Wisdom of the Elders

October 2, 2026/21 Tishrei 5787/Erev Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah

Hevre/friends,

This week I witnessed one of the most important conversations of our time.

Over forty people, from their twenties to their nineties, gathered for our Wisdom of the Elders evening which I proudly co-lead with my friend and Jewish community leader, Donna Friedman Meir. It was Sukkot, the season of ushpizin, when we invite our ancestors into the sukkah to share their Torah and rejoice with us. So we invited three living elders, ages 87, 92 and 96, to tell us about their lives: the triumphs and the tragedies, the Jewish values that shaped them, the lessons that carried them through.

In this perilous moment, we came hungry. We wanted to learn how to find stability in chaos. Abundance in scarcity. Meaning in confusion. Wholeness in brokenness. Love in hate.

Then a woman in her twenties asked the question that changed the room: Tell us honestly. What do you think our generation needs to understand that we're missing?

All three elders leaned forward at once. You could feel the charge in their bodies, the weight of what they were about to say.

The first didn't hesitate. Lean in, she told the young people. Throw yourselves into the crises of this moment, the way my generation did during Vietnam. We're old. We're tired. It's your turn now. There's no one else.

The second urged them to find a passion. Something you care about deeply, fiercely. Something that gives you a reason to get up in the morning and a sense of what's possible.

The third was sharpest of all. Get an education. Be an informed citizen. Learn how government works, how a democracy functions. Know the system, so you can help take back the reins of a country that feels out of control.

Silence. Everyone was absorbing it.

Then someone in their sixties spoke up. Remember, she said, these young people grew up in a pandemic, told daily that the planet was failing, watching the civic values we trusted give way to crudeness, aggression and violence. Our young questioner nodded. For her and her friends, she admitted, the real challenge is just getting through the day.

There is a quiet despair among many young people. And too often we are too busy being enraged to notice it.

Between the pandemic, October 7, and the dark years since, I often wonder what it feels like to be in the final chapter of life and to imagine leaving the world in this state. When I have the honour of laying people to rest these days, I can't help but think about how our broken, divided world coloured their last thoughts as they said goodbye to the generations they were leaving behind. The urgency in our elders' answers that evening was surely a reflection of the anxiety every generation feels, living in a world on the edge.

Other exchanges moved me just as deeply. The elders spoke of personal loss, of families uprooted, of political persecution, and of how they came through. They were candid and heartfelt and, remarkably, hopeful. They held their struggles and their achievements with equanimity, and with profound gratitude.

But what stays with me most isn't any one thing they said. It's how rare and precious it was simply to sit together, every age in one room, at the feet of our elders, and draw out their experience, their insight, their fears, their dreams. It felt like our own Har Sinai. We were receiving Torah: the Torah of lived experience and of courageous, compassionate reflection.

The ushpizin ritual welcomes our ancestral family into the sukkah: Abraham, Isaac, Jacob, Moses, Aaron, Joseph and David; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, Leah, Abigail and Esther. But it calls them guests, and in doing so it scrambles our usual categories of closeness. When we welcome the poor and the vulnerable into our sukkot, we turn strangers into family. With ushpizin, we turn family into honoured guests.

We look again at the faces we see every day, the people we're sure we already know. And when we take the time to ask, to listen, to look longer, we find a whole life we never fully met.

Sukkot ends tonight. As you leave the sukkah, take the practice with you. The sukkah is a small model of our fragile world, a place where we're still called to find meaning, purpose and joy. Gather your own elders. Sit with them. Ask, and listen.

Shmini Atzeret and Simchat Torah are now upon us. Three years ago, our day of greatest joy became the darkest of our generation. This year, again, we will say Yizkor and then, in the same breath, begin Bereishit. Memory and renewal, together. That is Judaism's promise of an energy that never runs out. It pulses all around us, in our families, in our friendships, in the elders still at our tables.

Don't squander it.

Shabbat Shalom and Chag Sameach,

Dini