Old and Older

News from North Dakota rarely makes headlines in New York, but last week we had an exception to that general rule when a majority of voters there voted to make it illegal for individuals to run for congressional office in that state if they will turn 81 before the end of the year before their term ends.

Why such a measure should be legal in the first place eludes me: it seems to me that, in a true democracy, citizens should be permitted to cast their ballots for whomever they wish without any artificial barriers set in place to prevent them from doing so. Of course, that opinion puts me out of sync with lots of our nation’s laws, for example those that require members of the House to be over twenty-five, members of the Senate to be over thirty, and the President to be thirty-five years of age or older. Nor are these instances of latter-day legislation that would have been foreign to the nation’s Founders: all these requirements are enshrined in the Constitution (click here, here, and here to read the texts), and so constitute restrictions to free and unfettered voting that could not even imaginably be set aside at all, let alone dispensed with easily or casually. But there are no upper limits, not in the Constitution and not at all (except now in North Dakota), to the age of candidates. Similarly, all fifty states (including North Dakota) have at least some lower, but not upper, limits on individuals who wish to run for state-wide office. Some of these are a bit surprising—the citizens of California, Ohio, Rhode Island, Vermont, and Wisconsin, for example, can elect a teenager to be their governor as long as the candidate is at least eighteen years of age—but most are mostly what you’d expect. (To see a full table of minimum age limits for state-wide office in our country, click here.) Vermont is, and by far, the most liberal: there are no age limits on any state office other than the requirement that the governor be at least eighteen.

As far as I can tell, the basic principle seems to be that the Founders thought that it would be dangerous to elect someone to a federal or state-wide office who is too young successfully to bear the burden that comes with that position. On the other hand, the parallel thought—that a candidate could conceivably be too old successfully to serve—seems not to be part of our national culture. Until this week’s vote in North Dakota, that is. Of course, given the 1995 decision of the Supreme Court specifically denying states the right to set age restrictions for public office other than those mentioned in the Constitution, the new law in that state will certainly be tested in the courts. Still, it’s the idea itself I’d like to use this space this week to think through, the notion that individuals, regardless of their actual mental acuity, level of insight, or professional experience, can simply be too old to serve in the Congress. Or, by extension, in any elected position if a state passes legislation to that effect.

Given the fact that it is inconsonant with the Supreme Court decision mentioned above, this new law in North Dakota was destined to be contentious anyway. But how much the more so is it going to be a hot-button issue—in North Dakota and in the other forty-nine states as well—given the degree to which the age of the presumptive candidates for President is clearly going to be an issue in the months leading up to Election Day and is already such an issue. President Biden, as everybody who ever reads a newspaper knows, is eighty-one years old. At seventy-eight, Donald J. Trump is roughly the same age. There are surely lots of surprises still to come in the months leading up to the election, but it will come as a surprise to no one at all that the age of both candidates is going to be discussed endlessly. And all of that talk is going to be about the supposition that there is such a thing as being too old to serve effectively—and that that supposition is rooted specifically in the age of the candidates and not in their level of ability, skill, or talent. 

The whole concept of being too old to serve is—at least from a classical point of view—a strange one. Scripture—and particularly in the Book of Proverbs—could not be clearer that old age is not a curse that devolves upon the elderly as punishment for having lived too long, but rather a blessing and a reward. Nor is it difficult to justify that concept of old age as a blessing because the older people become, the more likely they are to have entire lifetimes of experience guiding them forward, as well as a lifetimes of learning, lifetimes of interacting with others, and lifetimes of making mistakes and learning from them. In other words, the idea that merely passing a certain age means ipso facto that one is no longer fit to lead could not possibly be less in sync with our classical sources. And yet that is the law in North Dakota as of last week!

