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Edge of Tomorrow: At 91, Grandma reflects on the state of the world and her soul for Rosh Hashanah

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September 23, 2014

“It’s been such a lousy year,” my grandmother said when I asked her what she thought I should write for my Rosh Hashanah column.

It was a cloudy Sunday night in Miami and we had just finished watching the Tom Cruise movie “Edge of Tomorrow,” in which Cruise is forced to repeat his past until he figures out how to save the world.

“You mean, for us?” I asked, as our family had lost both my mother and stepfather within the last 15 months.

“For the world!” my grandmother exclaimed.  “We gave up in Iraq; we gave up in Afghanistan …”

“So, what approach should I take with my column?” I pressed.

“Definitely optimistic,” she said.

One of the things I’ve never understood about my grandmother is how she has retained, at age 91, a level of optimism I feel I lost at age 6. And it’s not for want of extensive experience: My grandmother, Roz, was a pioneer of her generation, one of the first commercial real-estate developers in South Florida, the fruits of which she parlayed into a second career as a philanthropist and communal leader. The list of her awards and accomplishments is quite long, so she has always held a position of authority within our community, and even more so within our family. Without fail, her go-to words of advice have always been: “It will all work out”  — which is nice to hear, even if I don’t always believe her.

As we watched the besieged world in “Edge of Tomorrow,” I realized that this movie is — like my grandmother — strangely, sometimes bleakly, optimistic. Guided by the motif, “Live. Die. Repeat,” the Cruise character is doomed to live in an endless loop unless he learns from previous mistakes and can assimilate past blunders into teaching moments that move him forward. In fact, the redemption of the entire world depends on this one man’s ability to grow and change.

How Jewish is that? And how apropos of the moment, days before Rosh Hashanah, that Cruise’s conundrum would loosely parallel the spiritual work of the holy days. In this film, the Hollywood ending conveys that change creates new possibilities.

“Hopelessness,” my grandmother declared from her spot on the couch. “That’s what we really have to strive against — when people are hopeless.”

This reminded me of the wisdom of the Bratslav Rebbe, another optimist, who counseled that the one great sin is the sin of despair.

By this point it was nearing midnight and we were already halfway into a very different film, the 2002 Oscar-nominated “City of God,” about a slum outside Rio de Janeiro in which gang violence reigns, saturating the city with fear and grief and ruining the prospects of a generation of impoverished youth.

I turned to my grandmother and asked how she could talk of optimism in view of the overwhelming evidence of the world’s anguish and despair.

“The large portion of the world wants to live and let live,” she said, even despite existential threats such as ISIS and the rise of international terrorism. “Most people want to take care of their families, make a decent living so they can have the things that they need and, eventually, want.” 

Grandma believes terrorism can be undermined by international diplomacy, and that the United States still has the potential to lead the world in matters of economics and humanitarianism. And yet, she is hardly oblivious to the more immediate dilemmas of our own nation.

“If you want to talk about our country,” she said, “the parties in Congress have split further and further apart. There are issues with the poor, and the educational system. Nobody in this country should go hungry. Nobody in this country should not have a place to live.”

Despite evidence of its flaws and failings, her faith in our political system is unwavering. “People have to vote,” she insisted. “Anyone who doesn’t take the opportunity to vote when they can is making a big mistake. In so many places, a vote doesn’t mean anything, but we live in a country where it matters.”

Grandma is not naïve. She is aware the world is full of brokenness.  And yet, she maintains her belief in tikkun olam, explaining that she feels a personal responsibility to repair things. In light of the good fortune that has allowed her to do so, I ask if she ever feels guilty for having so much when many have so little.

“The word tzedakah is what I go back to all the time,” she said, “to make the world a better place than it was when we came into it. [My family] worked hard through several generations to get where we are; we didn’t have any special privileges. My parents came here to get away from the strife that was going on in Europe. So I don’t feel guilty. But there are people who are sick, who are not capable of working, who for so many reasons can’t afford high rents and so forth, and the country as a whole has to work toward being in a position where each person has a job, whether they are men or women, rich or poor. Right now the haves are so much above the have-nots that the difference is impossible to believe.”

I asked her where she acquired these altruistic values.

“Our Jewish heritage,” she told me unequivocally. “I have always tried to help those who cannot help themselves in every way that I could.”

Since she is well into the twilight of her life, I often wonder if she feels complete. Does life feel “finished” for her, or does she still set goals for herself? Does she still feel the need to grow? To strive? To do better?

“Ohhh,” she sighed, “almost everything I would want to do better. But what I’m doing now is just elaborating on everything I’ve already done. In some ways, I’m taking the place of your mother since she’s not here; we didn’t expect to lose her that fast, so just being here helps my children and grandchildren accept things the way that they are, rather than the way we would want them to be.”

The symbolism is so clear: On Rosh Hashanah, we celebrate the birthday of the world — for it was on the first day of Tishrei that God created human beings. Soon, we would prove how foolish and flawed we could be, and God would punish us many, many times. But at the moment of this monumental act of creation, God’s forecast was, “This is very good.” Which I think makes God, like my grandmother, an eternal optimist.

Before I went to bed, I asked my grandmother one final question. After nine-plus decades of living, does she harbor any regrets?

“Right now, at the end of my life, I am very happy with the way life has treated me. I have no complaints,” she said. “But there are so many people who are in such distress that if I could do anything at all to make life more bearable, I would love to be able to do it.”

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