The Elder Factor

What’s an elder? “Elder” wasn’t in my vocabulary until Bernie made Peter Matthiessen and Bob Lee “Zen Peacemaker elders.” He used 80 as the defining age. I’ve no idea why Bernie chose “80.” He never made it to 80 himself. Missed it by a couple of months. My father missed it by a lot. I was happy to get there. Then I began to wonder, what’s an elder? Before then, I thought “senior.” Senior clinicians were the supervising analysts I’d trained with at Brookdale. They were thirty years older than me at least.

When I was offered my first consulting gig on one of the South Beach inpatient units, I was 31, out of social work school only eight years and probably got the offer because I had my doctorate, still rare among social workers in those days. I was happy to get the extra money, but I felt like a fraud. I was a beginner in psychiatry, a baby. I was shocked when South Beach staff, two years out of school, referred to themselves as senior clinicians. I joked that South Beach was “a children’s crusade.” Hired to help an inpatient team with their group work, I planned to say nothing in the beginning, to observe, but realized immediately that, in my few years of practice, I’d learned some stuff which was useful to people with even less experience. I did some good work there, got picked up by a second inpatient team, and eventually came on full-time as the interim chief social worker while the permanent chief returned to Israel to fulfill her military obligation.  I enjoyed that year, worked with more than ten clinical teams but didn’t become a “senior clinician.” In my mind, I was still a beginner, and I hadn’t yet read Suzuki Roshi’s Beginner’s Mind.

My friend Rabbi David Curiel suggested “mentor” as an alternative term. David remembered reading somewhere that a mentor was someone thirty years older than the person being mentored. Thirty years resonated, reminded me of my senior clinicians. I thought about the people who’d mentored me starting out, at the social work camp where I’d worked college summers and at Brookdale in my early professional years. All but one was at least thirty years older than me, and he was close. They were mentors, not elders. They were role models. They were all still very much in the game. It wasn’t just the advice they gave me. It was the stories they shared of what they were doing. They were doing what I wanted to be doing. They were being what I wanted to become. They were all players.

When we opened our first charter school, I was going on 67 and into my second career. I was a player. My peers were all retiring, but I was still in the game and proud of it. Maybe I thought I had no choice. Our daughter, Morrigan, turned 12 that year. I figured I’d be working until she graduated college. Over the ensuing twelve years later, we opened three more schools. Our network, Integration Charter Schools, grew to 1500 students and 330 staff. By the time I retired, we had annual revenue closing in on $50 million and were positioned for continued growth.

It was only after I retired (for the second time) that I began to think of myself as an elder and to wonder what that meant. Senior? Mentor? Rabbi David turned me on to a book on eldering by Reb Zalman Schachter. David studied with Reb Zalman. I love that. Bernie and Reb Zalman were close. From Age-Ing to Sage-Ing arrived from Amazon a day later.

Reb Zalman helped me think about the meaning of eldering. He kept bringing me back to the work I’d been doing. Although in the beginning, especially in years when it was my sweat equity that carried us to our first charter, I was the proverbial chief cook and bottle-washer but, as time went on, I became less involved in the day-to-day nuts and bolts and more focused on the container in which our young people worked. Over those years, I increasingly focused on developing the next generation of leaders. Mentoring was the biggest part of my job, and in my final years it became a formal part of my schedule. We called it “coaching.” In addition to the four VP’s who reported directly to me, I met every other week with our principals individually and with the assistant principals as a group monthly. Mentoring wasn’t telling people what to do. It was helping people learn from mistakes and setbacks.

People on our team referred to me as  “our visionary.” I was the person who dreamt up, envisioned, the new schools that we would open, the new initiatives, but more important, I kept in front of us the vision on which we had founded our schools, to combat the stigma and discrimination faced by people – including children – living with mental illnesses and other emotional challenges. That was the principle that guided us in school design and in our operational decisions.

Reading Reb Zalman, I discover that this kind of envisioning is what elders do, helping the community connect where it’s coming from to where it’s going. And elders mentor. Was it possible that I’d begun to practice eldering – without realizing it – even before I retired?

Well, I wasn’t 80, but over the 12 years, I was getting older. Maybe I was growing into elderhood. I could feel it happening. My way of leading and teaching was morphing, moving from articulating principles to telling stories. Reb Zalman might have said that I was acting more and more like an elder.

My sense though is that Zalman would say that elders are no longer in the game, and I was still active. I was old enough to be the grandfather of the school leaders I was mentoring, and I was discovering the joy – a joy I had to learn to appreciate – of turning my tasks over to the “youngsters.” While I still thought of myself as a player, I wasn’t competing with members of my team. I wasn’t sitting at the poker table anymore.

Looking back now, it looks like I was becoming an elder during my charter school years. Of course, I was putting on age, and living a long time, bringing the long view to the present moment, is an important part of eldering. I brought the stability of long experience. When we faced setbacks and challenges, I was confident that we would learn and grow from the experience. I shared my experience, and as time went by – as I got older – I became more comfortable with my storytelling practice.  And I held the vision. I held the this-is-why-we-built-these-schools.

I didn’t think of myself as eldering, but maybe I was. We built a network of schools with a unique organizational culture. I’ve been asked how we did it, and I’ve always talked about our vision and our values. But why did it work at ICS? Maybe a key ingredient which hadn’t been articulated is elder leadership. Maybe what made the difference at ICS was the Elder Factor, although I didn’t realize it at the time.