On Becoming 75
Entering my 75th birthday has been a roller coaster ride, a year-long journey of bewilderment and many moments of sustained discomfort. Being born in the shadow of the Holocaust and having spent the past seventeen years facing consistent emotional and spiritual challenges as a caregiver have brought inevitable suffering. But these experiences also presented me with an opportunity to dig deeper to understand my own trajectory that culminated in becoming a rabbi. In considering the many challenging moments I have faced in my life — particularly since my teen years were filled with insecurities, performance anxiety, and messages of who I should be — I came to appreciate all that I had to unlearn. My parents’ Eastern European roots, the Jewish tradition, and the culture of the ’50s and ’60s continually reinforced my role as one meant to serve a male-dominated society. My appearance was more important than my mind and getting married and having children was my raison d’etre. And yet it is the very strength of my survivor family that flows through my veins and my DNA. Those were the sparks that ignited my need to learn new ways of being and tackle risky choices that would slowly but surely strengthen my resolve to expand and grow. Each one of us is the hero of our own story, and as we consider our stories we must find moments of resilience so we can face the future confidently.
The number itself made me feel ancient, as if I were crossing over to the other side, a place of no return, destined to wander the parched desert where very little blooms.
As I contemplated my own narrative, I questioned whether, if I were to leave this earth at any moment, I would feel regret or acceptance. Had I accomplished my goals, expressed my core values in my work and in my relationships? Did I leave a positive mark or a legacy for my children and grandchild? It was a moment in time to truly understand the arc of my life and reflect on whether I was able to embrace this new stage with a deep sense of gratitude instead of grieving the losses associated with change, especially in a society that desperately clings to youth. The number itself made me feel ancient, as if I were crossing over to the other side, a place of no return, destined to wander the parched desert where very little blooms.
Yet what’s in a number? Sometimes it is laden with enormous weight, markers of social or historical import (who will forget September 11, 2001 or January 6, 2021?)—dates we may want to forget or need to remember. Our tradition calls on us to honor those who have left the world on the date of their burial as an anniversary that, like a birthday, is marked with lighting a candle to burn in memory and gratitude for a full 24 hours. The numbers associated with Jewish holiday celebrations or commemorations are etched into our yearly cycle, providing opportunities to embrace the vast variety of emotional responses from laughter to tears. They honor these historical moments of our timeline, encouraging connections easily forgotten.
Yes, 75 is only a number, but yes, it is a giant one. Three-quarters of a century is a massive amount of time, though in the scheme of things it is but a blink of an eye. For me it feels like “coming out of the closet.” Previously, I never thought about my age. Nobody ever asked how old I was, and as a result I have befriended colleagues that I later discovered were 20-30 years my junior, yet always feeling their equal. My youthful attitude and presence have always been embraced, leading me to feel as a contemporary to those generations younger than me. When a dear friend announced she was celebrating her 50th birthday, I exclaimed in shock, “You mean I’m almost 25 years older than you? I could be your mother.” It was a revelation for both of us.
To openly admit I am 75 has been a process of acceptance. Facing large-scale catastrophes in the world, now including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, has brought insecurities and unknowns, heightening my sense of feeling tired and old. During this pandemic, being shut down and shut in, I have confronted many challenges as have so many of you. Living with a spouse who is chronically ill has been a double whammy, as I have experienced the impact from the outside and ongoing personal challenges from the inside. So many have had to cope with career, medical, and relationship problems all under the black cloud of fear and insecurity because of COVID-19, political chaos, antisemitism, and hatred of the other. For myself, losing so much person-to-person work has often felt like enforced retirement, only reinforcing my discomfort with aging and becoming 75.
As a woman I have struggled with what it means to grow old, to be real, to be authentic. I was challenged during COVID to let my hair go grey, embracing my birthday in the true sense of its meaning: wearing the mantel of the elder. What I’ve come to accept is that authenticity comes from within. It means being honest, real and expressing core Jewish values of compassion, empathy and goodness — in sum, to be a mensch. It means expanding my mind and spirit, embodying the Divine, and treasuring the sacred. It means feeling comfortable with who I am, exerting every effort to strengthen my body, mind and spirit. Being 75, I’ve come to feel that it’s cool to be a woman and to be Jewish, in combination an expression of Shechinah, the feminine indwelling presence of the Holy One.
