"A Torah Portion Of Old Age and Sound Advice"

Wow. I just read a piece. Wow. It's about something I think about all the time: time. It's filled with phrases that explode in your head a second after you read them like literary Pop Rocks ("a fugue for the wisdom of the old playing softly against the stentorian symphonies of youth"). And it's a dvar Torah (sic) which works in the straight Torah and a chidush - that rings true to me - to boot. Liel Leibovitz paints a vivid picture of an old woman named Francis and then organically mentions an old man named Moshe. This piece blew me away.

Youth No More

by Liel Leibovitz

"My next-door neighbor, Frances, cast her first ballot in 1920. She was among the approximately one million women in New York State who celebrated the suffrage movement’s monumental victory that year by participating in the electoral process for the first time in American history. She had voted, she told me, for the socialist Eugene Debs; it was the only time in her life she hadn’t given her voice to the Democratic Party’s candidate. Frances shared that story with me a few days after John Kerry’s defeat in the 2004 election, and I could swear by her look that she still felt a little awkward about having wasted her vote." CLICK FOR FULL ESSAY.