“The past is never dead,” wrote William Faulkner. “It’s not even past.” As long as things we said and did long ago still shape our conduct and character – well, then, prior events are still very present.
Thinking this way might leave you neurotic, imprisoned by things you cannot change. Maybe it would be better to let bygones be bygones and go on.
Instead, I think of this attitude as a salutary “Elul consciousness.” Approaching the Yamim Noraim, our Jewish time of reflection and repentance, I find it spiritually healthy to recognize that yesterday is not a closed book. Actually, we can still change the past.
By transforming our conduct and character today, when we grow toward better versions of ourselves for tomorrow, we also impart new meaning to yesterday. In telling a new story of the future selves we might yet become, we need not – actually, should not – treat past episodes as bygones to be forgotten. Even when we might be ashamed of previous deeds, words or thoughts, can we learn from them? Take responsibility for them? If we can, then prior failures will have become valuable steps in future journeys.
This idea is familiar from diverse cultural expressions, like the well-known Japanese kintsugi, the method of repairing broken ceramics with a lacquer made from gold or silver, beautifying the damaged beyond the intact.
Jewish tradition has been better with words than pottery, I suppose. And we have plenty of lovely expressions of this idea. The Talmud [Yoma 86b] offers the kintsugiesque view that repentance can transform even sins into merits, for the wicked deeds helped bring us to wholehearted reverence and love.
On this passage, the great theologian R. Joseph B. Soloveitchik wrote that “the present and the future pry open the past and re-read its meaning. … When the future clarifies and elucidates the past — points out the way it should take, redefines its goals, and indicates the direction of its development — then a person becomes a creator of worlds [Halakhic Man, p. 113-15, Hebrew edition].”
My Elul wish for myself – and for you – is that we bring our broken past into the better worlds we will create.