Numbers in our tradition have great import. Each of the Hebrew letters represents a number. Using the process of gematria (Kabbalistic numerical formulations) we can find deeper understandings of words and their connection to other texts by virtue of sharing the same numerical value. The earliest Kabbalistic text Sefer Y’tzirah (The Book of Formation) teaches that the world was created with three things: text, story and number. Numbers tell stories; they bring to life all the emotional and spiritual baggage and wonder we carry deep in the crevices of our psyche. Every birthday is a reminder of being put on this earth, an expression of the love and passion two people shared resulting in the gift of life, an affirmation of our existence. As we go through life from our first birthday on, we are often showered with joy, parties and gifts, a continuous reminder of our value to others. We pridefully embrace the growing privileges that come with maturity and becoming an adult, investing in education, mentoring, and deeper assessment so we find the role that best fits who we were meant to be and why we were placed on this earth. As we approach midlife, we hopefully acquire experience and skill, and develop relationships that bring love and sharing, expanding the tapestry of our lives. Then we come to the third quarter, which is a time of refining, re-evaluating, and exploring the missteps as well as the richness and expansiveness of life, knowing that the last quarter might be filled with physical or medical challenges or perhaps new possibilities through retirement or redefinition of time and relationships.
Moments of aging are important times to take stock and embrace with gratitude our longevity and incredible grit. The losses, the personal and cultural challenges, the pain, the suffering, the social and political climate, and of course the pandemic, are realities that impinge on our lives and only heighten our connection to the physical world. The age of 75 has felt more weighty than birthdays of the past. The numbers, as they grow, remind us of the one thing we all must face: dying. This existential reality, as we reach the third and fourth quarters of our lives, is a reminder that time is precious. Our tradition sees a world beyond and teaches that we are both body and soul. The body, purely physical, is buried in the earth, but the soul, ephemeral and the truest indicator of who we are, moves to be rebirthed in a new way. I’ve come to understand, as we age, that “the body will diminish in strength and agility, but the soul will continue to expand beyond imagination.”
This potent birthday afforded me the opportunity to process these many stages as I recalled the life my parents built upon arriving in Toronto after the horrors they endured. I could tap into the foundation of Jewish values centered in family. My father, a maternal caregiver, brought his brother with his family, as well as my grandmother — all of them survivors — to live in a small, two-bedroom bungalow, nine of us close and cared for, treasuring freedom and a new future. Memories of sharing Jewish holidays and many Shabbats poured over me as I scanned hundreds of photographs taken by my father. This was a birthday that took me back in time and motivated me to create a special heirloom, a video of my 75 years. I was reminded of sitting in the back of the classroom in cheder, ignored by my teachers because I was a girl and learning Torah was not important for me. I was reminded of my teen years when I chose to become a secretary because I didn’t have the self-confidence or encouragement to go to college, and I was reminded of being faced with an abusive first husband who created an environment of fear and insecurity. And yet I chose to find pathways to shift my trajectory — to study, explore alternatives, and build confidence, to change my life and not be defeated by it. Building resilience is facing what is hard and discovering strength and not weakness. Turning pain and difficulty into opportunity is how we face getting older.
Life is never a straight path. Torah teaches of the Israelites journey to the promised land, a mere three-day trip, but God sent them on a circuitous path, one that added distance and encounters that were to help bring spiritual and emotional development. But finally reaching their destination, they blew it. Ten of the twelve scouts confront the new landscape with trepidation, projecting their enemies as giants and feeling like “grasshoppers.” Driven by fears and inaccurate projections only to be punished with death, they turn down a great gift, and instead a whole generation is wiped from the earth because they couldn’t embrace risk and put faith in God.
