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Using The Past
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RABBI DAVID NELSON SPECIAL TO THE JEWISH NEWS

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ostalgia, it has been said,
is when we find the pre-
sent tense and the past
perfect. Current difficulties
cast a retroactive glow of happi-
ness on the past and conceal its
pains and its problems. Distance
in time as in space lends en-
chantment.
This Torah portion describes
two severe attacks of nostalgia —
two of many of our ancestors
suffered in the wilderness. When
they ran short of water or became
fed up with the steady diet of
manna, they looked back to the
"good old days" before Moses led
them into this predicament.
"Why did you make us leave
Egypt to die in the wilderness?
There is no bread and no water,
and we have come to loathe this
miserable food. We remember the
fish we used to eat in Egypt free,
the cucumbers and the melons
and the leeks and the onions and
the garlic. But now our soul is
dried up; we have nothing except
this manna to look to.
"Oh, the glory that was Egypt!
The grandeur we left behind!"
Conveniently edited out of
their rosy memories were the
degradation of slavery, the bru-
tality of arbitrary whippings, the
bricks without straw, the groans
of broken bodies, the decree con-
signing every male Hebrew
infant to death at birth. "Boy, did
we have fish and cucumbers and
garlic in Egypt!" Forgotten, of
course, was the fact that these
foods were flavored with bitter
tears and eaten with the bread of
affliction.
The tendency to romanticize
the past and to denigrate the
present did not begin with our
ancestors in the wilderness. The
oldest piece of writing in existence
is a cuneiform script on a piece of
papyrus some 6000 years old. It
contains this complaint: "Alas,
times are not what they used to
be. Everyone wants to write a
book and children are no longer
obedient to their parents."
And when do you think the
following commentary on the
younger generation was written?
"Our youth now love luxury; they
have bad manners, contempt for
authority; they show disrespect
for elders, and they love to chat-
ter instead of exercise. Children
are now tyrants, not the servants
of their household. They no longer
rise when elders enter the room.
They contradict their parents,
chatter before company, gobble

N

David Nelson is rabbi of

Congregation Beth Shalom.

up their food and tyrannize their
teachers."
No, this is not the report of a
principal to the school board on
the behavior of high school stu-
dents in the inner city; it is a
lament of Socrates written some
2400 years ago!
In the "good old days" they also
longed for the good old days. Per-
haps the best thing we can say
about the good old days is that
they cannot come back. If we
doubt it, let's try to read this page
tonight by an oil lamp.
After a lifetime of studying
America's past, an author named
Otto Bettmann wrote a book
called The Good Old Days —

They Were Terrible.

Let's not forget that one day
the very days which now fill us
with so much discontent and
grumbling will one day be con-
sidered "the good old days."
Despite the nostalgia that
filled our ancestors in the wilder-
ness, the whole thrust of Judaism
is to look forward not backward.
Our messiah has not yet come.
Moses is told by the Almighty to
command the complaining Is-
raelites in the wilderness: "Sanc-
tify yourselves for tomorrow!" The
road to fulfillment leads not to
yesterday but to tomorrow.
Having said all this we ought
to hasten to add that if we should

Shabbat Chukat:
Numbers 19:1-22:1
Judges 11:1-33.

not deify the past neither should
we denigrate it. Unless we know
where we come from we do not
know who we are and where we
should be facing. A generation
without Jewish memories is a
generation without Jewish hopes.
To be sure, we cannot and should
not live in the past; but the past
can and should live in us.
In his autobiography Growing
Up, Russell Baker talks about the
thoughts that came to him as a
result of his visits with his bedrid-
den mother who is in her 80s.
"These hopeless end-of-the-line
visits with my mother made me
wish I had not thrown off my own
past so carelessly. We all come
from the past, and children ought
to know what it was that went
into their making, to know that
life is a braided cord of humanity
stretching up from time long
gone, and that it cannot be
defined by a single journey from
diaper to shroud." ❑

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