Rabbi Ben Ezra

I’ve been thinking about Rabbi Ben Ezra, the speaker in Browning’s poem of that name and from whom today I can draw comfort and strength. Perhaps it is the season of the Jewish High Holidays that provokes this desire to return to the Rabbi. He says, “Grow old along with me/The best is yet to be/The last of life for which the first is made.” I have wondered to whom he speaks in this invitation, I am always interested in the narrator’s audience, but today I think the Rabbi speaks to me as I age. When first I read this poem, I was an English major at Roanoke College and too young to understand the implications of the rabbi’s bidding. Studying Browning’s poem then was a satisfying and wholly academic enterprise. When I arrived on campus in Fall, 1965 the class of 1915 was gathered there for their fifty-year reunion. I marveled at those gray-haired folk as they wandered the campus; I thought of them as very, very old, ancient even, though from my perspective now I understand that they were really at that moment only in their late sixties or early seventies as am I now. I was then amazed that so many people still managed to remain alive and I couldn’t imagine that I would ever see my fiftieth reunion. Ah, I was so much older then. I’m seventy-four years of age now.

Browning’s lines then sounded lovely enough to remember, and I have stored them in memory for this past fifty and odd years. And the words arose recently in my seventy-four-year-old mind and in that moment they possessed a different resonance than first they did on the campus of Roanoke College. I returned to the poem entire. Ben Ezra does not so much celebrate old age, though certainly for him it is a stage of life devoutly to be wished. He does, however, appreciate having arrived there: “Therefore, I summon age/To grant youth’s heritage/ Life’s struggle having so far reached its term.” Age is an inheritance awarded to youth, a position devoutly to be wished. As for me, I do love my life and would not want to leave it. As difficult as it has been at times and even now yet continues to be, I look forward to awakening each morning to realize all that is about me and to consider what lies on the schedule today. As the Weavers sing, “Though nations are warring and business is vexed/ I’ll still stick around to see what happens next.” I accept Ben Ezra’s belief that age may be a time for reckoning and acceptance. I have arrived here to this moment and I am content. I do not cling to regret for some refuge. 

Like me, Rabbi Ben Ezra honors doubt. I think perhaps that what old age knows and enjoys is the certainty of doubt and the awareness that the ultimate paradox of life consists in the fact that what is important in life is not to measure the successes but its failures. The Rabbi states, that “what I aspired to be,/And was not comforts me.” It is not success that the Rabbi values, but the failures in his youth that his effort achieved. To have failed is to have tried. Now, in his old age he can rest from the effort. To the ghost Hamlet says, “Rest, rest, perturbed spirit,” but then Hamlet asserts that “The time is out of joint: O cursed spite/That ever I was born to set it right.” Youth is the time for action. Aging may have been now extended, but it is comforting to know that at some point it will come a time to rest for just a bit. I have recently grown comfortable with an intellectual laziness that refuses constant study: my friend says, “Isn’t it wonderful!” I turn very often to detective novels and I have left the classrooms. There is some comfort in leaving the torch for the next generation to assume, to step back from the struggle, and to acknowledge there are in this world differences of opinion but somewhere a truth. The Rabbi asserts, “Let age speak the truth and give us peace at last!”  To my daughters I can only offer what I have learned and what I am, “A man, for aye removed/From the developed brute—a god, though in the germ.” I agree, and my death will finally complete that consent.

 I appreciate the thought of Browning’s Rabbi Ben Ezra who suggests that with aging comes the wisdom that youth, busy as it must be with experience, cannot achieve. For Rabbi Ben Ezra it would seem that old age is a stage to which I might arrive, the way my yoga teachers advise that to begin practice I might just lie on my back or come to a comfortable seated position and just “arrive.” Ben Ezra suggests that though thought will validate and justify the days past, thought is not a backwards longing at all nor is it some return to a past splendor. The present reflects on the past, proofs it and open the way to the future.

       Let me discern, compare, pronounce at last,

         “This rage was right i’ the main,

         That acquiescence vain;

The Future I may face now I have proved the past.”   

Rabbi Ben Ezra suggests to me a different perspective on the life cycle than does Wordsworth. For the Rabbi, the last of life was promised by the first of it but did not determine it. Youth may be the time of action and experiment and action, but old age offers the opportunity to rest, to contemplate, to prepare some understanding to his life. Rabbi Ben Ezra says, 

Youth ended, I shall try

My gain or loss thereby;

     Leave the fire ashes, what survives is gold.

            And I shall weigh the same,

            Give life its praise or blame.

Young, all lay is dispute; I shall know being old.

I do not imagine that now that I am well beyond youth I can really know, but I can take comfort in the idea that at this time I can accept the occasions of my life and appreciate that what remains is finally valuable. Frost had said that nothing gold can stay, but Rabbi Ben Ezra declares that only the gold survives.  Whereas youth in its boldness and uncouthness strives to do, old age is “exempt from strife, should 

know . . .” Should know some peace, I think. I settle into my chair before the fire with a glass of wine . . . 