The awareness of how time flies or how unannounced difficulty enters our lives reminds us of the need to be fully present.
So it is with our own lives. Our journeys are never direct but often confusing and unclear. Our life’s work is not just to live but also to step out of ourselves to understand what makes us tick, to see the purpose of painful and traumatic events, to recognize the hidden angelic beings that changed our lives, to assess who we were and who we have become. Each birthday, as we head toward the last quarter of our life, is an opportunity to evaluate, refine, and retune, to hopefully embrace the moment fully so that if we leave this world unexpectedly it will be with acceptance and without regret. I often teach that we must live each day as if it is our first and each moment as if it is our last. The awareness of how time flies or how unannounced difficulty enters our lives reminds us of the need to be fully present. “Teach us to count our days, then we shall acquire a heart of wisdom” (Psalm 90). This means that we must make our days count.
We all face forks in the road that demand decisions that can lead either to dead ends or the promised land. Even some of our mistakes can have miraculous outcomes. Only later in hindsight do we understand that what was painful led us to gifts of awareness, fulfilling relationships, or opportunities that were truly blessings. My miserable first marriage brought me to the city of Cincinnati so my then husband could complete his Ph.D. in Psychology. But there I discovered a place where I could transform myself and find my b’shert. There are hidden miracles in the most unlikely places. The same letters in Hebrew can mean a test, a miracle to find refuge and lift one’s self. I came to Cincinnati kicking, but it was significant for my growth and expansion. Seeing the glass half full instead half empty I had the opportunity to appreciate with more clarity the purpose of mistakes and painful experiences. “Jewish gravity” is my new term for our process of living: What goes down, must come up.
Turning 75 has also been an incredible validation of my accomplishments and a life well-lived. Though time has flown at warp speed, and has been full of personal difficulty and challenges, there has also been a steady rise of spirit and skill in multiple dimensions. Each day represents a fullness of thousands of moments — moments both of reverberating memories of the past and dazzling awareness of the present. I have come to embrace many voices — the nurturer, the artist and designer, the musician and cantor, the rabbi and teacher, and now the writer of two theses, a book, and multiple Journal articles, despite failing English in high school. All of this grew out of the voice of silence, being told in my youth to be seen and not heard. Yet I hold deep inside that still small voice, the whisper of Divinity that holds me up and emanates through my work and relationships. COVID has demanded my newest voice, the one that is translated through Zoom and YouTube, mastering unexpected skills. Creating a video was a new journey into the unknown, learning and developing another way to express my creativity and communicate on new platforms.
At 75 I’ve come to feel so blessed and filled with enormous gratitude to all those in my life. I wanted to honor this birthday by reviewing my past — from my birth to survivor parents on the edge of darkness, through 75 years of growth, expansion, accomplishment, and dedication to my most treasured values. I’ve come to cherish 50 years as a wife, partner and mother. This project turned into a “docu-memoir” in which I spent hours upon hours with photographs from years past, reminding myself of important moments and transformative experiences, creating an offering, a minchah service, a gift of gratitude to both the many precious angels in my life and the souls beyond who impacted my life from the beginning. It was also an opportunity to share the spiritual lessons I have learned that might inspire others to accept and embrace their own lives at whatever number they confront.
“They will still bear fruit in old age; they will stay vigorous and fresh” (Psalm 92). What could represent more hope than knowing that no matter what our age we can continue to plant seeds and harvest new glorious crops. We can continue to flourish even through the limitations of this pandemic. “It is never too late,” has become my motto. I have soared late in life. At age 49 I entered the UCLA Interior Design Program, then become a Bat Mitzvah at 51, was ordained as Chazzan at 57, and most recently was ordained as rabbi at 68. Everything Judaism values is based on the power of the soul to continue to grow, learn, and change. T’shuvah, to return, reminds us that at any moment we can turn things around. The Holy One waits with open arms in every moment. Even deep hurts and traumatic experiences can be healed. Grief and suffering linger and often resurface. Embracing their reality and finding ways to heal them is a gift at any age.
