ELDERS AND INITIATION PART 4

You simply can’t be an elder without a beloved community.  I didn’t do justice to this simple but profoundly important point in Part 1.

The folks in my parsha class who are in their thirties and forties highlighted this point when they were asking if they were partly at fault for the lack of elders because they didn’t look for them. I would never say that they are at fault individually. If you are part of 2% of a population that can’t do something, look in the mirror.  But if 50% of our kids aren’t, for instance, reading on grade level, that’s a social failure.  The consequences are both individual and collective, and, if we want to solve the problem, we have to look at the social creation of it.  As a society, we lack beloved communities and we lack elders. These problems go together and, unfortunately, mutually reinforce each other is a vicious circle.

If you are not part of a beloved community, if you are as most of us are, socially isolated and too reliant on some version of a nuclear family on a deep level, then you won’t have elders.  From the perspective of a someone moving into chronological elderhood, I can only be an elder to a beloved community.

Ask yourself who are my beloved communities?  Don’t be ashamed if it is a really short list. For me, there is some sense of beloved community and being an elder with my local day school where I was the board president for something like 7 years.  There’s a sense of a beloved community with the earth based Jewish community I serve in California.  There’s a beloved community in which I am an elder with my business because we built an organization that was more than just a place to work and get paid so you could enjoy your leisure. There’s a beloved community in the parsha class I teach.

I am lucky that I have so many beloved communities; it’s more than many and more than I had say 15 years ago when I actually didn’t have any beloved communities.  There are too many people who have no or very limited beloved communities. 

That said, I still feel an enormous lacking.  I don’t pray with any of these communities (except I did during Sukkot with the California one).  I don’t eat with any of them, don’t raise food together, don’t laugh and watch as the young adults find their mates. I don’t go hiking with any of them, don’t dance with any of them, don’t have that sacred mix of working together, hanging out and doing deep work.