The Mystery of You. Adin Steinsaltz
almost comical: two discourses going on at once – at times interweaving, sometimes at odds with each other, sometimes indifferent to each other.
The more I listened, the more fascinated I was. I approached – I felt drawn in and was becoming involved with them.
“Hello,” said one of them. “What’s your name?”
“Ron,” I replied.
“What did you say?” was shot back at me loudly.
“Ronny,” I responded.
“Speak up!” was shouted back into my face. “Why don’t you speak up, you’re so quiet. No one can hear you! Can’t you talk so we can understand you!”
That was the beginning of my encounter with the Emmy Monash Home for the Aged.
I began visiting regularly, always smiling at the residents who were either sitting around or moving about. I dropped a kind word here, a polite response there. Mostly, conversation topics were routine and superficial; but were they, really? I don’t think so. To me they definitely seemed so, initially, but to the residents of Emmy Monash, they were most definitely not so. For them, my visits were an important distraction from their customary daily routines; a breath of fresh air, a stimulating diversion.
Interesting! Different people were experiencing the same thing, at the same time, in very different ways. Those people were projecting strong images with theatrical personalities. There was the always-angry one; there was the sweet, serene one; the sleepy one; the fidgety one; the funny one; the inquisitive one; the worried one; the frightened one; the searching one; the old one, the younger one and the other one.
People with thoughts, feelings, needs, memories; people who had once been children and then had parented their own children. People with names given to them by their parents – names filled with hopes and dreams and people with labels tacked onto them by other people. People living and people dying.
I could not resist attaching labels to the first two people I encountered that very first time at Emmy Monash: the “agro one” became alter zisser and the “softer one” became zisser alter. In Yiddish1, the word alter means “old one” and the word zisser means “sweet one”. So there was the old sweet one and the sweet old one; or was it really “not so sweet” and “sweetie”? Which one was which and why were they so different? Were they really so different? Why did this matter
1 A Jewish-German jargon, spoken by Ashkenazic Jews from Central and Eastern Europe.
We so often put name tags on people superficially, based on our first impressions. First impressions do count for something and are important as relationships start to develop. Some first impressions can be accurate but others can be quite misleading and deceptive, especially when created out of context.
Some time later – I cannot now remember when this transition occurred – I renamed them: the nicer one became chaviv ve-zaken, whereas, the unpleasant one was most definitely zaken velo chaviv (Zaken in Hebrew means “old” and chaviv means pleasant, likeable). So there was the sweet and elderly one, who was always pleasant to be with and the old and unpleasant one, who was mostly hard work.
A famous Shakespeare line from Romeo and Juliet says: “A rose by any other name would smell as sweet”. Flowers can be labelled – this is surely true for roses (although today, many of the perfumed roses have been replaced by scentless ones) – but it’s not true for people. Labelling a person is dehumanising, because it ignores the complexities and sensitivities of the personality, its abstract and delicate spiritual essence – all those things that are integral parts of the non-mundane essence of humanity.
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We are born and we begin to develop. We grow, we experience and we remember. Our memories then influence our destinies by “programming” our reactions to the events we encounter and impacting our impressions of random occurrences, by interpreting them through our own unique patterns of thought and behaviour.
While our bodies age, intellectually we are ageless. We continue to experience an egocentric, individual reality for as long as our memories allow us to function. These two dimensions operate in parallel. The physical world has a beginning and an end; its existence is purely a function of time. The spiritual world, in contradistinction, is timeless. Biologically, as we age, more and more of our cells cease to function, but psychologically, we remain much the same – only with more memories and experiences … and fewer and fewer people who are older than us.
Thinking back to that particular day, it was so different from most other days at Emmy Monash: there was a lot of noise. People sounded frustrated and angry.
“Can’t you see I don’t want to talk with you?”
“Help me!”
“You can’t sit here!”
“Help me, Nurse, help me!”
“I love you.”
“Can I have a cup of tea?”
“Speak up, I can’t hear you!”
“I want to talk with someone. People here are old. Look! They’re sleeping.”
Two people were arguing passionately about nothing. They were talking about different things; each of them was arguing with an imaginary person and neither was listening to the other. Unfinished business, I thought to myself. One was complaining about all sorts of things, reminiscing over various disappointments he felt he had suffered in his life. He felt so cheated and hard done by. The other one was bemoaning apparent lost opportunities; more disappointments; bad luck; things he should have said and things he should have done. Two people living the sunset days of their lives, unhappy with their memories.
“Excuse me,” I heard suddenly. “Excuse me please!” Looking across the room, I spotted the person who was calling to me and walked over. “Do you have a few minutes’ time to push me out into the garden? The nurses are too busy and I want to sit away from these people.” I released the two handbrakes of the wheelchair and pushed it along the corridor and out into the garden. “Thank you,” I heard. “What’s your name?”
That was the start of another deeply informative chat about life and life’s experiences.
All of the Emmy Monash residents had started their lives, physically at least, in a very similar way: as tiny, dependent babies. But, equally obviously, their life circumstances and environmental dynamics had been so different, as were their feelings and memories, their perceptions and, even more importantly, their misperceptions; their experiences of giving and of taking, of loving and of feeling loved; feelings of security and insecurity, expectation and disappointment; the psychological programming of fulfilment and achievement with the associated positive experiences of enjoyment and contentment; or else of frustration and failure and the accompanying negative experiences of sadness and lack of contentment; facing up to problems and dealing with issues, or running away from problems and avoiding issues.
All these great forces act on people’s personalities and behaviours: actions and reactions; giving and taking; expectation and reality; happiness and sadness; needing and wanting; hunger and thirst; equilibrium and serenity; touching and being touched.
Ageing is about coming to terms with ourselves and with life; it’s about reconciling the many internal conflicts which life throws out at us; it’s meeting our yetzers – yetzer ha-tov (the good inclination) and yetzer ha-ra (the evil inclination) face to face.
The lucky ones among us have come to terms with their yetzer ha-ra by suppressing or distracting it as often as needed, even if they have not been able to fully overcome this potent force within each of us; and they have also been able to nurture their