‘At Seventy For Grey Hairs’

The departure from Karmiel of Rabbi Michael Schultz and his wife, Rachel  and with it, the end of a four year cycle of  Torah study, coincided with my husband’s 70th birthday. Was a blessing appropriate, I asked.

The Schultzes, enjoying  nothing if not a marriage of true minds, decided after hurried consultation on a passage by Rabbi Judah ben Teima  from the Pirkei Avot – the ethical teachings and maxims of the rabbis of the Mishnaic period.

It runs thus:

“At five years old a person should study the Scriptures, at ten years for the Mishnah, at thirteen for the commandments, at fifteen for the Talmud, at eighteen for the bride chamber, at twenty for one's life pursuit, at thirty for authority, at forty for discernment, at fifty for counsel, at sixty to be an elder, at seventy for grey hairs, at eighty for special strength (Psalm 90:10), at ninety for decrepitude, and at a hundred a man is as one who has already died and has ceased from the affairs of this world”.

If it sounds familiar to non-Talmudists, that’s no surprise as it comes from a tradition that examines not only the phases of an individual’s life but the myth of the  ‘ages of the world’ where the past of the human race is seen to degenerate in the course of time from a ‘golden age’ to an ‘iron age’.

So it’s small wonder that Shakespeare’s famous contribution to the debate in As You Like It (Act II, Scene VII) should feature a sad Jacques who compares life and those who live it to a play and those who play in it.

Here, the speech is delivered by the Oscar-winning U.S.actor Morgan Freeman.

“All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages. At first the infant,
Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms;
And then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel
And shining morning face, creeping like snail
Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,
Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad
Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,
Full of strange oaths, and bearded like the pard,
Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,
Seeking the bubble reputation
Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,
In fair round belly with good capon lined,
With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,
Full of wise saws and modern instances;
And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts
Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,
With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;
His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide
For his shrunk shank; and his big manly voice,
Turning again toward childish treble, pipes
And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,
That ends this strange eventful history,
Is second childishness and mere oblivion,
Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything”.

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© Natalie Wood (18 August 2014)