 

Those Little Green Bags

I have not been a person who has kept a dog as a pet. For several years a Shetland sheepdog named Laddie lived in my childhood suburban home, and we would let him out in the morning and evening to do his doody in the street before our house or in the backyard where we children played. But when the family moved to an apartment in Queens that forbade dogs my parents unbeknownst to us put him down while telling us that they had driven him to a farm in upstate New York where he could live a happy outdoors life!. I did live amongst cats for almost thirty years and did clean their litter boxes with some regularity, but the cats also used the outdoors to move their bowels and their modesty kept their products carefully hidden.

     I appreciate that people do keep dogs in their houses and apartments. I suspect that people even keep dogs in their automobiles and travel vans. For thousands of years domesticated canines have lived and worked with human beings. Often, I have seen various canines sitting on the laps of passengers and drivers. There is a full-grown Alaskan husky who hangs halfway out of the passenger side window when the truck is in motion! I see that a puppy of this species sells for $3,500.00. These dogs are not seat belted! Dogs have been domesticated and live comfortably and dependently with humans. And dogs are housetrained to do their excretory functions outside.

     So I meet a great many folk walking their dogs as I engage in my daily saunters. Walking has become my morning exercise. I wish the human a good morning and smile at the dogs. They exhibit many different behaviors: often as they draw near they look at me with a little curiosity and pull toward me though the owner often pulls back on the leash. Sometimes the dog lunges towards me not aggressively or with violence in its gaze but with an appeal for play. Some dogs ignore me completely, as James Keelaghan notes, they continue to sniff about for possibilities. Almost my favorite response from the animal is when I walk yards behind them and having sensed my presence, follow the walker’s lead but repeatedly turn their head to measure my current distance and my present position. A similar response occurs when I pass the dog moving in the opposite direction. First the animal stares at me, and then as I pass continue to turn its head and keep me assessed. I know it is the dog’s personalities I meet on our walks. 

     But what continues to astound me is to observe adults carrying those little green bags with which they pick up the dog’s poop. I watch the process every time with some astonishment: The bag is turned inside out and the walker reaches down and scoops up the excretory piles, turns the bag carefully over and ties the top. And then owner and dog continue their walk, the dog completely innocent of their having shat and of the little green receptacle that their walker holds of that action and that now contains it. Indeed, during the clean-up the dog remains completely unconcerned and seems only to want to continue on the walk. And once again, it seems, the human is left holding the bag.

     I do appreciate the service of picking up the droppings after the dogs: I have in my life stepped in not a few piles of poop. But the entire experience continues to seem to me so bizarre. 

 

Of Ants and Grasshoppers

 Like the squirrels and the ants, I have begun to hoard supplies for the coming winter. I buy two rather than one bag of coffee beans at my regular visit to J&S Coffee Roasters; I purchase another spare tub of CeraVe body lotion. The dermatologist has recommended a twice daily application as the colder weathers close in too rapidly. I buy more patchouli incense for the home, and like many older retired folks, I purchase extra cans and boxes of foods that are on-sale. I check my closets to be certain that my long sleeve and flannel shirts have been cleaned and properly stored and are ready to be uncovered and worn. My flannel lined jeans are moved now front and center. Sweaters are taken out of storage and placed on shelves neatly folded. I have begun to pile another set of books that will be read throughout the cold months, and I have stacked my artificial logs before the fireplace. I make sure there is enough paper and ink in the printer, and have purchased a supply of replacement light bulbs.

     In fact, I don’t truly mind winters here in the mid-west, though by February I begin to tire of the frigid temperatures, the dirty snow and the darknesses. One thing that I find uncomfortable about winter is having to step out of the shower into the cold air. I think sometimes it would be nice to have several servants about to instantly wrap me about with warmed towels as I exit the steamed-up shower stall. Or perhaps I fantasize about installing some form of safe space heater that would not electrocute as I stumble about in the bathroom space or set afire my towels and balls of cotton. I wonder if somewhere people have come to have installed small fireplaces in their shower rooms! I’ll bet Henry VIII did not tolerate the cold of winter without a bevy of servants and women to keep him warm!
     I read that squirrels can’t remember where they have stored 70-80% of the goods they have buried. Alas, as I continue to bring supplies from stores inside the house; the rooms get cluttered and I can’t always remember where I have put some things. The newpapers and journals carpet the floor. I put post-it notes on top of post-it notes. And where now did I leave that pen?
     But like the grasshopper I continue to play and dance as summer becomes Fall. And will continue to dance and sing my way (I hope and anticipate) from Fall to Winter and then to Spring and back to Summer. There is much cause to mourn but too little time to indulge so. Alas, I do indulge myself nonetheless. I think often of the lyrics to “The Merry Minuet”:

They're rioting in Africa
They're starving in Spain
There's hurricanes in Florida
And Texas needs rain.

The whole world is festering
With unhappy souls
The French hate the Germans,
The Germans hate the Poles
Italians hate Yugoslavs
South Africans hate the Dutch
And I don't like anybody very much

And so, as I open another beer, put some fake logs in the real fireplace, purchase thicker bath towels and make room in the pantry and refrigerator and freezer. And anticipate the colder days.