Youth and Wisdom
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For most of my life, I’ve been considered “young.”
My parents had me when they were 40 and 33 — not old by today’s standards, but in 1972 that was practically geriatric! I was among the youngest kids in our Southfield neighborhood cohort. I was the youngest cousin on my dad’s side by many years. I was a young employee at the Federation. I received recognition early.
And I am among the youngest of the “second generation,” the children of Holocaust survivors. That one has always carried a different weight. Being young in that group means I’ll be able to tell my father’s story longer than most, and hand it to people who will never meet a survivor.
But I don’t always feel so young anymore. I’m nearly 54. I’ve worked my entire adult life. My kids are well on their way to full independence: They live elsewhere, working, and enjoying emerging adulthood.
And still, when I’m talking with people I consider peers, I often hear, “You’re just a baby!” It makes me laugh, and it makes me cringe. I probably should appreciate the nod to youth in midlife and accept it as the compliment it’s intended to be, but it can also feel like a brush-off.
If you’ve spent any time on Instagram, you may have come across Recess Therapy, the series where kids on playgrounds are asked big questions about love, fear, and what makes a good friend. Their answers are hilarious, and they’re often wiser than anything I’d hear at a professional conference. We share the clips because they’re adorable. I wonder how often we stop to take them seriously.
The dismissal runs in both directions. But if I’m honest, in philanthropy it usually runs one way. We give enormous credence to age and experience, and we don’t always listen to the next generation.
About a decade ago, I was at a professional conference and saw a presentation that really stuck with me. It described how the Greatest Generation, the Silent Generation, and even Boomers were funding programs for young Gen Xers, Millennials, and the older edge of Gen Z. Those programs reflected two things: what the funders thought younger people would want, and what the funders themselves wanted for them. What was missing was what younger people actually wanted. The intentions were good. The listening wasn’t there.
I see smaller versions of this all the time around family tables. A grandparent’s giving priorities are treated as settled, and the grandchildren’s ideas are received with the same “that’s so cute.” Sometimes it goes the other way, and an elder’s hard-won perspective gets tuned out as old-fashioned. Either way, the family loses half its wisdom.
I think about this often in my Family Circles work. A circle usually comes together to remember or honor someone older: a grandfather’s lifelong love of music, a mother’s devotion to the neighborhood where she was raised. Their passions are the starting point. But part of the work is looking at those passions through the lens of today rather than yesterday. However rapidly the world is changing, human needs are pretty fixed. The school program Grandpa loved may no longer exist, but the need he cared about is still very real and looks different now. Honoring someone’s legacy doesn’t mean funding what they would have funded in 1975. It means asking what their values call for today. That question needs every generation seated at the same table to get the answer right.
Jewish tradition has a lovely image for this. Rabbi Meir teaches: Don’t look at the jug, look at what’s inside it. A new jug can hold old wine, and an old jug can hold nothing at all.
So when does one stop being young? When does one become wise? I’ve come to think these are the wrong questions. Each age has its own wisdom. The 25-year-old sees the world as it’s becoming. The 85-year-old has watched worlds come and go. And those of us in the middle, still being called “babies,” get to hold both, if we’re willing to listen in both directions.
So I’ll leave you with this: How old do you feel? And whose wisdom, older or younger, have you been overlooking?
Shabbat Shalom,
Kari
