OU TORAH I Get No Respect! By Rabbi Dr. Tzvi Hersh Weinreb

I love visiting residences for senior citizens. For one thing, being around truly older people invariably helps me feel young by comparison. Recently, I was a weekend guest scholar at such a residence. I dispensed with my prepared lectures and instead tried to engage the residents of the facility, not one of whom was less than ninety years old, in a group discussion. This proved to be a very wise move on my part, because I learned a great deal about the experience of getting old. Or, as one wise man insisted, “You don’t get ‘old’—you get ‘older’.” The question that I raised to provoke discussion was this: “What made you first realize that you were getting ‘older’?”