The Future Is Old

A few years ago, as I was browsing the many books crowding the shelves of my parents’ house, I found a volume titled Your Best Is Good Enough: Aging Parents and Your Emotions that a social worker named Vivian E. Greenberg had published in 1989. My parents are not the kind of people who read self-help books, so it took me by surprise and also wrenched my heart a little. It was a silent witness to what my parents had gone through in the early 1990s, when their own parents were in their late seventies. They never talked about the difficulties that must have prompted them to get Greenberg’s book, and, as a teenager at the time, I had been completely oblivious to whatever was going on between my parents and grandparents. I quietly slipped the book into my bag without asking for permission. I certainly wasn’t going to say, “Hey, do you mind if I borrow your book about managing the emotional turmoil of your parents growing old?” As a daughter who lives 7,500 miles away from her parents and is only able to visit them once or twice a year, I took comfort in the idea that my best is good enough, although I am also acutely aware that it isn’t.

The book’s title reverberated in my head as I read and taught talmudic stories about relationships between adult children and their aging parents. These stories of old age are clustered around a discussion of the biblical obligation to honor one’s parents. The Talmud asserts unequivocally and repeatedly that when it comes to honoring your parents, your best absolutely isn’t good enough. The duty to honor one’s parents, the Rabbis insist, should know no boundaries. The Talmud goes so far as to compare honoring one’s parents to honoring God, and it provides illustrative anecdotes of pious individuals who came close to that ideal.

For example, one rabbi used to run toward his mother whenever he heard her footsteps, proclaiming, “The heavenly presence [shekhinah] is arriving!” Another rabbi would stand over his sleeping father with a cup of water for hours so that he could give it to him the minute he awoke. Another memorable account relates the somewhat disturbing daily routine of Rabbi Tarfon and his mother:

Every time Rabbi Tarfon’s mother wanted to climb into her bed, he would stoop down to let her up, and every time she would step out of her bed, she would step down onto him.

When Rabbi Tarfon was praising himself in the study house, his fellows said, “You have not even reached half the honor that is due to one’s parents. Did she ever throw your money into the sea in front of you, and you did not disgrace her?” (Kiddushin 31b)

Although perhaps somewhat immodest, Rabbi Tarfon—who literally lets his mother walk over him—really just wants to be told that his best is good enough. It isn’t, his colleagues tell him. The litmus test they propose makes the relationship between adult children and their parents a zero-sum game: The only way to be truly good to one’s parents is to accept treatment that borders on humiliation and abuse with equanimity.

The basic underlying assumption seems to be that the commandment to honor one’s parents is impossible to fulfill. Rabbi Yochanan expresses this tragic sense of inevitable failure bluntly: “Happy is he who never met his parents.” Since honoring one’s mother and father is a divine obligation that one can never properly meet, it would be better to be an orphan.

While I doubt that any late-twentieth-century readers of Your Best Is Good Enough let themselves be used as a footstool by their parents, they confronted the same issue that plagued Rabbi Tarfon. They weren’t sure what the appropriate standard of care for parents was. Greenberg describes the adult children who were her clients as bewildered: “They are lost in unfamiliar territory since they do not know what society expects of them or what they should expect from themselves.” A quarter of the way into the twenty-first century, we’re still bewildered.

I had always assumed that the move away from traditional ideals of filial piety was a result of growing individualism—of prioritizing one’s own well-being over that of others—but it turns out that it has at least as much to do with how we perceive old age itself.

The fifth commandment, “Honor your father and your mother, so that you may long endure on the land the Lord your God is assigning to you” (Ex. 20:12), is the only one of the Ten Commandments in which a reward is explicitly promised. This may not only be a divine reward but also a natural consequence of one’s actions: Those who honor their parents will be role models for their own children who will in turn honor them when they are old, thus allowing them to live long. The flip side of this is, of course, a tacit threat that those who do not properly care for their parents will have no one to care for them.

Old age often reverses the relation of dependency between parents and children. This reversal can take inoffensive forms—we help our parents download the new app, screw in a lightbulb, fix the back door—but it can also be psychologically devastating when, for instance, one has to help a parent with personal hygiene or take over as a full legal guardian. Nowadays, most of us associate this reversal with the kinds of physical and cognitive decline that often accompany old age; in the past, however, the dependence of aged parents on their adult children was first and foremost financial. It is probably not coincidental that Rabbi Tarfon’s colleagues used the example of a mother throwing her son’s money into the sea to describe the sacrifices required by filial piety. For most of history, aging parents who could no longer work were an inevitable financial drain on their children.

