A Life of Connection

So, the following headline caught my eye: “New Study: Helping Others Slows Cognitive Decline by Up to 20%.” Researchers at the University of Texas and the University of Massachusetts followed 30,000 US adults over 20 years and found that those who volunteered or offered informal help to neighbors, relatives, or friends experienced 15% to 20% less cognitive decline associated with aging.

In short, helping others is good for us. As a wise woman quoted in Rav Eliyahu Eliezer Dessler’s Kuntres Hachesed remarked, “Everything I kept for myself was lost; everything I gave to others remained.” When one gives to others, that act of giving creates a relationship that endures. And the quality of our relationships is the best predictor of life satisfaction, according to the famous Harvard longitudinal study.

IF ANYONE SERVED as a living prooftext for the proposition that a life of giving to others helps one remain vigorous and full of zest, it was Morah Dubby Liff, as she was known in Baltimore, who passed away two weeks ago, just three days after her 95th birthday, completely lucid until the end. When flowers arrived on the Erev Shabbos before her birthday, she quipped, “For the grand finale.” In a photo of her surrounded by the flowers, she is smiling serenely.

Her ayin tovah, love of people, and giving nature drew young and old to her — from her four-year-old charges in the pre-elementary school of Talmudic Academy in Baltimore, where she taught for 63 years, only retiring at the age of 93, to her fellow residents in an assisted living facility in Lakewood, where she spent her last 15 months. At the shivah house, a woman told Rebbetzin Liff’s sons that the only reason she ever thought about returning to America for a visit was to see their mother, whose very presence buoyed her so much.