wisdom of the elders – Feminism and Religion

Becoming the Elder I Hoped to Be by Rabbi Nadya Gross

I have always been old by association. My husband is nine years older than I am, and so for most of our life together I have lived a little ahead of my own age, attending to the questions of the next decade before I reached it. I never minded. In truth, I think I was born looking forward to growing old.

I grew up surrounded by elders who were accomplished and gifted people, men and women whose wisdom shaped the way I saw the world. Chief among them was my Savta, my grandmother. She initiated me into a Kabbalah tradition that had been passed down through her mother-line, from woman to woman, across generations. I watched her and I knew what I wanted: to grow up to be just like her, wise, kind, gifted, and fully present to the world as it is. With elders like her around me, aging never looked like something to fear. It looked like something to anticipate with joy.

In My End: My Beginning by Margot Van Sluytman

In my end is my beginning.
T. S. Eliot

This year two colleagues of mine died. And my heart roared. Tears aplenty accompanied me. Poet that I am. Word-lover. Image-seeker. Meaning-making-hound-dog. Doggedly seeking a place to plant myself so that the ache of these losses within the crucible in which I find myself grounded, honed, chiselled, challenged, challenging, writing, wording, rewording, sculpting relationship with my students, who are too my teachers, is soothed. By tiny shards. Soothed. And death finds home everywhere. In each nook. Cranny. Crevice. Concreted crenellation or grassy llano, there she be.

What research, I ask myself, can we do when the heart fails to cease its eking, leaking ache, and crushing sorrow? What academic skill need we birth, resurrect, divine in order to erase this over-whelming tsunami of acknowledging our finitude? Where to look? What book? What paper? What journal? To what podcast need we creep, crawl, scurry, bound, fling ourselves in order to quell brutal, blistering despair? Self-immolation cannot work, for too, too many teeming tears douse the flames.