Consider, for example, the famous verse in Proverbs (16:31) that remarks that silver hair, instead of being something to be feared or regretted as a sign of decline, is to be acclaimed as “a crown of glory.” The word for “silver hair” in that verse, seivah, should be familiar to students of Torah as well: in one of its most famous passages, Leviticus depicts God as commanding the faithful Israelite to rise before the silver-haired individual, the seivah, and then continues on to command as well that the faithful show the deepest respect to the elderly as an expression of their wish to be seen as God-fearing people.  Read in each other’s light, these two passages have a clear and specific lesson to teach: with age can come wisdom, insight, and an enhanced ability to lead well…and that turning away from such people merely because of their age is counterproductive, even self-destructive, behavior. Youth is impetuousness, whereas old age is deliberation and thoughtfulness . Youth is eagerness, whereas old age is reticence. Youth is self-absorbed, whereas old age is focused—if the individual in question has spent the years of a life acquiring wisdom—on the public weal, on the good of society, on the needs of others. Youth is worry rooted in anxiety, whereas old age is calm born of resignation and acceptance. Obviously, not every old person falls into that category. Neither does every young person. But the idea that some specific individual should be disqualified for public service solely because he or she has reached a certain age—that idea should be anathema for people who seek to be led by the wise rather the reckless.

In ancient times, great philosophers wrote whole books about the merits and virtues of old age. Of them all, the one that seems the most on point to read or reread during this presidential election would be Cicero’s short (but truly great) work, On Old Age. You can read the whole thing in a very readable English translation by clicking here,  or, for just a few dollars, you can buy the still-very-readable translation of Evelyn Shuckbergh, a scholar of classical literature who lived in the second half of the nineteenth century. (An earlier translation by one James Logan was actually published by Benjamin Franklin, thus making it the first classical text to be published in translation in North America.) In his work, written just a year before his death, Cicero discusses the gifts and troubles that the aging process brings along in its inevitable wake to all who survive their own youths. His comments are trenchant and more than accessible. As a result, there are lots of passages to consider, but I’d like to offer here just one that is specifically concerned with the relationship between old age and the ability to lead well:

Those who allege that old age is devoid of useful activity are like those who would say that the pilot does nothing in the sailing of his ship, because, while others are climbing the masts, or running about the gangways, or working at the pumps, he sits quietly in the stern and simply holds the tiller. He may not be doing what younger members of the crew are doing, but what he does is better and much more important. It is not by muscle, speed, or physical dexterity that great things are achieved, but by reflection, force of character, and judgment; in these qualities old age is usually not poorer, but is even richer.

Is Joe Biden too old to be our President? Is Donald Trump, only a few years his junior? In my opinion, the question itself should be shelved. Obviously, old age brings some early-onset senescence and its attendant incapacity. But there are others whose older years feature insights born of experience and wisdom rooted in a lifetime of learning from others. Supposing that Joseph Biden and Donald Trump are their respective parties’ nominees, the decision whom to choose should be rooted in their policies, their experience, and their character. The question of age, and specifically when considered independent of ability, should be deemed wholly irrelevant.

The Southern Border

The current presidential campaign has already been characterized by an amazing amount of obfuscatory rhetoric, confusing policy zigzags, and inconsistent argumentation—and we are still almost five months away from the actual election and, other than Robert F. Kennedy, Jr., there still aren’t any actual candidates out there, by which I mean candidates formally nominated by their parties to run for the office of President. Nonetheless, and barring the kind of catastrophe that in our gun-crazed society can never really be ruled out, we all know that the next president of the United States is going to be one of two individuals. And neither is Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

For me and for many, the ultimate decision about how to cast my ballot will have to do with the candidates record on supporting Israel, and particularly during the war in Gaza that has lasted now for well over 200 days. I suppose that won’t surprise anyone at all among my readers, since I have basically been writing ever since October 7 solely about issues relating to Israel, and particularly to the events of that horrific day and their aftermath in Israel and around the world (and particularly on American college campuses). But there are other issues to consider. And today I’d like to write about one of them.