As James Chappel explains in his excellent recent book Golden Years: How Americans Invented and Reinvented Old Age, it was primarily a concern with the financial burden elderly parents placed on their children that led to the creation of the Social Security Act of 1935, the most important legislative act regarding old age in American history. While some attempts to advocate for government pensions had been made already since the 1890s, the Great Depression was a major catalyst for the Social Security Act, which guaranteed regular payments to Americans over sixty-five. Advocates of a national pension did not just restrict themselves to arguing for a financial safety net for the elderly; they were also concerned that when adults could barely support themselves and their children, the added burden of supporting older generations could only lead to animosity and resentment, which would tear at the social and moral fabric of the country.

In some respects, then, the first significant piece of American legislation to promote the welfare of elderly people was designed with their middle-aged children in mind. One of its main purposes was to protect the financial well-being of adult children who had young children of their own—“the sandwich generation” as they later came to be called—and thereby to protect the older generation from the indignity of being a burden.

That adult children may feel resentment and disdain toward their aging parents, which can sometimes lead to aggression and anger, is not a novel insight. In the course of its discussion of the obligation to honor one’s parents, the Talmud Yerushalmi comments that it is not enough for one to provide for all one’s parents’ physical needs; one must also treat them kindly. The Yerushalmi tells the story of a son who served his aged father “fattened hens,” that is, sumptuous food, but when the father tried to make conversation during the meal, the son snapped, “Shut up and eat, old man! Dogs are supposed to eat silently.” That son, the Yerushalmi assures us, will end up in hell regardless of what he gave his father. While the Yerushalmi’s story is an extreme case, we all know that the feeling of being impatient and exasperated with older parents is not restricted to the wicked. My father likes to repeat a saying in Yiddish that he had heard from his own father: Ikh hob zei gelernt reden, zei hoben mikh gelernt shtilen (I taught them to speak, they taught me to be quiet.)

The Talmud speaks only indirectly about the sense of belittlement, shame, and discomfort that aged parents themselves sometimes feel when cared for by their children—even when those children act reverently and with the best of intentions. The Yerushalmi contrasts the son who fed his father fattened hens with a miller’s son who, when the Roman army forcefully drafted millers, left his aged father to grind wheat at the millstone and reported for military service in his place. That son, we are told, will end up in heaven even though he imposed hard physical labor on his father since he did so out of concern for his father’s dignity. Such stories are concerned exclusively with children’s obligations to honor their parents, and therefore, they treat the parents almost as conduits for their children’s virtue rather than as individuals with their own thoughts and feelings. One wonders: Perhaps the father in the second story would have preferred military duty to walking in circles all day around a heavy millstone. Perhaps he would have wanted to make his own decisions rather than have his son decide for him.

The most radical way that old age was reinvented in American society in the twentieth century, and especially between the 1950s and 1970s, was in the repeated insistence on the autonomy and independence of the aged. As Chappel shows in Golden Years, in the earlier decades of the twentieth century, the aged were regarded as a uniquely vulnerable part of the population for which society as a whole must bear some responsibility. They were, in some respects, like children. In both cases, welfare policies came into place upon the realization that family members who were supposed to serve as caretakers were not always willing or able to do so.

After World War II, however, both advocates for the rights of older people and business entrepreneurs who identified a financial opportunity sought to rebrand old age as a time of vibrant activity, during which independent, healthy—and well-resourced—individuals made the most of life and continued to contribute to society, first and foremost as consumers. Old age shifted from being a time of dependence to a time of independence.The most important moral feature of old age was no longer the adult child’s ability and willingness to care for an aged parent; it was an old person’s ability to lead a full, productive, and satisfying life. Independence became a primary moral virtue of old age, and dependence on others was construed, in part, as failure. In the 1950s, “senior citizens” began to replace “the aged” as the common term for people over sixty-five, signaling the insistence that they were still full members of society.

This shift had to do with demographic changes—an increase in life expectancy as well as more overall wealth to go around—but, according to Chappel, it also had to do with the Cold War. The new ideal of American living—a house in the suburbs in which parents lived with their young children—was repeatedly positioned against the Communist model, in which grandparents huddled with their children and grandchildren in tiny, overcrowded, state-subsidized apartments. The three-generational household came to be seen as un-American, a relic of the old country, a failure of self-reliance.

The contrast between the ethos of elderly independence in the United States and the elderly dependence allegedly characteristic of Communist societies made me wonder about the place and perception of older people in the kibbutz. As a utopian and self-selecting social experiment, in the first decades of its formation the kibbutz consisted almost exclusively of very young people. This was not only because life in a kibbutz in the early twentieth century was extremely demanding, both physically and emotionally, but also because of an ideology of veneration of youth, guided by a vehement rejection of the “old” and “stagnant” world of parents and grandparents. Not only was old age scarcely seen in the kibbutz in the years of its formation; it was its anathema.

