"A test of a people is how it behaves toward the old. It is easy to love children. Even tyrants and dictators make a point of being fond of children. But the affection and care for the old, the incurable, the helpless are the true gold mines of a culture"
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Heschel doesn not flatter us with sentimental pictures of innocence; he indicts us with a harder metric. Children, he notes, are an easy public-relations project. They photograph well, they symbolize the future, and caring for them can be wrapped in national myth. Even regimes built on cruelty understand the propaganda value of baby-kissing. By opening there, Heschel strips benevolence of its most marketable form and asks what remains when compassion offers no glamour and no return.
The old, the incurable, the helpless are society's inconvenient mirrors. They expose whether a culture treats human worth as conditional: productive, attractive, improvable. Heschel's phrase "test of a people" borrows the language of measurement and judgment, as if ethics were not a private feeling but a civic audit. And "gold mines" is a deliberately jarring metaphor. Gold mines are where a society goes to extract value. Heschel flips that logic: the real treasure is not what you can take from the vulnerable, but what care for them reveals about your moral economy.
Context matters. As a Jewish theologian who fled Europe and spent his American years confronting civil rights and war, Heschel writes with the memory of what modern states do when they classify lives as burdens. The subtext is unmistakable: barbarism often arrives dressed as efficiency. A culture that can carry those who cannot "contribute" has built something sturdier than prosperity - it has built a definition of humanity that survives the temptation to rank lives.
The old, the incurable, the helpless are society's inconvenient mirrors. They expose whether a culture treats human worth as conditional: productive, attractive, improvable. Heschel's phrase "test of a people" borrows the language of measurement and judgment, as if ethics were not a private feeling but a civic audit. And "gold mines" is a deliberately jarring metaphor. Gold mines are where a society goes to extract value. Heschel flips that logic: the real treasure is not what you can take from the vulnerable, but what care for them reveals about your moral economy.
Context matters. As a Jewish theologian who fled Europe and spent his American years confronting civil rights and war, Heschel writes with the memory of what modern states do when they classify lives as burdens. The subtext is unmistakable: barbarism often arrives dressed as efficiency. A culture that can carry those who cannot "contribute" has built something sturdier than prosperity - it has built a definition of humanity that survives the temptation to rank lives.
Quote Details
| Topic | Aging |
|---|---|
| Source | Help us find the source |
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