Regret and Hope

Three weeks ago, I had the chance to revisit one of the great “could have–would have–should-haves” of my life, a regret that I have carried with me ever since college. My years at University of Michigan overlapped with the Fab Five – the most promising starting line-up that Michigan basketball and arguably any college team has ever fielded. And sure enough, as predicted, they arrived at the NCAA tournament. To this day I can recall the excitement on campus as the tournament progressed and then the frenzy as they made it to the final four. My roommates and I stood in line with the rest of Ann Arbor to enter the ticket lottery. Our numbers were picked, a friend had a car we could borrow, someone knew someone who would let us crash on a couch and the twenty-something hour car ride from Michigan to New Orleans was set into motion. If you know your basketball, then you know that Michigan lost in the finals, but wow! What a trip! Thousands of Wolverines on a basketball weekend, in New Orleans no less. It could not have been more perfect, except for one thing – I never went. To this day I can’t tell you exactly why I chose not to go. Maybe the Fab Five’s dominance was concurrent with an untimely assertion of academic responsibility on my part. Maybe I had a job interview, maybe I prophetically knew that whatever would happen in New Orleans that weekend would not serve to enhance my (as yet unknown) plans to be a rabbi. Truth be told, I have no idea. I either cannot remember or have long since repressed the reason. But ever since, every time my roommates and I get together and the stories start flowing, we inevitably arrive at that awkward moment when one of them makes reference to that trip, looks at me and says, “Oh yeah, Cosgrove – you weren’t there, were you?!”

Regrets I have a few, and in the scope of things, this may not be a big one, but when Michigan beat Syracuse three weeks ago this evening, the very first thing I did was text my college roommates to make plans to be in Atlanta for the final game. The details were unclear, the flights had to be arranged, tickets had to be procured, but one thing I knew for sure – no way was I going to miss that game again. The stars were aligned – no board meeting, no class to teach, no school function, no communal meeting, no shiva. My roommates didn’t flinch, and all of us, now with lives and families spread out in New York, Miami, and DC, flew to Atlanta to watch the big showdown between Louisville and my Michigan Wolverines.

Like the eyes of a painting that track us no matter where we may stand, our past is an unavoidable mirror into our present that we cannot shake. We all have regrets, whether they are trivial or tragic. The landscape of the past is littered with setbacks and disappointments, missed opportunities and defeats. Nobody can turn back the clock, and nobody has a crystal ball capable of predicting whether fortune will or won’t bend our way to extend us a second chance. To paraphrase Shakespeare, while each of us plays many parts in our lives, once we exit, we leave that part never to return to it again. Given this state of affairs, it is fair to ask if there is a posture of being – a spiritual demeanor – that recommends itself one way or another. Do we dwell in that past, ever replaying moments of regret, or for that matter, glory days gone by? Or shall we erase our regrets and pretend they never happened? What about the future? Is it just a shoe waiting to drop? Shall we spend our lives trying to fix the past, or are we better off letting go, and getting on with the future?

In its most basic formulation, I think the question boils down to whether we are optimists or pessimists. Last week when I was in Israel on the congregational trip, we had the honor of hearing from Israeli President Shimon Peres, a man who at the age of ninety is acutely aware of his past, the daunting challenges facing Israel in the present, and the diminishing likelihood of those challenges being met in his lifetime. If anyone has earned the right to live in the “could have–would have–should have” melancholy of regret, it is Peres. Yet he didn’t at all; rarely have I heard such an upbeat assessment of Israel. When challenged in the Q & A on how he could have such a hopeful assessment of the future, Peres explained: “Optimists and pessimists die the same way. They just live differently [and] I choose to live as an optimist.”

Neither Peres, nor any one of us knows what the future holds. I have no doubt that he, like all of us, has a list of that which should have been done differently. But Peres’ answer strikes me as profoundly Jewish in formulation, because in it he acknowledges the choice that each one of us has as to how we relate to the past and approach the future. We could, if we wanted, live like that Harry Chapin song, mourning lost opportunities that can never be retrieved. We could, if we wanted, live with a perpetually wounded sensibility, believing that it is just a matter of time before we are hurt again. I believe that Judaism’s outstanding contribution to the landscape of religious sentiment is its contention that no matter what happened in the past, the best part of the narrative is yet to come. Every time a Jew prays, every time we recite the amidah, we return to the banks of the sea and stand on the cusp of redemption. Of course we remember the Exodus as an act of collective memory, that we were once slaves set free by God’s mighty hand. But more than preservation of the historical occurrence, it is the anticipation of redemption that is being cultivated. Our very liturgy reminds us that you and I, each and every one of us, every single day, exist forever with the best part of our story in front of us.

