Parshat Vezot Haberachah
We tend to think growing wiser means becoming more realistic.
We learn how the world works. We become more discerning, less naïve, more careful about getting our hopes up.
But somewhere along the way, we can begin to confuse maturity with becoming more certain. We decide we know what people are like. What we’re capable of. What will work. What won’t.
And slowly, experience can begin to make our world smaller.
In Vezot Haberachah, the final parsha of the Torah, Moses dies at 120. He has spent forty years leading a people who challenged and disappointed him. He has known conflict, failure, frustration and loss. And after devoting his life to bringing his people to the Promised Land, he knows he will not enter it himself.
Yet the Torah tells us:
May life deepen our wisdom without diminishing our wonder at what is still possible.
“His eyes were undimmed and his natural force unabated.”
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks noticed something beautiful in these words. Perhaps these are not two separate descriptions. Perhaps Moses retained his vitality because his vision remained undimmed. He never lost sight of his ideals, or of what he still believed was possible.
Moses wasn’t naïve. Life had taught him too much for that.
But what he learned from life did not become a limit on what he could still imagine.
Maybe that is part of what keeps us young.
We recognize it in someone still willing to learn something new, take on a challenge, change their mind, deepen a relationship, or discover a capacity they didn’t know they had.
Because sometimes growing old happens in the conclusions we begin to make:
I know how this will go.
That’s not for me.
People don’t change.
It’s too late to start.
Wisdom asks us to learn from experience without allowing it to become the boundary of our lives.
Experience should make us deeper, not smaller.
There can still be more to learn. More to try. More to understand. More in another person than we have allowed ourselves to see. Even more in ourselves than we have discovered yet.
As we reach the final words of the Torah, may we carry forward everything life has taught us without allowing it to close us. May we grow older and wiser with our eyes still undimmed, our curiosity alive, our idealism still vibrant, and our sense of possibility open to what may come next.
Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach.
