UncategorizedNovember 14, 2009 - כ"ח חשון תש"ע
by Rabbi David Lapin
It is strange that with the passage of time children “grow up” but adults “get older”? At what point do you stop growing up and start getting older? The truth is, there isn’t a point on a spectrum of age where you suddenly stop growing up and start getting older. Children get older too and adults also grow up. It depends what your perspective is on growth and aging.
If you experience the world through a physical lens, then as a child gets bigger and stronger, he or she is growing up. When we begin to go into physical decline (probably sometime in our twenties) we grow older. But that is like looking at a glass as you fill it with water and only seeing the volume of air in the glass diminishing.
During life two simultaneous processes occur: one spiritual, the other physical. The spiritual process is the soul growing bigger and stronger as you exercise it, develop it, and overcome the resistance to its growth. But at that very same time, the second, physical process happens: your physical strength begins to wane. Physical waning can be slowed by good health practices just as spiritual growth can be accelerated by healthy spiritual practices, but neither can be avoided.
We start life as predominantly physical beings; we end life as purely spiritual beings leaving our physical bodies behind. Everything in between is the movement from the predominantly physical to the purely spiritual. During this movement, our bodies contract their physical power so as to create “space” for the growing soul. In considering growth and aging then, it is important to see both of these processes and their relationship with one another. We should see the soul expanding at the very same time as the body contracts in strength. The total result if a person is working on himself spiritually, is that he grows holistically into a much more dynamic, powerful, wise and insightful person with every passing year. This is the growth that birthdays celebrate.
Milestones in Decades
Many milestones mark the journey through this life-process. The most significant are the ones tracked by Yehuda ben Teima in Pirkei Avot (5:24).[1] In my own life I have found them to be astonishingly accurate. Towards the end of every decade I begin to feel seismic disruption somewhere deep in my subconscious. Sometimes these tremors break through to the surface, sometimes they manifest in major shifting of the ground I used to feel firm on. Then, at the end of the decade comes the decade-birthday marking the beginning of a new era in the journey to ultimate spirituality. With this birthday I feel a profoundly deep and peaceful awareness ushering in the next decade, a time of new and promising breakthroughs. These breakthroughs have always occurred exactly in the areas featured by Yehuda ben Teimah and the sum of the transitions he outlines, produce an elaborately exquisite chain of spiritual! evolution.
The twenties are Lirdof, Ben Teimah says, a time of ambition and the pursuit of goals. The thirties are when people are at their physical peak. At forty the decreasing graph of physical strength and the increasing trajectory of spiritual growth intersect. The forties are a time of Binah, the understanding of complexity and intellectual innovation. During the fifties, when wisdom is growing, ego is in decline and the individual has accumulated some life experience, he becomes a competent consultant to others. The characteristic of this period is Eitzah, the giving of sound advice.
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