Los Angeles Jewish Home

By Alice Kulick, 88
Jewish Home resident

As I was watching Good Morning America, an author of the book “Time Keeper” came on. His concept on how we use time got me thinking about time and how we use it all our lives. We used our time as children at play, school and growing up to high school, proms and then onto college. When we married and had children, our time went very fast. Raising our children was a full-time job. Our home and family was so busy, we just didn’t know how much time had passed.

The years and our time also passed swiftly. Our ages also passed with time. Before we knew wit, we were senior citizens. Now we had lots of time. But how were we using it? We now enjoy our lives in the beautiful Jewish Home. But do we spend our days in our rooms watching TV or do we volunteer in the mail room, conduct tours, help our in the volunteer office? There are many jobs to volunteer for and committees to be a part of. We are all time keepers. Everyone has time but how we choose to use it can make our lives more valuable.

Labels: Aging, For the Spirit, Kulick, Life Cycle, Time, Time Keeper

A famous phrase from a Torah reading this month has set me thinking about the nature of our responsibility towards each other. Two brothers, Cain and Abel, bring thanksgiving offerings to God. Perhaps one brother is more generous-hearted than the other, for we read that God accepts Abel’s gift, but not Cain’s. Hurt and jealous, Cain kills his brother – and then seeks to evade responsibility.

But God always calls on us to take responsibility, and demands of Cain: “Where is your brother Abel?” In a chilling response, Cain answers: “I do not know; am I my brother’s keeper?” It is an extreme kind of individualism that could claim a person is not responsible for what happens to his brother, that “each man is an island” responsible only for himself.

It seems to me that different people have very different visions of who they are responsible for. Cain took the most extreme view, trying to shuffle off any idea that what happened to his own brother was any concern of his. Others might say they feel responsibility for their close family and friends, people they love. What do you think? Perhaps it should be enough to limit our feelings of responsibility to those in our own circle, but we know that some people go much further. Indeed, don’t we sometimes demand that others feel a sense of responsibility?

When residents – especially Holocaust survivors – talk about the Holocaust, they frequently ask: Where was God? But residents also raise another question: Where was the rest of humanity? It seems that much of the world did not feel a sense of brotherhood with Hitler’s victims, and did nothing to stop the mass murder. (On the other hand, we have the heroic example of the people we call the “Righteous among the Nations” who risked their lives to save Jews from the Nazis.)

I am reminded of another time Torah uses a form of that word keeper. Many of you have been present with me when I have asked God to bless you, in the traditional formula from Torah. The blessing starts: “May the Lord bless you and keep you” (or we could understand it as “protect” or “look after” you).

Does that mean I can leave it to God to look after you and everyone else? Of course that’s not how we understand our relationship with God – or with humanity. Ascribing to God qualities such as compassion and justice should inspire us to live by these qualities ourselves. And if we ask God to look after people, then we should know that we have a duty to look after people. We are the keepers of our brothers and sisters. So many of the ethical teachings of Torah imply this, such as the way we are commanded to look out for the interests of the widow or orphan, or the stranger (immigrant), or our employees.

To be the keepers of our brothers and sisters in America or around the world is a tough doctrine for all of us. So often we’d rather bury our heads in the sand and not get involved with the needs or dangers that others are facing. It’s so much easier to turn off the television news, and forget. Wouldn’t we all, quite often, rather say: I am not my brother’s keeper: What happens to him is not my responsibility.

But there are so many stirring examples of people who do care, who do take responsibility for others. Eleanor Roosevelt championed the establishment of a Jewish State, and advocated for African Americans. Many people actively campaign for the rights and safety of others, and some even put their own lives at risk, like those young Jews who stood with African Americans in their struggle for civil rights in the 1960’s.

I believe that one of the foundations of this Home is the sense that we are all responsible for each other. I see it in the generosity of our donors. And when a resident looks out for the needs of other residents – or staff – doesn’t that come from a sense that we are the keepers of our brothers and sisters? Humanity is at its greatest when we know this.

Tell Dr. Doron Melamed that aging is inevitable, and he is among the first to agree. The critical question, he points out, is not whether the process can be avoided – it’s whether, at certain levels, it can actually be reversed. His breakthrough research has proven exactly that.

Based at Haifa’s Technion, one of Israel’s most prestigious universities, Melamed leads a team of researchers that has accomplished something extraordinary: showing that it is possible to turn back the clock on the aging of the body’s immune system. The idea, he says, is not necessarily to extend survival, but rather to help people live healthier. “Older people suffer more from infectious disease and cancer,” he notes. “If we are able to improve their immune systems, they will age healthier and enjoy an increased quality of life.” His finding matches up exactly with the Jewish Home’s commitment to healthy aging, which includes a focus on helping seniors live high quality, productive and independent lives.

Melamed is an immunologist – someone who studies the development of immune cells. As the body ages, those cells see a marked decrease in development, ultimately leading to an immune system comprised of old cells that have a limited capacity to respond to infection. In the scientific community, conventional wisdom has long held that this age-dependent change in immune cell development is part of a progressive and irreversible process. Working in collaboration with colleagues, Melamed has turned that conventional wisdom on its head. “We conducted a ‘proof of principle’ experiment in which we took an old mouse whose lymphocytes [a type of white blood cell] were poorly generated and transformed it so that it was just like a young mouse in terms of generating cells,” he explains.

The potential implications of his work are remarkable and far-reaching. Restored to full health and functionality, immune systems would be better equipped to fight disease, enabling seniors to maximize enjoyment of their golden years instead of “going every week or two to a physician, having to take multiple pills each day and facing repeated hospitalization,” Melamed says.

In partnership with researchers at Haifa’s Rambam Hospital, Melamed is conducting a clinical trial in humans to determine whether his discovery holds true across species. “I think it will take another two or three years until we start getting data from the clinical trial about whether or not this will work,” he forecasts. Once the efficacy of his treatment is determined, Melamed predicts it will be another several years before physicians and scientists begin identifying the full range of opportunities for human use.

Funded in part by coveted grants from the Israel Science Foundation, Melamed’s research continues to distinguish him as one of the country’s most promising young scientists – someone capable of seeing things with new eyes. It’s a metaphor he finds appropriate. “Aging was always considered to be progressive and irreversible,” he says. “Suddenly, someone comes along and wonders whether that’s just the way we see it, and that maybe, if we adjust our vision, we would come up with a different result. And that’s exactly what happened.”

Labels: Age Reversal, Aging, For the Body, Healthy Aging, Immune System, Immunology, Israel, Israel Science Foundation, Melamed, Technion