The future of the past. It's strange, very strange. Rushashana is the beginning of the Assyria.

You may chuvah the ten days of repentance. We reflect on the past year. Recall the bad we did

and the good we failed to do. Apologize, confess and ask for forgiveness. And yet there's almost none of this on Roshishana.

There's no confession, no Ashamnu Bogadnu, no al-Heat, no reference to the past year, no looking back.

One of the very few references to the fact that we're embarking on a process of Chuvra at all

is the Unatana Tokev prayer reminding us that today

our fate is being written, who will live and who will die. Surely the beginning of the days of

repentance should begin with repentance. But I think the answer is one of the deepest truths of Judaism.

To mend the past, first, you have to secure the

future. I learned this from the Holocaust survivors I came to know. They were among the most

extraordinary people I've ever met, and I wanted to understand how they were able to survive,

knowing what they knew, seeing what they saw. What I came to

realize was that many of them didn't speak about those years, even to their spouses or their

children, sometimes for as long as 40 or 50 years. Only when they'd secured the future,

did they allow themselves to look back at the past? Only when they'd built a life did they permit

themselves to remember death. That's when I understood two strange characters in the Torah,

Noah and Lot's wife. After the flood it seems Noah looked back. Overwhelmed by grief,

he sought refuge in wine. Before the flood, he's the only person in the

whole of Tanakh to be called a Tzaddik, righteous, yet he ended his days drunk and disheveled. Two of his

sons were ashamed to look at him. Lott's wife disobeyed the angels, turned back to look at the destruction

of Siddhar and was turned into

a pillar of salt. I think the Holocaust survivors knew that if they turned and looked back,

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