Seating our elders at our tables - The Jewish Standard

“Rabbi, what’s the word from the outside?” I would get asked repeatedly by a dementia patient.

Every time I visited with that senior, she would ask me the same question: “Rabbi, what’s the word from the outside?” She had dementia, and while she recognized me, her awareness of her surroundings was limited. She hated where she lived, feeling trapped in a prison, saying so whenever she saw me. At other times, she’d greet me joyously and say, “Rabbi, it’s so good you’re here. We need you, you know.”

As a rabbi, I’ve spent quite a bit of time with seniors. In nursing homes I’ve met with elders individually and in groups for classes and holiday programming. I’ve visited older adults who have just made the transition to long-term facilities like nursing homes, seniors who arrive for short-term rehabilitative care, and those who arrive at hospice, most mindful of life’s end. Undoubtedly, I’ve encountered those whose minds are no longer as sharp or are actively deteriorating.

The quality of care elders receive relies significantly on what resources these elders or their families have at their disposal. Still, we live in an age that yearns for youth, intoxicated by innovation, obsessed with optimization, enthralled by whatever is newest and fastest.

I find this tenor around aging painfully out of step with Jewish ethical standards.

The Torah emphatically states, “You shall rise before the aged and show deference to the old and you shall fear your God.” Not admire from afar. Not post about. Rise. Rearrange your posture. Disrupt your momentum. The elder who repeats herself, who forgets your name, who asks again and again for “the word from the outside,” is not an inconvenience to be managed but a presence to be encountered. This is not just a social courtesy — it’s a religious obligation tied directly to reverence for God.

Aging is natural and inevitable. When we avoid conversations about loss, grief, and dying, we do not protect ourselves; we impoverish ourselves. The Torah’s vision of dying “full of days” is not naïve about decline. Isaac’s dim eyes, Jacob’s hard years — these are part of the story. But so too is the possibility of completion, of blessing, of inner peace. Our task is not to deny the tremors that dementia sends through our narratives of a life well-lived. Our task is to widen the narrative so that dignity does not depend on memory, and holiness does not evaporate with cognition. To be a person of faith in this time is to look squarely at fragility — planetary and personal — and to respond not with retreat but with resolve. We rise before the aged not only because the Torah commands it, but because in doing so we practice rising to our better selves.

The isolation many seniors endure is not inevitable; it is constructed — and therefore can be dismantled. Intergenerational gatherings, shared melodies, classrooms that pair teenagers with residents of nursing homes — these are not quaint programs but sacred interventions. They challenge the lie that worth is tethered to youth. They teach our children that wrinkles are not symbols of obsolescence but cartographies of survival. If aging is the oldest plight on the planet, then it is also the most universal bridge among us.

If I have learned anything from my time sitting beside hospital beds and folding chairs in rec rooms that smell faintly of antiseptic and overcooked vegetables, it is this: the measure of a society is revealed in how it speaks to those who can no longer shout back but in the quiet still voice that asks repeatedly, “what’s the word from outside?”

Human suffering seems to increase as much as AI grows but the soul strains for connection, always. To be a person of faith in the 21st century is to accept the calamitous condition of our planet as real while simultaneously not raising our hands in shrunken exasperation. The environmental, political, and religious challenges of our time are unparalleled and deserve to be acknowledged as such. But despair has never been a Jewish virtue. Collective responsibility is.

“The Merciful One demands the heart,” the rabbis of the Talmud asserted, inviting us into our feelings, whatever they may be. And yet, as the rabbis of the Mishna reminded us thousands of years ago: “You are not obligated to complete the task, nor are you free to desist from it altogether.”

Each spring, as we sit at our Passover seder, we retell a story that insists our people were saved from bondage — that even in haste and uncertainty, we carry our elders with us out of narrow places. It is a narrative not only of liberation, but of memory, presence, and obligation across generations.

Rabbi Avram Mlotek is a founder of Base Hillel. He grew up in Teaneck, where his parents, Debbie and Zalmen, still live.

Opinion

comments