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Looking Back and Forward

After spending a month considering the approach of the Jewish New Year, the topic returns and returns in little ways.

Rosh Hashanah is a time to remember. There are two reasons we do this. One so that we can look back at the good, the bad, the pain, the triumph, the mistakes, and the achievements of the past year. If we don't look back and evaluate, how can we build a plan to move forward? Two, it is to return farther back to our goals, hopes, and dreams of the previous year. We are to look at the larger picture of our life, our community, our country, our world and take stock. What are we trying to do on the larger, meta-macro level? What did we do and what remains to be done?

It's a bit awkward to think about the start of the New Year as a time to be looking back. The secular New Year is a time to make resolutions and to plan for the future. Judaism teaches us that we can't move forward without the past. We must learn from our past, we must heal our past wrongs, we must know where we came from so that we can see to where we are headed. Without this retrospection we cannot place ourselves in the today and build for the tomorrow. It is all simply too tangled up together. What we survived, experienced, lived in the past makes us who we are today and who we will become, and we'll get there faster if we know the past.

Not to get on a political soapbox here, but this issue, to me, is loud and clear in the American election we are about to live through. Get out and vote, consider the monumental impact your vote will have. Each election cycle is not an island into itself. All that our leaders have done before informs what our leaders can and will do in the terms to come. The depth of our ability to understand this complexity directly correlates to our views this election cycle. And remember, the record of who voted is public!
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