Recently, I’ve been reading and hearing a lot about what is called the “Age Fifty Crisis.” It refers to men and women around the age of fifty who make significant changes in their lives, almost as if they are trying to be born again.
I read that in the free world, this is often the stage when people get divorced, G-d forbid, resign from their jobs, or move to a different city or country.
At this point in life, many of their major obligations are already behind them. The children are independent, the daily pressure is lighter, and suddenly they dare to discover — and even admit to themselves — that their current spouse no longer feels suitable, that this house or this car bores them, that the city they live in or the social circle around them makes them feel small or at least does not allow them to flourish. The work has become exhausting and there is a longing for something different.
In short, you understand the point. These are actually very understandable feelings for someone who has lived the same life for twenty-five years and longs for change.
I can understand it. In my opinion, many people around the age of fifty can understand it and even identify with it.
I can understand the feeling of boredom, the sense of “I’ve had enough,” the desire for change, the need to flourish and truly live. But what pains me deeply is the assumption that the only path toward something new and exciting is to sever the existing relationships.
I would like to challenge that idea.
A person who has been married for twenty-five years and longs for renewal, excitement, and butterflies — is there really no way to reach that within the home itself? Must one necessarily destroy what already exists?
In my opinion, there is another way.
It is simply much harder. Much more painful. It requires much greater self-awareness and self-understanding.
Not only in marriage — in almost every area of life — the relatively easy path is to cut off an existing connection and create a new one. The harder and more demanding path, but in my eyes the truer and healthier one, is to deepen the existing connection and create change within it.
Here is an exercise:
Imagine you are fifty years old. You work at a decent job, but not one you truly wanted. You live in a nice apartment, but if you dared, you might change something about your living experience. You drive a functional car, but if you had the courage, you would replace it with something that makes you smile every time you enter it.
Suppose you are married to a good woman and life is “fine,” but the passion and enthusiasm have died. The conversation has become entirely technical and local — and who even speaks anymore about butterflies? You live among the same people your entire life, and as a result most of your daily conversations are shallow, technical, or superficial, while deep down you long for a different kind of dialogue, a different language for your life.
Suppose your daily routine has looked exactly the same for twenty years, and in truth you wish it looked different. Suppose you dream of completing the entire Talmud, but you already assume that won’t happen in this lifetime. Suppose you dream of beginning your day at 5:30 in the morning with a study partner learning Chassidut, but you are so exhausted from all the burdens of life that you have almost given up on the dream. Suppose you wish to become a person who can give generous amounts to charity, but that dream feels infinitely distant from who you are now. Suppose you dreamed of being the kind of father who is deeply connected to his children, but in reality it never happened and now it already feels too late.
Now imagine that — G-d forbid — you suffer a concussion that causes you to forget experiences, memories, traumas, and fears. You still recognize your family members, but only their names and faces. Not their personalities. Not their reactions. Not the fears or traumas connected to them. You forgot their essence; only their existence remains.
You return home. You see your wife, your children, the house, the car, the synagogue, the friends, the workplace — essentially the life you left behind before the concussion.
What do you do?
Remember: you no longer have fears. You no longer carry traumas. You never lost money in the past, and your parents never passed down financial anxiety to you. You do not remember the painful arguments and conflicts with your wife — you are meeting her anew. You have no painful memories regarding your children — you are meeting them anew as well. You do not truly remember who your synagogue friends were, so you are free to choose them again. Your schedule is no longer fixed and exhausting — you create it anew.
You can decide to wake up at five in the morning for a class. You can insert a plan into your daily routine to complete the Talmud. You need to get to know your wife again, so you schedule a series of dates and ask her anew: “What do you love? What makes you happy? What frightens you?” And so too with your children.
You open Spotify and search for subjects through which you wish to expand your mind again. You look at your bank account and realize something there makes no sense — but you have no fears, so you are not intimidated by meeting with an investment expert, a real-estate advisor, or someone from the capital markets. You look at your apartment and it no longer feels familiar, so you hire an interior designer to create a vision where your bedroom looks like a luxury hotel suite. You diversify your bookshelf because you are now a fresh person.
Should I continue?
Now tell me: what are the chances that a regular fifty-year-old person — someone who did not suffer a concussion and did not forget anything, someone who absolutely carries fears and traumas, pain and experiences — will stop and examine all this and say to himself:
“You know what? I refuse to continue living in mediocrity. I want to move toward my aspirations, both spiritual and material. I must find a way to release the fears and conditioning and begin walking forward, slowly perhaps, but without stopping — and especially without listening to everyone and everything that tries to stop me.”
It is difficult — very difficult — but possible.
And if it is possible, then it is worth every effort.
The message is that almost everything can be renewed and upgraded within the existing framework. It will likely require breaking internal patterns and assumptions, courage to speak and express oneself, strength to look pain directly in the eye, tremendous inner power to overcome fears and traumas — all while remaining within the existing structure, especially within marriage.
And this connects to the Torah portion of Bemidbar and to the giving of the Torah.
The Torah was given in the desert to teach us that truly new things emerge in a desert — in a place where nothing from the past exists. And if I want to recreate my life anew, then I must first quiet the noise and imagine myself in a desert free of traumas and fears, a place cleansed of anxieties and painful experiences — where everything can be created again from the beginning.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zalman Wishedski