The Challenges of Aging

Like all of us, the patriarchs and matriarchs faced old age, death and the challenges of bringing meaning to life’s close. The parasha opens with the death of our matriarch, Sarah, and continues with the story of how our patriarch, Avraham faced the verities of old age. The rabbinic tradition, harnessed two different verses, one with reference to Sarah and one for Avraham, as inspiration for making these two heroes of the tradition models for how to contend with aging.

The parasha opens delineating the length of Sarah’s life in an unusual fashion:

And Sarah’s life was one hundred years and twenty years and seven years – the years of Sarah’s life. (Genesis 23:1)

The sages, always keen to latch on to when the Torah expresses itself in an unusual way, provided us with a famous interpretation:

“Sarah’s lifetime was one hundred years.” “The Lord knows the days of the faultless (temimim); their inheritance will last forever” (Psalms 37:18) – just as they are faultless, so their years are faultless: When twenty years old she was like a seven-year-old girl regarding beauty, and when a hundred years old she was like a twenty-year-old regarding sin. (Bereishit Rabbah 58:1, Theodore-Albeck ed. pp. 618-9)

This midrash, which draws an equivalency between the different periods of Sarah’s life provides a deeper message. It was not just that she preserved her youthful beauty or innocence throughout her life; she also preserved her youthful outlook, the joy and inquisitiveness of youth throughout her life. In other words, what made Sarah special, from the vantage point of this midrash, was that she did not think or act “old” when she got old! She never lost the inspiration of youth.

Avraham’s concern, after burying his beloved wife, was to find a wife for the son of his old age, Yitzhak. The Torah, before recounting this episode, tells us of Avraham:

And Avraham was old, advanced in years, and the Lord blessed Avraham in all things. (Genesis 24:1)

The sages are renowned for taking seeming redundancy in the Torah and elaborating on its significance. This midrash creates a rather colorful anecdote to explain why people grow old in appearance:

[Avraham said to God:] When I and my son enter a city, no one is capable of distinguishing between father and son.” [Since in those days] a man would live to be a hundred or two hundred years old without becoming old age. Said Avraham: “Master of the Universe, You must distinguish between father and son, and between young and old, so that the young will honor the elderly.” The Holy One, blessed be He said to him: “By your life, I will begin to distinguish with you.” [Abraham] went to sleep that night, and when he woke up in the morning, he saw that the hair of his head and beard had turned white. Avraham said to Him: “Master of the Universe,” he exclaimed, “You have made me an exemplar.” (No one would recognize the reason I became old!] The Holy One, blessed be He, replied: Thy hoary head is a crown of glory (Prov. 16:31), and it says elsewhere: And the beauty of men is the hoary head (ibid. 20:29). Hence, it is said: Abraham was old. (Tanhuma Hayei Sarah 1)

As I have noted, this midrash is etiological, namely, it explains the origins of a worldly phenomenon, but its message is actually quite deeper. Old age is not just a question of looks. With old age, hopefully comes worldly wisdom worthy of honor and respect from the young. Avraham pleaded with God to give a sign to the world so that other would recognize this.

In some sense, these two midrashim seem contradictory. One advises the elderly to retain their youth in old age while the other praises the qualities possessed by those who grow old. Such a paradox is quintessentially Jewish and intuitively, we know both are true.