Research on the brain reinforces the importance of continuing to learn, whether through books, a new language, instrument or new skill, creating neural pathways that strengthen the longevity of our thinking. Moving my body through walking or yoga has led me to discover an agility and sense of well-being necessary for me to remain grounded and sturdy, like an Etz Chayyim, a Tree of Life.
The Rambam, in the Middle Ages, taught about the interconnectedness of the body and soul. When one is out of alignment the other is impacted. Focusing on my soul’s work is easier when my body feels well and whole. Taking care of my physical being supports my soul’s work. Both are important. Through silence, meditation or prayer we can bring peace, calm and insight. Each part of this triad — mind, body, and spirit—demands special attention and restoration. These past years I’ve been faced with vulnerability, first by experiencing vertigo, the horrific feeling of objects moving around you when they’re not. The sensation is a total lack of control often accompanied by nausea and difficulty walking. A chiropractic head movement corrected the problem, but I was reminded that aging brings medical crisis. This was a new reality I faced for the first time. The other was high cholesterol numbers, part of my COVID weight gain. The number 75 was reminding me I have entered new territory. I had two choices, go on Western medications or bring it down naturally. I chose the latter, creating a protocol that is now part of my routine. Knowing that I can bring about change is incredibly empowering. As a young adult, 75 represented senility and fragility. Today, decades of science, medical research and spiritual teachings have provided tools and knowledge so that we can take better care of ourselves and embrace our latter years with more confidence.
Judaism teaches, “With the aged is wisdom, in the length of days is understanding.” In a youth-oriented society, aging has become one of the last “isms” that still plagues our culture. Becoming older often puts us on the fringe of society, leading many to feel isolated, rejected and depressed. Judaism is the opposite. Torah teaches, “In the presence of an old person shall you rise.” Knowledge and learning is one of our most deeply held values, and it is assumed that moving on in years is accumulating not only great wisdom but also experiences that enrich our well-being. We rise not for the heroes that American culture promotes — movie stars, sports figures, and multi-millionaires — but those who have spent their lives filling the reservoir of their being with vast knowledge becoming teachers for the rest of us. Over two decades ago Rabbi Zalman Shalomi-Schachter, z”l, wrote a book based on his own struggles with aging. His personal reflections turned into a wonderful acknowledgment of “Aging to Saging.” Through our own affirmations and focus on spiritual practice we can embrace a rich future and become elder statesmen (or stateswomen). As boomers, we have helped to create and nurture a more passionate perception of life at 75, 80, 85 and beyond.
Judaism offers a way to start each day. By saying, “Model Ani L’fanecha” (“Thank you God for returning my soul … with great faith in me.”). We tap into gratitude and confidence and enter the day a little less stressed. Taking a deep, slow breath of the gift of life, just as Torah teaches that “God blew into the nostrils of the first human the soul of life, becoming a living being,” we connect to our Divine source better able to handle what lies before us.
This is 75 for me — the growing awareness of my potential and my acceptance of and surrender to ongoing change and inevitable unknowns. “Regrets I’ve had a few, but too few to mention,” sang Frank Sinatra. I have very few. What I hold dearly is knowing from where I came, who I have become, and who I can still be. I treasure the love and support of my partner, family, and friends and God’s constant hand on my shoulder. I appreciate the gift of spirit that still has many years to learn, explore and discover the many wonders of this world before I move on to the next. It has become a very happy 75th!
Eva Robbins is a rabbi, cantor, artist and the author of “Spiritual Surgery: A Journey of Healing Mind, Body and Spirit.”
Barhany is working to heal those rifts — not through politics, but through the “harmony and connection” she creates at Tsion. “I wanted to create a space celebrating everyone’s identity.” In 2003, she created the Beta Israel of North America (BINA) Cultural Foundation, to foster greater understanding of Ethiopian Jews. “I’m very proud of who I am, and others should be as well.” Images of the “Ethiopian angel” appear throughout the café.
