Someone once wrote that “time is a gentle thief and a poor beautician.” This became more obvious to me than perhaps ever before as I recently focused in on my window on a zoom session and when I was working on my Medicare plans for the coming year. 

Of course there are other reminders, such as the stiffness in my back from arthritis when I get up in the morning, coupled with some sore joints in my hands. My nearly all-white beard rounds out the image. Not so bad, as these are the normal signs of aging—and as they say, “it beats the alternative.”

It is a tad personally comical when I look back to those days when I looked very young and could always fool the guessing game booths at carnivals and county fairs. Add to this that the night before my wedding, some 40 years ago, (I was 24 at the time) I was carded in the bar of the hotel where the wedding was being held. And when I entered the pulpit rabbinate two years later and would be officiating at a lifecycle event, it was not uncommon for me to hear comments from the crowd, questioning who the Bar Mitzvah boy was, standing in for the rabbi.

In truth and appreciation, I have nothing to complain about as I have traveled into my seventh decade. Aside from the passing of dear family members and my many teachers and mentors and the great void that has left in my life, I have had a good journey thus far. At this stage in one’s life, even as there are more years behind me than ahead, there is a greater sense of interiority—increased inner thought, self-reflection and personal assessment that can be useful and fulfilling.

Throughout my more than 30 years in the full-time pulpit and other professional roles that I have played in the Jewish community, I have met and served a myriad of interesting people and situations. I have benefited from the opportunities for extensive higher education and have been invited into various fellowship programs. But most important of all has been the gift of family, particularly those in my own household. I have been married to the same wonderful, beautiful woman, a unique human being, for all these years, and have been the often undeserving recipient of her patience, forbearance, unwavering friendship and especially good counsel and limitless wisdom. We are blessed with three grown children and four grandchildren. So I have had the opportunity to plant well for posterity. 

And the signs of aging are also victory scars against the vicissitudes of contemporary times and human circumstances. I see no need for a hair weave to thicken my thinning crop or for a dye job to mask the gray and white tuffs and strands. I have always wondered what convinces so many people to paint their heads and faces. As if we can’t tell!

I reflect on this theme of aging as I approach Thanksgiving, feeling in my heart of hearts that all too often I have given more than short shrift to my embarrassment of riches and thus much-needed cause for my gratitude. Being restless by nature and something of an overachiever, coupled with a penchant for living life from a highly strategic perspective, have at times led me to question the path I have taken and to engage in some less-than-helpful moments of regret and misgiving. 

The challenge for me has been to see the silver lining in life’s many clouds and the aggregate results of my earthly efforts and experience. If only I were able to live up to the comments of the great Biblical exegete Rabbi Solomon Yitzhaki, also known as Rashi, who writes of the life of the matriarch Sarah that “all of her years were good” (in Hebrew, “kulan shaviin le’tovah”). We all know from the Biblical text that Sarah met with many challenges in her life, from dislocation and barrenness to situations of domestic tension and unrest. Yet Rashi contends that when viewed in its totality, her life was a good one. 

It is easy to miss the forest for the trees and it is this area of human weakness and vulnerability that can set one off on a course of negative thinking and self-deprecation. Here I am reminded of the folk wisdom that contends that if everyone were to put all of their “pekelach” or packages of sorrow and woe on a table, each of us would gladly reclaim one’s own. 

So as I grow older, I become more acutely aware of my natural, age-related limitations and the challenge to accommodate one’s self to these new realities. But one’s life assessment should not wait for a third-party review in an end-of-life eulogy, but should rather give expression in real time. 

Such awareness is not easily realized, but beckons our reach and grasp. The Psalmist writes, “Teach us to number our days so that we might attain a heart of wisdom.”

I so hope and pray for the inspiration and fortitude to rise to this occasion and see every day in a more positive light: for the honey and the sting, for the bitter and the sweet it brings, and hopefully for a balance sheet that reads like Sarah’s—after all is said and done, a good life in its totality.

Rabbi Lawrence S. Zierler lives in South Fallsburg, NY and serves the religious needs of many in Sullivan County. He has served as a pulpit rabbi, a Jewish organizational executive, and a hospital and hospice chaplain. His graduate degrees are in clinical counseling and bioethics and he is the president/CEO of Sayva Associates, an elder care solutions practice, with a focus on aging in place.