Bring Your Past Into Balance

Rose B. Simpson: Counterculture installation view at the Art Preserve, 2023. 

Dear friends, 

Dear friends,
 
The most liberating experience I had this Passover was hearing an artist talk about time. “We have to bring the past into balance,” she said. She described a moment with her daughter that made her realize that the past is totally up to us. “We hand it down to our children,” she said.  

Hearing this on Passover, when we pass down our past rang loudly in my ears. It should be clear to us Jews by now that nothing in our past is set. We tell the old story and play with it, in order to create it anew each year. We encourage our kids' questions in order to tease out which past we want to tell. Which past can we tell them this year? Which can we tell ourselves?  

This is one of the ways in which we try to bring our past into balance. We will do it again this week when we mark Yom Hashoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. We do it through our attitudes toward what we see happening in the world. Nations change their pasts, protest movements do it, each of us does it. We play with the past like clay, and it with us. 

We learned a few years ago from philosopher Susan Neiman that denying that the past is present is ridiculous. Her book Learning from the Germans laid out in simple terms how the Holocaust is alive in Germany and Israel, and how The Civil War is still going on in this country.  

The artist I heard speak, Rose B. Simpson is Pueblo, from New Mexico. When she speaks about the past she hands down to her daughter she is talking about the genocide of her people. And she’s talking about what came before that. And she’s talking about her great grandmother, and her grandmother, and her mother who passed down a tradition of working with clay. She’s talking about her art, which is a living relationship between what came before her and what happened to her in her life, and what the present moment is calling her to do. She’s talking about the dead who speak to her, and the various unseen forces that she knows are a part of the reality we experience. She’s talking about a past that is alive, and a present that goes far beyond what most of think of as present, and a future that is inviting us to feel it right now. 

Occasionally, in prayer or meditation I catch a glimpse of what she means. It’s what our Western physicists taught us about time: that it’s happening all at once. “The past, present and future are only illusions, even if stubborn ones,” Einstein concluded.  

This passing moment in which you are reading these words is not devoid of past and future, even as it already begins its way into the void of your forgetfulness.  

Tomorrow, according to our tradition, we cross the Sea of Reeds. We walk through the narrows of linear time to arrive at the expanse of true freedom. Our souls know they are in the vastness of the ever-expanding universe, present to a world beyond our capacity to know. 

On the day of his death, in the year 1272, the Japanese Zen monk Goku Kyonen gathered his disciples. Sitting at his pulpit he raised his stick, gave the floor a single tap and spoke: 

The truth embodied in the Buddhas 
Of the future, present, past; 
The teaching we received from the  
Fathers of our faith 
Can all be found at the tip of my stick. 

“He raised the stick once more, tapped the floor once more and cried 'See! See!' Then, sitting upright, he died.” 

Chag sameach and shabbat shalom, 
Rabbi Misha

Yonatan's new melody for the Seder