The gift of aging
24: 1 ‘And Abraham
was aged ((היה זקן,
well along in days and Hashem blessed him with everything’
The biggest battle of our age is not radical Islam, not a sinking
economy, and not cancer, but aging. We
are all in search of everlasting youth, and the great desire of man is to
conquer both death and the process that leads to it. However, it could be we are looking at it all
wrong. A midrashic source from this week’s
parsha on the verse above[i] says the following: Abraham did not age. He exclaimed to G-d:’ father and sons go to
one place and no one knows who to honor. And if you were to crown us with old age
people would know who to honor’. G-d
said to him, ‘you have asked for a good thing, and with you it will
start’. Prior to his time in the book
there was no old age and since Abraham stood up (and complained), G –d gave him old age as
it says, ‘And Abraham was aged’. Further, in a different
part of the midrash it says that ‘old age’ is a crown and beautiful thing. In our purview, beauty is associated with
youth and vigor. So why did Abraham feel
a lack without wrinkles and a white beard; what was he seeking?
The way to understand Abraham’s request is with
the following metaphor. Imagine if a
person worked out his whole life and his muscles never changed. That would be a cruel state of being- a person
has worked hard and has nothing to show for it.
That is what was behind Abraham’s request to G-d. Abraham’s whole life mission was to bring
holiness to the body, which is why circumcision began with him. He was
the first person to understand that spiritual enlightenment lay not with
meditative mantras on a mountain, but with real change in this world. And whenever a person wants to make a genuine
change in the world, it has to start at home first, with ourselves, which means
making the body into a vehicle that expresses soul.
After a life time of hard work
in making the body into an expression of the soul, Abraham complained to G-d
and said, ‘hey, I’ve been working hard my whole life and I have nothing to show
for it’. In response, G-d gave him a wizened
body: lines of wisdom and a face of care and compassion. Why is it that wisdom is associated with a
white head of hair and a white beard? Because
white is the idea of clarity, and the idea that the façade is not important,
rather what is behind it. The whiter a
person gets the more the inside is revealed.
It shows that what is driving life is not the body itself, as white is
actually associated with death, but
an inner light .
It is no surprise then that a beard in Hebrew is called a ‘זקן’ or ‘old
man’. The idea of a beard is that ideas
flow down from the head into the body.
Old age should reveal a lifetime of accomplishment in this area, where the ideas of the soul
slowly imprint on the body. Therefore, think twice next time you buy an
anti-wrinkle cream, as those wrinkles may be the product of the best type of
growth.
[i] the midrash is bothered by the words ‘היה זקן’. Why does the
verse have to tell us that he was an old man? We already know that he was past
one hundred years old
