There is no portion this week, but we do read the book of Ecclesiastes in the Synagogue, so I thought I’d pick a line from there – a book with many, many great one-liners.
“Do not say, ‘How is it that the earlier days were better than these?’ For it is not out of wisdom that you ask this.” (Ecclesiastes 7:10)
I love this one. King Solomon says that the answer to the question is not to explain why previous times were actually better. Rather, it is to point out that the question itself does not come from wisdom.
We live in such difficult times. Life is so challenging nowadays. No one ever had to adapt as quickly as we have to adapt to AI. Antisemitism is worse than ever.
I hear these types of lines very regularly. But, as King Solomon said, they are not wise.
They are not wise for a number of reasons, but let me talk about one. We are comparing apples and oranges. We have an intimate and personal relationship with our own times. We are, after all, living participants. Any worry and fear that we have feels very real. Past times, however, are gone. Because they are not right in front of us, they are sanitised. We edit out the bad in a way that we can’t when it seems to be right here, right now.
It’s why I think a proper understanding of history is so important. No one who has any sense of Jewish history, for example, would say that antisemitism is really bad nowadays. My grandparents left Ukraine in the early 1900s because they didn’t know when the Cossacks would be coming next to plunder, rape and murder. I was in Vienna over the summer. In the Jewish Museum there, they had walking sticks from 1920s Vienna – liberal, enlightened First Republic Vienna, not post-Anschluss Vienna – with caricatures of grotesque Jewish faces as their handles. They had many of them. We Jews live in the very best of times, not the worst.
Interest rates are so high – 3.75% base rate!! But how easily we forget that the average interest rate through the 70s was 9.5% and in the 80s it was 11.7%. It might be worse than a few years ago, but it doesn’t help us to exaggerate. We live in very good times.
So the first reason that looking back and imagining earlier times were better is unwise is because, almost invariably, it isn’t true. And even if there is a grain of truth, it is usually an exaggerated one.
But there is another reason why it is unwise. Because it is defeatist. If indeed previous times were better, don’t ask a rhetorical why. Ask how we can improve our own times. It’s never good to look to the past other than to teach us how to make a better future.
The unwise person asks why the past was better. The wise person asks how we can make the future better. And the more we human beings keep that question on our lips, the better and better our world will become.