In 1923, Yitzhak Tabenkin, who would become one of the leaders of the kibbutz movement, made the point that there was something distorted and unnatural about a society that consisted only of young people. If the kibbutz were to continue this way, it was bound to become a “futureless society,” he said, and added, “A society that excludes old and frail individuals is no society at all.” Tabenkin could have been wondering whether it would be feasible for its current members to continue living in a kibbutz when they grew old. Along the lines of the implied threat of the fifth commandment, he may have been unsure how kibbutz members would be cared for in their old age if they never set a model of elder care for their own children. But it appears that Tabenkin was mainly concerned with the kibbutz’s aspiration to set a model for an ideal society. How could the kibbutz demonstrate that communal living protected and supported the weakest members of society if it did not include people in need of protection and support? In this regard, he was not so far from the talmudic framework in which the honoring of parents serves to build and assess the virtue of the children.

As it turned out, Tabenkin’s vision of a multigenerational kibbutz became a reality much sooner than anyone could have expected. With Hitler’s rise to power, many older people whose children had left Europe and settled in a kibbutz followed them—not because they were committed to a Zionist-socialist ideology but because the earth was burning under their feet.

In several kibbutzim, including Tabenkin’s kibbutz, Ein Harod, there were enough elderly parents who reunited with their children that separate living quarters were set up for them. The parents were even provided with their own synagogue and kosher kitchen (since, unlike their children, most of them were still observant). Elderly parents who were able to contribute to the kibbutz as, say, tailors or shoemakers, worked a few hours a day; those who could not, did not. On the face of it, this was a perfect realization of the socialist ideal of “from each according to their abilities, to each according to their needs.” But not all the elders were happy with this arrangement. They missed having their own households; they abhorred the feeling of dependence on the kibbutz and its institutions, a social setting that they had not really chosen and whose ideology they did not entirely subscribe to. Most of all, they felt like charity cases.

In his beautiful 1944 novel Ma’agalot (“Circles,” translated into English in 1950 as Young Hearts: A Novel of Modern Israel), Ein Harod member David Malets described an exchange between one of the elderly parents in the kibbutz and a young kibbutz member:

God forbid that I should blame you. You are good sons. You obey the commandment to live in the land of Israel. You honor your fathers and your mothers—you give us everything, even a synagogue. But the soul—you are wounding our souls. . . . Here the world is yours. You’re the builders and the owners of this world and we’re only guests at your table. The very table at which we eat is yours. And we haven’t the strength to make an outcry. We must even bless your work, because you are doing sacred work.

The elder’s sad words are surprisingly reminiscent of the story from the Yerushalmi about the son who feeds his father gourmet food but tells him to “shut up and eat.” In a society in which contributing to the collective is the highest ideal, being one who only receives and does not give is akin to being nothing.

More than seventy years later, Malets’s insight is still profoundly relevant, and not only to the kibbutz (which, for the most part, ceased to exist in its strict communal form in the 1990s). There are many predicaments that come with old age—physical and mental decline, the rapid loss of loved ones, sometimes financial anxiety—but none is as corrosive to one’s psyche as the feeling of not being needed.

A sense of self-worth is not inherently contingent on one’s ability to live independently. Rather, it has to do with the feeling that one still belongs in the world, that one is a desirable member of one’s family and community and not merely an obligation to be met. While as a society we are constantly finding ways to make people live longer, we have not quite figured out how to think of old people as anything other than socioeconomic and public health problems that need solutions.

It is tempting to think that once upon a time things were different, that in the historical past older people were revered for their wisdom, their judgments and opinions glowing with an almost sacred aura. However, even a cursory look at ancient texts reveals that this was never the case. Old age was always very much associated, as it is today, primarily with cognitive and physical decline. Older people were infantilized and belittled in the past as they often are today. In both ancient Greek and in Latin there is a maxim that says, “Elders are children a second time,” and in tractate Bava Kamma, Rava quotes a similar aphorism: “When we were young, they treated us like men; now that we are old, they treat us like toddlers.” There was, in rabbinic and other ancient cultures, an unattainable ethos of honoring one’s parents to the utmost, but it was probably mostly honored in the breach, and even when it was upheld, it evidently took a toll on parents and children alike.

Old people now live longer, have access to better medical care, and are more financially secure than ever in history. And yet there is one way in which, I think, ancient societies did have an advantage over us: They did not have all the answers (mortality is insoluble), but they spoke about old age openly and frankly.

Noting that by the year 2030 the number of Americans over sixty-five will surpass the number of those under eighteen, Chappel concludes his book with a surprising and seemingly counterintuitive observation: It is old people who are the future. Old people matter more than they ever have before, and a whole host of institutions, social structures, and cultural concepts will have to change radically to accommodate this fact. Perhaps we can find ways to think about this not only as a problem but also as an opportunity. To do so, we need to think as frankly as Rabbi Tarfon and his colleagues, even if we do not come to the same conclusions.