Rabbi Irwin Wiener, D.D.
To survive in today’s world, we need to extend ourselves to others. Connection is the key ingredient ensuring the continuation of our human experience.
And this is the lesson we were taught as we began life’s journey. To enable us to get along, we need to be willing to meet each other halfway. We should consider the feelings of others.
Now, however, we seem to have forgotten the lessons of the past. Our generation, the generation of retirement age, for the most part, is settled. Many of us have done our share of compromising, and we feel that retirement gives us the right to be more independent. And yet we find ourselves being more dependent than ever.
It is not that simple. As an example: We must participate in faith activities, because when there is doubt, when we find ourselves being more dependent, when a loved one passes on, when we experience joy or sorrow, we turn to our houses of worship for solace and comfort and connection.
We helped our children learn the value of faith, and yet, when we retired, we thought that we had retired from that connection as well. More are not associated with “organized” religion than we dare to imagine. The statistics tell us that the great majority of us are no longer attendees of faith experiences. Somehow, we have concluded that retirement gives us the ability to retire from faith as well.
Retirement should not permit us to remove religious experience from our lives. Retirement from God should not be an option. It is not a fitting example for our children or grandchildren or friends and neighbors. More than that, however, we need to ensure that the generations that follow will find the same comfort and inspiration that we enjoyed and should and can continue to enjoy.
We represent a generation that was in the forefront of human decency. We liberated the world when it was enveloped in despair. We understood the value of faith and goodness and reliance. We took our community involvement seriously by nurturing those institutions representing the dignity of the human spirit. We were imbued with this fervor, and then we seemed to have forgotten.
We forgot our country as well. Some say that it doesn’t need as much from us as it once did. The truth of the matter is that the United States needs our involvement more than ever. We are a nation that is hurting. Gloom seems to be everywhere, and we search for someone or something to guide us out of this despair. We search and search, only to find out that the someone we are looking for is us. We were sent here to connect and be connected to each other and, through that effort, to God. That is the partnership we have with the Creator. God created, and we are here to complete that creation. And we can’t do it without respect and reliance on each other.
We forget how fragile our society is. We need to repair the tear in our human fabric. We need the world. The world needs us. We forget that we are who we are because of the past. And we need to continue to understand that support of faith-based efforts and institutions were created to bridge the divide.
A story is told of a time and place where people could not bend their arms. Because of this, they could not place the food in their mouths. Slowly, people died from the lack of nourishment. Then one person discovered that if they reached for the food with their outstretched arms, they could carry the food and feed another person until one by one they realized that the formula for survival was helping each other. Retirement does not relieve us of this obligation.