Americans like to reference their country—our country—as a nation of immigrants, a phrase made famous by then-Senator John F. Kennedy as the title of his 1958 book on the topic. And, for all it has gone out of fashion (to put it mildly) to celebrate our country as one founded and populated by colonialist settlers from other lands who—other than to massacre them or herd them onto reservations—mostly ignored the presence of native people in this place who surely thought of the land our nation occupies as their own, the reality remains in place that our nation’s Founders were either immigrants or the descendants of immigrants, which could also be said of the vast majority of American citizens today. (To refer to the enslaved ancestors of today’s Black Americans as “immigrants” seems both offensive and ridiculous, even grotesque. But, horrific though their story may be, they too came here from somewhere else.) And that truth—that, for better or worse, we actually are a nation of immigrants, just as JFK put it in his book—is at the core of our current issues with immigration.

In other words, President Biden’s decision to issue an executive order earlier this month closing the southern border when our officials are literally overwhelmed by a surge of would-be immigrants seeking to cross the border illegally needs to be evaluated in its historical sense as well as its political one.

The order itself feels almost banal. Targeting only people attempting to cross the border illegally, the order decrees that the border be closed once the average of such people trying to cross into the United States in a seven-day period exceeds 2,500 a day, and only re-opened after that figure drops to 1,500 for seven consecutive days and stays at that number or less for a two-week period. But nothing about our immigration policy is ever that simple. But between the two obvious response-positions—the one wondering why any illegal immigration should be tolerated at all  and the other wondering how a “nation of immigrants” can deny safe haven in this place to any newcomers at all when almost all Americans are personally descended from people who sought safe haven in this place themselves—between those two extremist positions there should be a middle-ground approach that features both charity for the desperate and respect for the law. Complicating all of this, of course, is the nightmarish images that still haunt the American psyche of children being ripped from their parents’ arms just a few years ago, an unbelievable 1,200 of whom have still not been reunited with their families. (For the government’s own avowal of that figure, click here.) For Jewish Americans, of course, it is impossible to contemplate the image of children—any children at all—being dragged away from their families and then forced somehow to survive on their own, or at least without their parents, without evoking the most horrific Shoah memories. And I suppose that is also the case for a large number of non-Jewish Americans as well.

Another part of this, and surely not just for Jewish Americans, is the challenge of setting the whole concept of barring the desperate or the eager from entering our country in its historical context. And that is  a long, complicated story.

We can start with the Page Act of 1875, which had as its specific point, to quote its sponsor in the House, one Horace Page (R-California), “to end the danger of cheap Chinese labor and immoral Chinese women” by making it illegal for Chinese women to immigrate to the United States. And then, seven years later, the Chinese Exclusion Act of 1882 made it illegal for any Chinese laborers, male or female, to enter the United States.

The Immigration Act of 1917 went a step further still, barring all immigration from Pacific Island nations and from the Far East, but also imposing literacy tests on would-be immigrants as well as creating for the first time categories of people to whom immigration was to be denied without respect to national origin. The sanitized expressions “mentally defective individuals” and  “persons with constitutional psychopathic inferiority” were used to deny openly gay people the possibility of entry, along with undesirable “illiterates, imbeciles, insane persons, and paupers.” But it was the Immigration Act of 1924, framed in its day as a mere extension of the earlier act, that for the first time established immigration quotas. Formally, the idea was to restrict immigration to a number equivalent to 2% of the number of Americans who claimed that nation as their ancestral home in the 1890 census. Why it was deemed desirable at all, let alone crucial, for the ethnic balance of the populace to be maintained by law is a good question. But it’s not that relevant a one, because the real purpose of the Act was to keep out Italians, Greeks, Poles, and (I can’t help thinking especially) Eastern European Jews, all of which groups were coming here in numbers that far exceeded the percentage of the population that was already occupied by people of that heritage or national origin. I hardly have to pause to note what happened to those Jews who would have come here to start new lives, but who were instead condemned to be present when the Nazis occupied their homelands. Nor do I have to say out loud that this specifically is the baggage Jewish Americans bring to this debate, that sense that millions died because of an act of Congress inspired by the xenophobic and anti-Semitic desire to preserve the nation’s religious and ethnic mosaic in the future precisely as it had been in the past.