Everywhere you look in Jewish life, we return to this idea. I have spoken before of this past week’s little known observance of Pesah Sheni (Numbers 9), the second Passover. It was instituted in response to the request of a group of Israelites who had been unable to offer the Pascal offering on the appointed date. That a make-up date was extended to them at all is curious enough, but as Simeon Chavel of University of Chicago explains in his study on the subject, what is really remarkable is that the make-up date is codified for the generations. Not just the Israelites of the desert generation, but every generation is extended the chance for a second chance.

Perhaps the most famous text on this subject comes from Maimonides, who in the second chapter of his Laws on Repentance rhetorically inquires at what point someone has fully atoned for a past misstep. Famously, the answer is that full atonement is achieved when and only when a person finds him- or herself in precisely the same situation in which the initial act was committed, has the opportunity to commit the deed again, and nevertheless abstains from doing so. (2:1) The text is not without its problems. How and why in the world could or would a person thrust him- or herself back in the same position to make the mistake again? Fair enough. But what should not be missed is that Maimonides operated under the presumption that our imperfect individual could be extended a second chance. A misdeed does not eclipse the totality of a person’s humanity, and it certainly does not preclude him or her from having a future.

There are wrongs in this world that cannot be righted and there are losses that cannot be recouped no matter what we do. But to be a Jew means that you live your life facing forward – towards redemption. “I believe, in perfect faith,” wrote Maimonides in the twelfth of his thirteen principles of faith, “in the coming of the Messiah, and though he may tarry [im kol zeh] I await him every day.” You may or may not be theologically inclined, but anyone who knows the story of our people, knows that for two thousand years it was the yearning for Zion, the tikvah – the hope, against all odds and logic – that kept our people together. The Talmud explains that when we arrive in the heavens for our final accounting, one of the questions we will be asked by the Holy Blessed One will be Tzipita lishua? “Did you hope for redemption?” In other words, do you believe that each and every day brings with it the possibility for renewal, that we – you and I – have the Godlike capacity for daily and constant renewal, ha-m’hadesh b’tuvo b’khol yom tamid. Messianic or not, whether we live to see it or not, the conviction that things will get better, the notion that hope springs eternal, that there are second chances to be had – these elements are hard-wired into our people’s DNA. As Rabbi Elaine Glickman cites in her recent book on the subject, it was none other than Holocaust survivor Emil Fackenheim who, in writing on the messianic hope, reflected: “…You have to hold onto it even if you can’t say it is going to be…[For] where there is hope there is life. And when there is life there is hope.” (The Messiah and Jews, 116)

There is one detail I left out about my basketball adventure a few weeks ago – how it ended. As I noted, a few decades ago with everyone but me present – Michigan lost. And you know what? This time around, with everyone including me there – Michigan lost. There is never any guarantee, this time, next time, or any time, that things will work out the way we want them to. And while my seats were undoubtedly better than they would have been back then, and it is always good to pick up friendships where they left off, it was a sobering moment when I realized that neither the players on the court nor the students in the stands were even alive that year I missed the game. I don’t regret my decision to go, but fun as it was, the fact still remains that I didn’t go way back when, and nothing I do today can change that. Nevertheless, im kol zeh. there is always next year. In this and in all things, we look forward to the future.

My teacher Rabbi Byron Sherwin shares a story of the Rhiziner Rebbe, who once entered a room to find his students playing checkers. When the students saw their rebbe, they were embarrassed at being caught playing games and not studying Torah. To their surprise, the Rebbe was not angry; rather he said, “I am glad you are playing checkers, because in checkers, you learn something important about life. First, you move only one step at a time. Second, you move only forward, not backward. And finally, when you have reached the highest rung, you can move whichever way you want.” (Crafting the Soul, 204-5)

We are who we are as a result of the things we did or didn’t do. Regret is nothing more than the act of finding retrospective fault in those decisions. To move back, to seek to undo the past is an activity neither possible nor advisable. While it may come with a sting, the recognition that we wish we had done certain things differently need not bind us to a long irretrievable yesteryear. Our past is our wisdom. It is a rudder that steadily guides our present journeys, as we, with our sails filled by the winds of hope, move ever so gently into a bright, unknown and redemptive future.