Among this year’s National Caring Award honorees were General Colin Powell and Rabbi Yitzhak Dovid Grossman. I had not met either man (hadn’t even heard about the Rabbi until quite recently), but the General and I share a common history. We were both raised in NYC by working-class immigrant parents: I, in the Washington Heights section of Manhattan surrounded by German Jews, and Colin, in the South Bronx surrounded by Yiddish speaking Jews. This is where he learned to speak the language. We both graduated from the City College of New York within two years of each other.

Colin Powell, who wrote of himself, “mine is the story of a black kid of no early promise,” managed to become Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and the US Secretary of State. After his public service, he founded America’s Promise, a campaign to provide disenfranchised youth with mentors and safe places to gather. “We have an obligation,” Powell says, “to provide for the next generation, places where children can grow up in healthy communities.”

Also at the awards ceremonies was a Rabbi from Israel, Yitzhak Dovid Grossman, this year’s International Caring Award recipient. In 1969, as a 22 year-old Rabbi, he arrived in Ha’Emek, a northern Israeli town that had high unemployment, drug abuse, and crime rates. He left Jerusalem because he wanted to stop a new generation of kids from winding up in jail.

Reb Yitzhak walked the streets of Ha’ Emek looking for children wherever the abandoned gather— in parks, prisons, discos — and invited them home for Sabbath meals. From that beginning handful, Rabbi Grossman founded a shelter giving love and care to 7000 at-risk youth at Migdal Ohr in Ha’Emek. On its sprawling campus are hundreds of teachers and counselors, a day care center, elementary school, library, computer center, and dormitories.

I overheard Gen. Powell and Reb Yitzhak speaking Yiddish in an animated conversation during the opening reception. The Rabbi said to the General, “Why don’t you come to speak to my children the next time you’re in the neighborhood?” The General responded that he would, “Alivay” (God willing). When they said goodbye, they wished each other “gey gezunterheyt” (go in good health), the Yiddish equivalent of the Navajo farewell “may you walk in beauty,” or the Lakota “may our eyes behold each other again.”

Two old men speaking Yiddish . . . reminding us what this season of peace on earth and goodwill toward man is all about. Take care of the children, from generation to generation, provide for them a safe, loving community, and we will build a world where human beings still take care of one another.

Happy Holidays . . . peace on earth, goodwill toward man . . . gey gezunterheyt.

I recently spoke at an Alzheimer’s fundraising gala in Abilene Texas. Sufferers of Alzheimer’s dementia experience the mind’s decline until even the familiar is unrecognizable.

To families who watch their loved ones decline into unrecognizable shadows of the people they once were, it can be so painful they can no longer visit them.

In spite of scientific advances, we still don’t know what causes it, how to prevent it, or how to treat it, other than palliatively. As we live longer, the incidence of this disease will triple by mid-century. In developed countries, it is one of the costliest diseases to society. In the US it costs $100 billion annually.

I told the audience, even if we can’t cure Alzheimer’s, we can heal our relationship to it. To heal ourselves and those we love and care for, we must look at the landscape of incurable senility, and see it with new eyes.

As families and caregivers, we can see beyond what now defines our loved ones and appreciate an occasional smile or hint of recognition — any reminder of their impact on our lives when they were whole. This is how we can let go of only the sadness and heal ourselves.

Former Supreme Court Justice Sandra Day O’Connor retired from the US Supreme Court in 2005, a decision based on the need to care for her beloved husband John.

John J. O’Connor III, a distinguished attorney, was married to Sandra Day for 57 years, and died several weeks ago. For the last 19 years, he suffered from Alzheimer’s and, for the last few, no longer recognized Sandra.

A couple of years ago, John became romantically involved with a fellow Alzheimer’s patient at his residential care center. Sandra Day O’Connor was not upset; she said she was grateful that the relationship had a significant improvement on John’s frame of mind. Sandra said this made him happy and she loved to see him that way.

If you can see the landscape with new eyes, you can let go of the loss and see the legacy of love. What we carry with us at the end of our lives is far less important than what we leave behind.