Get old, get happy

OUT OF THE BLUE

MY MOTHER was a modern woman with only a limited interest in religion. When the sun set and the fast of the Day of Atonement ended, she shot from the synagogue like a rocket from Cape Carnaveral to dance the charleston and black bottom the whole night through at the La Boh?me dancing rooms ?where the elite used to meet? in east London.

That is why she was so upset when I rang her from Oxford to tell her I was going to study for the rabbinate. But after I told her that otherwise I would be going off to the Himalayas and would return as a guru and sit outside Golders Green station with a begging bowl while her friends and foes passed by, she became more reasonable. She could accept the rabbi business, she said, provided I did not sport a black beard and look like a clerical crow. I introduced her to my rabbinical teacher who was shaven and blond. She took to him immediately and graciously gave way.

As she got older she began to dabble in religion. In her late eighties she decided to light candles for her dead mother, brother, sister and great-aunt. She also began to dabble in theology. Why was there so much suffering in the world?, she wondered. Why did some female octopuses eat their husbands alive after making babies? ? she saw this on TV and it had been troubling her. Why did aged people suffer so? The classical answers I gave her didn?t convince and the one which did was her own work.

God was a ?He?, she said, the prayer book said so and ?He? meant male. Now she had known many males ? and they had their uses as partners in the La Boh?me dancing rooms ? but, she added confidentially, you couldn?t rely on them. For responsibility only a ?She? would do. That was why the world was the way it was. I thought it was a jolly good try for an untaught amateur in theology and I told her so, which cheered her up.

But really she didn?t need much cheer. She enjoyed old age and because of her I?ve begun to enjoy parts of it too. Now there are some things, of course, you can?t enjoy. So far I?ve had it good and am crumbling nicely. But you don?t know what your body is going to do to you. It could be dancing all night in Benidorm propped up by a Zimmer or inhabiting the eerie world of Alzheimer?s. Also old friends die on you and they?re irreplaceable. Also you become dependent.

But good things come too. And I?m not just referring to riding the buses. To my surprise my seventies are nicer than my sixties and my sixties than my fifties and I wouldn?t wish my teens and twenties on my enemies. Now this isn?t what I expected. I remember watching my youthful hair fall out of my head before a hotel mirror. I was horrified and decided to do away with myself before I lost the lot. But then Yul Brynner appeared on the films and in the fashion magazines all shorn and chic, so I delayed my demise and lived to be a correspondent for The Tablet.

In my life there are pluses that only come with age. I?m outside the rat race and no longer worship the bitch goddess Success. At business parties I can concentrate on the finger food and not bother about networking. It?s more fun to watch without joining in. Also on the way to work good-hearted young girls sometimes offer me their seats, which I accept and bless them in return, a transaction satisfying to all concerned.

Being outside the clerical rugger scrum, I also begin to see my own religion and culture more objectively and my role in it. I begin to understand what the aged Rabbi Leo Baeck, who had gone through concentration camp, meant when he said, ?Lionel, Judaism is your religious home; it?s not your religious prison?. Chosen-ness and nationalism together have made us Jews become too self-absorbed, so that we prefer fences to bridges, which is part of our present tragedy.

I used to bewail my patchy life. But not now. I am not a camera but a small window which lets in some light and fresh air so that the outside world is perceived as something more than just a Jewish problem. That is where I fit in and where I?m needed. I am pleased now that I have lived in a gay as well as a religious ghetto, although it hasn?t been very comfortable. Taken together, their limitations cancel each other out and I have seen the world more kindly and more honestly. I am also pleased that I fell into a Quaker meeting and then strayed into Catholic contemplative retreats and introduced my students and friends into priories. I have been moved by the kindness I have received in theatres, squats and bars. The secular world is more spiritual than it thinks, just as the ecclesiastical world is more materialist than it cares to acknowledge.

When I was young I was very uptight, ideological and exclusive. But the experience of God in other people has made me more amused, gentler and inclusive. An aged rabbi, crazed with liberalism, once said to me, ?We Jews, Lionel, are just ordinary human beings?. And then he added, ?Only a bit more so!?