Don’t Look Back

“Do not look behind you.” Opening The Torah says: “And he said: Run for your life! Do not look behind you.” Here is a simple question. What is so terrible about a look? Lot’s wife was walking out of the city of Sodom. She did not stop. She did not go back to Sodom. She did not openly rebel. She only looked back. And for that she became a pillar of salt, frozen forever. Rashi, the classic Bible commentator, says it simply: she, too, had sinned. But what exactly was her sin? Just a look? The soul asks: how can a single look have the power to turn a person into stone? What the Look Really Was When we say “looking back,” we do not mean turning the neck. Lot’s wife did not only turn her head. She turned her heart. She missed what she had left. She held on to it. Her whole being was still in Sodom: in the comforts of that place, in its stories, in the life she had lived there. That is exactly what being stuck means. It does not mean you have no strength. It does not mean the road is closed. It means you are driving forward while your eyes, and your heart, are stuck looking backward. The Parable of the Car Think about a car. The windshield in front is big, wide and full of light. That is the future. That is the direction. That is where you are going. The rearview mirror is small. It is angled just so. It is useful for a moment: you glance at it, you check what is behind you, and you look forward again. Hashem “built” this car wisely. The future is big. The past is small. That is the guidance. That is the instruction. But most of us get in every morning, sit down behind the wheel, and stare into the little mirror. An old pain. A failure from last year. Something someone said to us ten years ago. And then we wonder: Why am I stuck? Why do I keep crashing? The answer is simple. You are looking in the wrong direction. What This Means for Serving Hashem This is exactly what Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi talks about in the Tanya, the classic book of Hasidic thought that he wrote. In chapter 26 he explains that heavy sadness is not wanted while a person is serving Hashem. This is true even of sadness that seems “spiritual,” like sadness over one’s sins. Just the opposite: it weighs a person down, pulls him down and paralyzes him. It is not a truly broken heart. It is sinking into the mud of what used to be. In another part of the Tanya, the section on returning to Hashem, he writes that returning to Hashem does not mean sinking into the past. It means coming back to Hashem now. Now, in the present, at the very point where you are standing. “You sinned? Come back.” It does not say: “Sit and cry until you have wiped out what happened.” It says: “Get up, look forward, return to Hashem with your whole heart, and get going.” A long stare at the past, even out of “spiritual worry,” can turn you into one more wife of Lot: frozen, and cut off from the life Hashem is spreading out before you right now. In Closing “Do not look behind you” is a living command. It was not only for Lot’s wife, and not only for the people of her time. It is for you. Today. Learn from the past? Yes. The rearview mirror is there for a reason. Glance at it, take the lesson, and bring your eyes back to the big windshield in front of you. Every day Hashem makes His world new again. Every morning He opens a new road. You do not need to drag your own Sodom into this new car.