And then there is the counter-narrative, the one that finds it reasonable for the great statue of Lady Liberty in New York Harbor to have on its base engraved the words of Emma Lazarus’s “The Great Colossus,” which poem was actually written in the first place to raise the funds necessary to construct the pedestal atop which the statue would eventually be set. This is my personal way into the debate because I have truly loved that poem ever since I was obliged to learn it by heart as a student in Mrs. Gilbert’s sixth-grade class at P.S. 196. And it was the poet’s description of the statue as “a mighty woman with a torch, whose flame is the imprisoned lightning and her name the Mother of Exiles” that was the most resonant with me because my people came here fleeing persecution from towns in Poland and Belarus in which, as far as I know, no Jews at all survived the Nazi occupation. And the rest of the poem spoke equally directly to the young me. When I read that “from her beacon-hand glows world-wide welcome,” I imagined the three of my foreign-born grandparents passing through Ellis Island and wondering what fate awaited them here. And when the poet imagined Lady Liberty herself addressing the decaying lands of the Old World and imploring them to send to us “your tired, your poor,” your homeless and tempest-tost, and that they would be welcomed by Lady Liberty herself, on duty 24/7 holding aloft her “lamp beside the golden door,” I felt that the values embedded in those words were precisely what made America great.

So was President Biden protecting our nation with his executive order or betraying our core values of inclusivity, tolerance, hospitality, and empathy? I suppose we shall find out soon enough. If this really is just a way to keep the authorities from being overwhelmed with desperate people eager to find a safe, prosperous place in which to raise their children, then it’s hard to find a good reason to be opposed: surely, no good can come from the system in place breaking down and ceasing to function well or at all. But, in the end, if this is really a way to close the border precisely to the people Emma Lazarus had in mind when she composed her poem, then it’s hard to feel sanguine about the nation’s future. Consider the poet’s words, “From her beacon-hand / glows world-wide welcome; her mild eyes command / the air-bridged harbor that twin cities frame.” In Emma Lazarus’s day, the twin cities were New York and Brooklyn. But although Brooklyn has been part of New York City since 1898, the poet’s sentiments are no less relevant today than they were when she wrote the poem fifteen years before the expansion of New York City from just Manhattan to the city it is today and defined, at least for me, what the most basic of all American values was to her and should be for us all.  

Dancing in the Moonlight

There are so many things in my heart following this crazy rollercoaster of a week that began with the death of my dear father-in-law last Wednesday and continued through his funeral on Thursday, my return to New York without Joan on Friday, our beautiful musical Shabbat on Friday evening, the remarkable Shabbat morning service featuring remarks by Rabbi Carl Perkins (my friend of many, many years), the Gold Plate Dinner itself on Sunday, Joan’s return to Long Island on Monday, and the next few days of shiva observance in our home. You could say it’s been a busy week!

Any one of the above could turn into a blog post in its own right. But I thought I’d write this week not about any of it but about all of all, about the experience of knitting so many discordant themes and diverse obligations and opportunities into a coherent whole. Because, in the end, isn’t that what life itself is like, only just not usually quite that concentrated? We dance through the years of our lives, after all, and, as the music changes to suit the occasion, we dance differently: slower or faster, in our partner’s arms or merely facing each other, in step with the other couples on the dance floor or fully on our own and without reference to anyone else. But, at least for as long as we can, we keep dancing. When the pace actually gets a bit dizzying, as happened to me this last week, we finally force ourselves to take note of what we’re doing. But most of the time, we’re too pre-occupied for that kind of focused introspection and we just keep on keepin’ on, twirlin’ and swirlin’ to the music, happy still to be standing, still to be moving, still to be dancing in the moonlight.  (Just for the record, “Dancing in the Moonlight” by King Harvest was my favorite record of 1972, the year I left for my junior year of university in France. I knew you’d all want to know that.) And the music is always there, always audible, always present—just usually in the background. And then something happens—sometimes a single event, but other times a strange concatenation of unrelated events—and suddenly, almost out of the blue, there we are in the moonlight as the world falls away and we are suddenly on the dance floor all by ourselves.

That’s what this last week was like.

