Bound to the Past

Opening Picture a man who was hurt. It happened ten years ago, maybe twenty. Something hard took place, and then it was over. But when he sits and talks with his wife, he reacts from that old place. When his child cries, something inside him goes back there. When money is tight, he lives through “back there” all over again. So here is a question that should bother us. That event is gone. It is finished. It is past. It is not here. How can a person suffer so much from something that no longer exists? The Core Idea Here is the big point to make clear. The pain does not come from what happened. It comes from what is happening now, inside the mind. The event is over. But inside our power of imagination and our power of memory, it is alive and breathing. Think of the part of us that the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought, calls the animal soul: the part of us tied to the body and its drives. As the Tanya explains, its whole world is the world of time and place. That is why it can get locked inside one single moment in time and live there for years. This is not only an emotional limit. It is a spiritual state. The soul wants to move forward, but the animal soul holds on to the rope. And as long as a person holds on to the memory, he is its slave. So we need to separate two things that people usually mix up: the event, and our holding on to it. The event no longer hurts us. The holding on is what hurts. In the Light of the Baal Shem Tov There is a well-known teaching of the holy Baal Shem Tov, founder of the Hasidic movement: “Wherever a person’s thoughts are, that is where he is, all of him.” This is not just a pretty saying. It is a complete spiritual reality. When a person’s thoughts are sunk in a painful past, then all of him is there. His body may be sitting here, at the table, with his children. But he himself is back there, twenty years ago. That is why it hurts. The pain is real because his being there is real. This is not weakness. It is the direct result of a fixed spiritual rule. And this rule also shows us the way out. We do not try to change the past, because the past cannot be changed. Instead, we bring our thoughts back to the present. The Work of Letting Go As King Solomon wrote: “There is a time to embrace, and a time to stay away from embracing.” The embrace he speaks of is not only something we do on the outside. There is also an inner embrace. A person can hold a painful memory tight in his mind and in his heart, as if without it he would not be whole. “A time to stay away from embracing” means this: there comes a moment when you have to choose, fully aware, to pull your inner self away from that inner embrace. But it is important to be clear. This does not mean pushing the memory down. It does not mean denying that it happened. It does not mean pretending, “Nothing happened, I never heard of it.” It means turning the mind away, a concept found in Jewish law and in Hasidic teaching. You turn your thoughts, on purpose, to another place. You choose where to live inside your own mind. This is the power of “the mind rules over the heart.” We cannot always stop what rises up from the heart. But the mind, meaning our awareness and our power to choose, can decide where our thoughts will settle. In Closing My dear fellow Jew: maybe you carry a memory that weighs on you, something that keeps coming back, that puts you back there again and again. Know this. The pain is not what happened. The pain is the holding on. Your past is not hurting you. Your holding on to it is what hurts you. The way forward is not to defeat the memory. The way forward is to step out of it. It is like leaving Egypt, which is something we are meant to do every single day. In Hebrew, the name Egypt sounds like “narrow places.” So step out of your own private narrow places, out of the borders that the past has drawn around you.