CHAPTER SIX - The Aging Process: Late Life Questions

A: BACKGROUND

8. Aging today: some issues to consider

In addressing the question of the elderly, the aim is clearly to aim for a situation with as many Category A types as possible and as few as possible Category Bs.

We have seen that the Biblical tradition recognises both types. The question is what makes the difference between Category A and Category B – and how the Jewish tradition tries to create Category A types.

Before exploring some of the factors that can affect the character of the old age experience, it is worthwhile reflecting on two aspects of the aging situation today that are relatively new:

• The increasing number of older Jews; and
• The breakdown of the extended family so prevalent in traditional societies, including the Jewish environment.

There are some quite illuminating statistics regarding the first question. A study of the Jews of the United States shows that, between 1957 and 1990, the percentage of American Jews over the age of sixty-four rose from 8.5% to 18% - and this trend is continuing into the twenty-first century. Moreover, the fastest rising group in American Jewry, according to the 1991 survey, was the over eighty-fives.

This is an astonishing, unprecedented statistic, with important implications.

Despite the Biblical record in which the main characters invariably approach or reach three figures (even if we ignore Methuselah and his ilk!), there has never been a situation like this in recordable Jewish history. Life expectancy has been completely transformed by a mixture of economic opportunities and medical technology and we are rapidly coming to the time when the traditional Jewish blessing for a long life – – [May you live]“until a hundred and twenty”, will become more realistic than is generally supposed.

• This data has important implications for the allocation of community resources, the building of physical facilities and the provision of care services for the elderly, a subject that is beyond the present context.
• It has equally important implications for the examination of attitudes towards the elderly: our community needs to think through its approach to the elderly among us in ways and terms that previous generations, with smaller numbers of elderly people, never had to address.

At the same time, another important factor in this social and moral equation which impacts on the elderly, is the change that has occurred in the physical pattern of the Jewish family situation in the last generation or so.

• Beyond the complications of Jewish family discussed in the last chapter, (which discussed how the norms of what constitutes a family unit are fast changing, with the accepted “nuclear family” becoming only one of a number of options in the Jewish world), these changes in family life have left the elderly particularly vulnerable.
• The family as a unit has tended to spread out geographically to an extent never previously envisaged. Changing attitudes towards community life and new potential for physical and economic mobility have undermined the traditional model of a family whose members, if not living physically together in the same house or building, at least lived in close proximity to each other within the same geographical area (with the exception of periods of migration).
• The Jewish family, like so many other families in the contemporary world, does not provide a natural community for its members in the same way that the perhaps did in the past. Without romanticising the Jewish family of the past as a tight supportive unit, where all loved and nurtured each other, it is clear that the family as a collective unit has suffered considerable attrition in the last generation. The family members who are most vulnerable in this situation are, of course, the elderly.

Once again, this should direct us to reflect and review our attitudes towards the elderly, in an attempt to enable as many of them as possible to live a life of dignity and (self)-respect.