RABBI ZUSYA'S QUESTION: REFLECTIONS OF A MIDLIFE BOOMER

The early Hassidic sage Rabbi Zusya once said, "When I reach the next world, God will not ask me, 'Why were you not Moses?' Instead, he will ask me, 'Why were you not Zusya?'" Why were you not the person you were meant to be? In today's world, though, putting Zusya's question this way sounds wrong. A little voice inside me protests, "Who said I was meant to be a certain kind of person? I can be whatever I want to be, and--hey--I decide what to make of my life; nobody else does."

HARRY R. MOODY

That protest to Zusya's question isn't unusual among baby boomers. In his book about upscale boomers titled Bobos in Paradise (New York City: Simon and Schuster, 2000), David Brooks states that the prime directive of the boomer generation is "Thou shalt construct thine own identity." Construct your identity. Make it up as you go along. Change course in midstream, even in midlife. Get a new spouse, a new job, a new religion. "Get a life," as the saying goes, and don't give me that stuff about "the person you were meant to be." That sounds like fate, or putting limits on who you can become.

Rabbi Zusya's question has a way of coming back insistently, though. A few weeks before I unexpectedly left a job at age 55, I received a gift in the mail, a book titled, provocatively, You Can't Be Anything You Want to Be by Arthur F. Miller Jr. and Bill Hendricks (Grand Rapids, Mich.: Zondercan, 1999). Opening the book package at my desk, I was tempted to inspect the cover to make sure it wasn't written by Rabbi Zusya. Might as well have been: same message. Pretty pessimistic, I thought to myself: Live within your limits. I put the book on a shelf without giving it a second glance.

Little did I know that the title of this book was like the kind of message sent by an unknown helper in a fairy tale to guide me out of a dilemma. Initially, I didn't think I was in a quandary, and I certainly didn't think I needed guidance. I had gone through life believing people could always be anything they want to be. Actually, in today's fast-paced job market none of us have much choice except to construct our identities over and over with every revision of our curriculum vitae.

My own career is a case in point. As a young man I'd gotten a doctorate in medieval philosophy, then promptly ended up working for a bank and eventually drifted into college administration and fundraising. Along the way I also wrote a self-help book and hit the national lecture circuit. I was always reinventing myself, like a character on Survivor who has to improvise to make it into the next episode.

In my enthusiasm for self-help and self-invention, I'd missed a key lesson. What do you lose when you reinvent yourself too many times? Who is the person you were meant to be? In the weeks that followed my unexpected job change, I thought a lot about Rabbi Zusya's question. I remembered that I got involved in this field called "aging" as a graduate student in philosophy 30 years ago. I felt that older people would be the best students of the kind of philosophy I craved: philosophy that is lived. In other words, I was not looking for students to teach, but for fellow travelers--those further along on the journey of life with something to teach me. I've never been disappointed. Even the lesson so many of us in aging learn firsthand--that not all old people are wise--carries its valuable reminder that reinventing oneself is not the same thing as discovering who one really is, who one was meant to be.

LIFE REVIEW
People don't usually ask themselves the question Zusya said God would pose to us in the next world. Most of us are too busy living our lives in this world. We don't review our lives, don't look back at where we've come from or forward to where we might be going. Life goes by quickly, and it is only at special moments that we take the time to look back. "Life review," a well-known phrase in the field of gerontology, refers to looking at the past during old age or at a moment of crisis, such as when life is threatened. But life review has value at other times, as well.

In my own transition, I found myself unexpectedly reviewing my life and asking Zusya's question, ever more insistently, and realized that people cannot wait for the next world to ask it of themselves. If we are fortunate, life will ask the question for us. Or maybe circumstances of life are always raising the question-- "Why are you not the person you were meant to be?" --but we simply don't hear it.

I think of the painter Paul Gauguin. Gauguin didn't start his career as an artist. By 1887 he was a successful stockbroker in Paris, though art was his passion. Then in middle age he realized that no matter how much money he made he wasn't living the life he wanted; he wasn't becoming the person he was meant to be. Gauguin left his job and family, migrated to the South Sea islands and lived the rest of his days painting haunting pictures with luminous faces that stare out at us from the edge of the world more than a century ago.

In Gauguin's case, changing the outer circumstances of his life did not put to rest life's biggest questions. He titled his last painting, "What are we? Where did we come from? Where are we going?" Gauguin was asking those questions to the very end of his life.

This message from the title of Gauguin's last painting is crucial. It helps people avoid the illusion that there is some exotic destination where all questions will be put to rest. Becoming the person we were meant to be doesn't mean traveling to the ends of the earth--and it certainly doesn't mean answering all questions with a pat formula.

Those of us in the fields of gerontology or lifespan psychology may be familiar with ideas of self-examination and life review, but it is only in moments of transition and personal crisis that the truth of the challenge becomes palpable to us. At those times, we may be open, in unexpected ways, to the big questions of life.

The poet Rainer Maria Rilke wrote in Letters to a Young Poet that genuine wisdom doesn't mean knowing all the answers but rather learning to make the questions part of the fabric of our lives. Rilke wrote:

"I want you, as much as you can . . . to be patient toward all that is unsolved in your heart and to try to love the questions themselves like locked rooms and like books that are written in a very foreign tongue. Do not seek the answers that cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is to live everything. Live the questions now. Perhaps you will then gradually, without noticing it, live along some distant day into the answer."

Harry R. Moody directs the Institute of Human Values (IHV) at the Brookdale Center on Aging of Hunter College and is affiliated with the International Longevity Center, both in New York City. He is the author of Five Stages of the Soul: Charting the Spiritual Passages That Shape Our Lives (New York City: Anchor/Doubleday, 1997). This article is reprinted with permission from Aging and the Human Spirit (spring 2001). The IHV e-newsletter, "Human Values Update," is available to those who visit www.HRMoody.com or e-mail Moody at hrmoody@yahoo.com.

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