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Accepted Paper:
Fragile rhythms: rituals and routines of care towards an end of life
Merav Shohet
(Boston University)
This paper examines the care trajectories of octogenarian and nonagenarian elders at kibbutzim near Israel’s borders, to reflect on what happens when war overlays aging and illness, (re)shaping the interpersonal dynamics of care as these collide or collude with geopolitical conflagrations.
Paper Abstract:
This paper examines the care trajectories of several octogenarian and nonagenarian elders at kibbutzim near Israel’s borders with Lebanon and Palestine, to reflect on what happens when war overlays aging and illness, (re)shaping the interpersonal dynamics of care as these collide or collude with geopolitical conflagrations. I describe, first, how elders in varying states of fragile health sought to establish ritualized daily routines to enact wellbeing while anticipating, at times with dread, at others with equanimity, the oncoming but temporally uncertain end of their life. Drawing on ethnographic interviews, observations, and media representations, I then reflect on how their precarious rhythms were shattered and remade in the wake of the Hamas massacres of October 7 and Israel’s devastating war in Gaza, as border kibbutzim faced mandated or voluntary displacement. Attuning to the silences and gaps in their narratives, I attempt to trace the psychic life of this elder generation’s biopolitics (Stevenson 2014), where militarization has been an enduring, if at times only haunting presence. I suggest that these elderly Jews’ histories of dispossession and repossession not only inflect the ways they conflate Israel with home as an inhabitable but tenuous space of welcome (Willen 2019), but limit sentiments and expressions of empathy, thereby highlighting the fraught nature of care.