think she is on to something, for there are now countless new books set in nursing homes and retirement villages, or following the lives of older residents, most notably Maud who is looking for her sister and her best friend in ‘Elizabeth is missing’, or Joyce, Elizabeth, Ibrahim and Ron in the ‘Thursday Murder Club’ who have to solve a murder right on their doorstep. Or my favourite character Florence who in ‘Three Things about Elsie’ is trying to figure out how a man that drowned more than 60 year ago has suddenly turned up at the Cherry Tree Home for the Elderly.
There’s a whole new genre of books where the protagonists are older, yet they are all written by younger people. They aren’t necessarily for older women, or older readers (they weren’t on any of the recommended reading lists for nursing homes that I could find). They are for all of us who either think about what it means to age, or have family members who are in nursing homes, supported living, or have daily carers. Exploring older age through a mystery is a way we can engage and perhaps try to learn about what it means to age, with a bit of intrigue thrown in.
We’re in the age of listening to older voices, about what it means to grow older, and as anyone who has seen Grace and Frankie or The Kominsky Method knows, growing old is not a child’s game. These shows reflect all the hilarious and difficult moments of growing older, showing the side of aging that no one talks about.
Many of us here today are aging ourselves, and/or have parents and grandparents who are aging. We may be battling hearing loss, memory loss, aching joints, stiff necks, and much more, either for ourselves or for our loved ones. More and more of us, or our relatives, are diagnosed with long term conditions, and more commonly with different forms of dementia.
“What was it I came for? The loaded shelves frown down at me as I circle them, and the blue and white linoleum stares up, dirty and cracked. My basket is empty, but I think I’ve been here for a while; Reg is watching me.
I reach for something: it’s heavier than I was expecting and my arm is pulled down suddenly with the weight. It’s a tin of peach slices. That’ll do. I put a few more tins in my basket, tucking its handles into the crook of my arm. The thin metal bars grind against my hip on the way to the counter.
‘Are you sure this is what you’re after?’ Reg asks. ‘Only you bought a lot of peach slices when you came in yesterday.’
I look down into the basket. Is that true? Did I really buy the same things yesterday? He coughs and I see a glint of amusement in his eyes.
‘Quite sure, thank you,’ I say, my voice firm. ‘If I want to buy peach slices, I can buy them.’”
It is heartbreaking to watch a loved one disappear into themselves, to see them slowly forget even the most basic words and concepts, whether it is the fictional Maud and her penchant for peach slices, or it is someone we know. I remember the moment we knew how advanced my grandmother's dementia was, when she animatedly tried to describe a fork, yet could not remember the word for it, but she knew that she had forgotten; the despair and fear on her face was heartbreaking. By the time she didn’t remember who we were anymore, at least she wasn’t aware of all the capabilities she had lost, (we hoped).
It is hard as a relative to know how to feel, let alone behave in these situations. We want to do what is best for them, and we might be finding our own lives being taken over with their needs. And yet it is equally easy to consign older people to a passive role, to speak across them, to forget that they were once strong, independent, and capable.
There’s a Jewish image that I find profoundly moving, and which can help us to remember their dignity, to help think differently about someone who is losing their memories, or their physical abilities; it involves the tablets of the Ten Commandments, rather than the words.
Show respect to an old man [person] who has forgotten his [their] learning through no fault of his [their] own, for we have learned that the fragments of the old tablets [of the Ten Commandments which Moses shattered] were kept alongside the new tablets in the Ark of the Covenant (BT Berakhot 8b).
The first set of the Ten Commandments which were broken by Moses in anger, were not assigned to the scrap heap, or repurposed, or ground to dust. Instead, the story tells us, they were kept alongside the whole tablets, in the Ark of the Covenant. Though they were broken, they were still sacred.
We live in a world where anything that is broken, chipped, too old, or faded is often gotten rid off. Anything or anyone without a clear purpose, who is not creating or making money, who does not have a job description are often not afforded attention. Those who might be slower, less able or less capable suffer the same fate. But we all have chips and cracks in our surface, and small parts of us get scuffed over time, we might even break or crack a bit. And yet, like the broken tablets as we age, we remain sacred. Whether we are broken intellectually, or physically we are reminded to accord all people the same respect as the whole tablets, we are tasked with continuing to see the sacred in them and in ourselves.
But aging is not only about the terrifying spectre of dementia and disease. That is one end of the spectrum. For those who are retired, semi retired, soon to be retired, life looks different. Some of it has to do with physical ageing, and other parts is about finding a new identity/new spiritual and philosophical job description so to speak. A wise older friend of mine put it this way: “The difference at our age is that death looms more definitely, it is less easy to put it on the backseat, death is part of older life. We deal with that by saying everyone morning: ‘how are we today, are we well enough to make it a day of life? and then we get on with it’”.
And then she gave a job description for the older generation; “There are younger people watching us, watching how we live, watching us to see the future, so let's give them a future to march toward with confidence”.
Young and old alike, we are so busy writing off anyone who is aging, or retired or both, that we miss an important point. At a time where six in 10 young people are extremely worried about climate change and their futures, where they say that “the future is frightening[4]”, maybe the role of older generations is, perhaps, to show how to cope in difficult circumstances, whether physical or intellectual, to help build a good life for all even when death looms more definitely.
Jenny Joseph finished her poem about being an older woman wearing purple clothes with a question;
But maybe I ought to practise a little now?
So people who know me are not too shocked and surprised
When suddenly I am old, and start to wear purple.
l
Perhaps we should all dare to practise a little ourselves now? To think about what it means to us to have a good life all the way to the end. For you never know when you might begin to wear purple.
L’chayim
[1] Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End
[2] Jenny Joseph from Selected Poems,(Bloodaxe, 1992)
[3] https://www.bbc.co.uk/sounds/play/m000z6rv
[4] Four in 10 young people fear having children due to climate crisis