Since I mentioned one of my favorite songs from my college years, I’ll also mention one of my favorite books, The Wisdom of Insecurity by Alan Watts. Watts, now forgotten by most, was a remarkable and well-known figure in his day and a great author. The child of devout Anglican parents, he eventually forsook Christianity to become a Buddhist monk, then went on to write any number of books I treasured as a young person. Of them all, however, The Wisdom of Insecurity is the one that had the greatest effect on me. He begins by observing that, just like people, animals also age as they pass through the years. They get older, then sicker, then weaker. And eventually they die, just as do we all. But the difference between animals and people is that, whereas we are consumed with anxiety about all of it (by which I mean: the aging process, the possibility of illness, the fear of incapacity, the opacity of death itself and our inability to see past it other than in our mostly made-up fantasies, the whole concept of growing more frail and less hale as we age, etc.), animals don’t seem to worry at all about following the natural trajectory of their lives. In fact, they seem far better at facing it all than any of us is. And so, as they become less strong and less able, they just move through those stages of their lives the way they’ve already moved through the earlier ones, possibly even not noticing the diminution of ability as it devolves upon them, and simply growing into new version of themselves without seeming to find that concept upsetting or off-putting. Growth, they appear wordlessly to be saying, may not be always positive, but it is invariably normal.

And so is the anxiety growth naturally engenders. In his book, Watts teaches that the insecurity that the aging process engenders in all of us is not a bad thing and certainly not something to try to deny or avoid. There is, he wrote, great wisdom in insecurity, in accepting the fact that we have no idea what the next day will bring (which idea would presumably be totally foreign to animals), that we cannot control the universe as we decline any more than we could when we were young people growing more strong and more capable with each passing year of childhood and adolescence. And it is from that insecurity that wisdom comes. (Or can come.) And not just wisdom, Watts wrote, but wisdom born of acceptance, of acquiescence, of submission to the nature of things, to our place in the universe, to the Creator who created Creation according to a divine plan that seems to include inevitable decline as we age and grow less sturdy and increasingly rickety. Even after all these years, I can still recommend that book to you all. You’ll like it, I think. But it is troubling too—and precisely because we are so good at avoiding these truths for most of the time, even perhaps for most of our lives.

And then you have a week like I just had. Brought together in a handful of days were the following: anxiety in the face of impending death, death itself (weirdly captured on video, since my father-in-law was actually facetiming with Joan when he breathed his last), eulogy, burial, bereavement, terrible sadness…and then, as if I wasn’t feeling mortal enough, my return to New York and the ensuing worship services and speakers and dinners and dancing celebrating my impending retirement, which is to say the beginning of the next stage, the stage that contains—not plausibly or possibly, but inevitably—all the things that Alan Watts writes about in his book. So you can excuse me for feeling a bit fragile as I contemplate all of this. Fragile and brittle. And yet, also as per Watts, hopeful and eager to see what the next years bring.

Is that eagerness itself a kind of denial? You could make that point very cogently! Or was Watts right that the great reward for facing things as they are is the wisdom that insecurity engenders as we find the courage to acknowledge the flimsiness of it all, to face the impermanence of this world we inhabit and, specifically, of our place in it? I thought he was when I was in college and, now, a half-century later, I find that I still do.

Like everybody, I’d like to live forever. But I’m not indulging that fantasy these days and, instead, I’m embracing the insecurity and seeking comfort in the ephemeral. Nothing lasts forever. As the great philosopher said, panta rhei, it’s all in flux, all changing constantly, all morphing forward into its own next version, all a work in endless and permanent progress. You can like it or not, but that’s how things are in this world God made and set us all into. So I’m not going to retreat into morose acceptance of my fate or resignation to the inevitability of decline. Instead—and this is the last and best lesson Joan’s dad taught me—I’m going to dance in the moonlight for as long as I can. Like my father-in-law, I have a happy marriage to sustain me and three wonderful children. And another three wonderful children-in-law. I have grandchildren too, unberufen, and watching them grow is and always will be a source of huge pleasure for me. So what am I complaining about? That life is process? I’ve known that since I was in college!