CHAPTER SIX - The Aging Process: Late Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

2. Medals for the virtuous - long life as a prize

One of the central features of Judaism, from its earliest texts, is the emphasis on reward and punishment; whereas the good will be rewarded and the evil will be punished.

The Bible, as a whole, does not present a view of the afterlife: the themes of reward and punishment are presented there in this-worldly terms. In other words, the reward for a good life is perceived as something that must be experienced here on earth during a person’s life; a person’s present day life on earth is all that a person can expect, all that is known about, with reward and before death. This approach would be moderated and changed in the post-Biblical world, as Judaism worked out a complex system of life after death and the world-to-come.

The Bible is an excellent place to examine the ideas of reward and punishment in this world.
A great deal of the Biblical discussion of the subject is couched in national, collective terms. If the People as a whole behaves in the way that G-d wants them to behave, they will be rewarded by the terms of the Divine promise which has offered them national life in the Land of Israel, for example.

There is also, however, some reference to the individual’s reward for G-dly living and, according to Judaism, the major reward consistently offered to people who live the right way of life is the promise of a long life.

In a number of different places in the Torah we are specifically told that the reward for observing G-d’s laws will be long life:

• In relation to the honouring of parents (Shemot 20:12),
• Saving a mother bird out of its nest, (Devarim 22:7),
• Tthe using of fair weights and measures in one’s commercial life, (Devarim 25:15).
• But the most general and all embracing comment in the Torah is found at the beginning of Devarim 6. After Moses has explained again the system of G-d’s commandments (including the reiteration of the Ten Commandments) in Chapter 5, he says:

These are the commands, decrees and laws that the Lord your G-d directed me to teach you to observe in the land that you are crossing the Jordan to possess. [This is] so that you, your children and their children after them may fear the Lord your G-d as long as you live by keeping his decrees and commands that I give you and so that you may enjoy long life.
Devarim 6:1-2

Another explicit connection between the life that one leads and the length of that life appears in the book of Proverbs:

…grey hair is a crown of splendour: it is attained by a righteous life.
Proverbs 16:31

In other words, the Bible views old age as a prize awarded to people in exchange for living the right kind of life, namely, living according to G-d’s laws and demands. In this light, there is no question that the old are essentially considered as those whom G-d has selected personally and has rewarded for their virtuous living. Old age is perceived as a blessed and desirable state, something that should bring recognition and respect from others.