Of Clocks And Calendars

Back in the day, when yeshiva structured my life, the onset of the month of Elul was a tense time. We felt something change in the air; summer, with all its diversions, was gone. Life in the dormitory was austere and no-frills, without the treats and indulgences of home. The tone of our Torah learning changed as did the focus of the morality discourses or mussar shmuessen. There was a heavy feeling all around. Many of us became more subdued, believing that distancing ourselves from levity or idle talk would propel us past the struggles that adolescents and young men wrestle with. The onset of the daily shofar blasts made their mark at the close of each morning’s prayers. We were all on alert. The Yamim Noraim were not far off.

Elul would speed by in the sense that when Selichos Week ended and Rosh Hashanah began, many of us felt we still had a lot of spiritual repair work to take care of. Yet, paradoxically, the heaviness and gravitas of the month made it seem to crawl along; its somber atmosphere putting the weeks in slower motion. At times, I felt as if it would go on forever; other times, I wished it would never end. So much for Elul in a yeshiva.

I am a grown man now, perhaps not feeling as old as I must look, but very much regarded as a senior citizen. I am aware of time dilation and time proportionality, and know that as the aging brain processes new information more slowly, time appears to speed up and the days and weeks seem shorter. I am also aware that, as we age, most of us become set in our ways, which can be good because routine is healthy, but many of us are less open to new experiences and creative ways of thinking. As the joke goes, you know you’re getting old when you have a choice of two activities on a Saturday night, and you pick the one that will get you home earlier. Less novelty means less brain activity, and less activity in the brain means less fills up our time. It is only when we punctuate large intervals of time with innovation, variety, and novel approaches to problem-solving that our brain creates more neural pathways. When we retire and do little, or only maintain our familiar cerebral status quo, we must be on the lookout for mental decline. Our Sages have derived a heartwarming lesson from the fact that Moshe Rabbeinu stored the broken shards of the shattered first Tablets inside of the aron alongside the intact second Tablets. The Sages taught us that the broken tablets are a metaphor for an aged Torah scholar who may have some mental decline, but because he still contains the radiant wisdom and light of all that he has accomplished, he is still revered, just as the shards of the first Tablets, which were placed together with the intact second Tablets.

As we learn more about the brain’s plasticity, we recognize that one is able to train and retrain the ways in which we problem solve, learn new languages, and keep our minds stimulated. Although there are forms of mental decline which have genetic loading and which can occur among the most mentally agile and erudite persons, there is some hopeful data about preventing or slowing down the onset of some forms and aspects of cerebral deterioration. Talmudic study is one means of doing this, for it provides stimulation of thoughts, of making intelligent comparisons and discovering contrasts, and creating sequences of ideas directed towards a decision or a solution. Learning with a partner or being a participant in an ongoing lecture series can also boost communication and foster interpersonal attunement, which is far better than withdrawal and solitude when it comes to brain health. The bottom line is that as we age, we need to speed up the brain’s input and output if we seek to slow down our sense of time passing.

Elul has begun. The New Year will soon show up, whether or not we prepare for it and whether or not we look forward to it. There is something I miss about my bygone days in yeshiva. But there is still a lot that I can do to replicate that sense of time waiting for me as I keep active and try to learn new information and work at trying new and better ways of socializing, behaving, and communicating. What’s good for the brain may be good for the soul. Wishing us all a good New Year season. n

Rabbi Dr. Dovid Fox is a forensic and clinical psychologist, and director of Chai Lifeline Crisis Services. To contact Chai Lifeline’s 24-hour crisis helpline, call 855-3-CRISIS or email [email protected]. Learn more at ChaiLifeline.org/crisis.