THE GOOD OLD DAYS

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It is said that “the good old days” are a combination of a bad memory and a good imagination. Every generation seems convinced that things used to be better: the streets were safer; politicians were more honorable; children were more respectful; life was simpler. Whatever the problems are in the present, the solution seems to lie somewhere in an idealized version of the past.

It actually goes much deeper than that. In Hagley Park, at the heart of England’s West Midlands, stands what appears to be the ruin of an ancient Gothic castle. One lone tower still rises into the sky, while the others have crumbled away. Collapsed walls tell the story of historic architecture now eroded into collapsed shadows of their former selves.

Standing in front of it, one naturally begins to imagine what a magnificent castle once stood here, and to wonder what disasters reduced it to this picturesque ruin. But the truth is – there was never a castle, and the ruin you can see was built exactly as it appears.

The castle was never inhabited – it was deliberately constructed in the eighteenth century to look decayed from the very beginning, to evoke a sense of longing for a glorious past that never actually existed.

In many ways, it is the perfect monument to one of humanity’s most enduring habits. We are often less interested in history than in our imagination of history. The past we long for is frequently not the past as it was, but the past as we wish it had been.

In a landmark 1997 study, psychologists asked children returning from summer vacation to list the good and bad things that had happened. Initially, the lists were roughly equal. But when researchers asked them months later, the bad memories had largely disappeared. By the end of the year, only the positive memories remained.

Long before psychologists put nostalgia under a microscope, Marcel Proust famously observed that remembrance of things past is not necessarily remembrance of things as they were. As it turns out, memory is not a recording device; it is an editor. Sometimes it is a very selective editor, like a movie director who cuts out every scene that doesn’t flatter the star or enhance the plot.

Memory is just the same: quietly removing inconvenient footage and leaving us with a highlight reel that bears only a passing resemblance to the original. And increasingly, our nostalgia isn’t even for times we personally experienced.

There is even a word for this: ‘anemoia’ — coined to describe a deep longing for a time or place we’ve never seen, but imagine once existed. People romanticize eras they never knew. The past becomes polished, simplified, and perfected, and what endures is not factual history, but a romanticized story. And often it’s a story that’s used as a weapon against the present.

Although, before we dismiss nostalgia as mere sentimentality, it is worth noting that Judaism has always focused on the past in a seemingly very nostalgic way. The Jewish faith is built on memory: we frequently remember the Exodus, recall Sinai, and mourn Jerusalem.

Nevertheless, Judaism does not encourage us to live in the past. On the contrary, the Torah’s narrative is relentlessly future-oriented. Abraham is told to leave behind the familiar, and the Israelites are led toward a Promised Land they have never seen.

Time elapsing is understood as a double-edged sword. It brings decline — buildings crumble, bodies age, memories fade – but it also creates the possibility of growth. Knowledge accumulates as time unfolds, and wisdom deepens.

Every generation has people who notice what time has taken away, and make a big noise about it – but far fewer people notice what time has made possible.

It is this tension that lies at the heart of one of the most remarkable episodes in Parshat Behaalotecha. The Jewish people have escaped servitude in Egypt, a country that enslaved them and persecuted them in unimaginable ways. Now they are making their way toward the Promised Land, carrying with them a divine mission, and looking ahead to an extraordinary future.

And yet, they yearn for Egypt. Not the slavery, obviously, but the food (Num. 11:5): זָכַרְנוּ אֶת הַדָּגָה אֲשֶׁר נֹאכַל בְּמִצְרַיִם חִנָּם — “We remember the fish that we ate in Egypt for free.”

It is one of the most astonishing statements in the Torah. Free fish? That’s what they thought about when they remembered Egypt? Not the slave labor? Not the beatings? Not the murder of their innocent children?

Egypt, in their imagination, had undergone a remarkable transformation. The house of bondage had become a paradise. It’s as if someone who survives a plane crash would say, “I love the service on that airline, and the seats are so comfortable on their planes.”

But perhaps the answer is simple. The Israelites were doing exactly what human beings always do: they were editing the past. The Egypt they longed for did not actually exist. Instead, they had invented a golden past to make a dismal present feel even worse. Just like Hagley Park, they built an edifice to a glorious past that now lay in ruins – but the truth is: that past was a figment of their imagination.

More significantly, because they were looking backward through the soft-focus lens of invented nostalgia, they could no longer see what lay ahead. Which is exactly the danger of nostalgia. Not that it is based on invention, which it often is, but that it can prevent us from moving forward.

The Midrash makes a striking observation. The Hebrew word “chinam” means both “for free” and “for nothing.” And that is precisely what their nostalgia was worth. They had traded a future of purpose for a worthless memory of fish.

The tragedy of this episode is not that the Israelites remembered the past. The tragedy is that they remembered it incorrectly. Judaism rejects both amnesia and fantasy nostalgia. Memory must never be a destination unless it is a solid foundation to build on. You don’t build a house on shaky ground, because then, inevitably, the structure will fall down.

If Egypt is to be remembered – and we are certainly instructed to remember Egypt – it can only be so that our future can be infused with lessons learnt. The Promised Land would only ever live up to its great promise based on an unvarnished past.

The past is important, but not if it interferes with our present and threatens our future. Not every longing for the past is a fantasy, but if the past is weaponized, it must be rejected. The passage of time presents opportunities that previous generations never possessed – every new day offers the possibility of growth.

The challenge is not to forget yesterday, just not to live there. Like the artificial ruin at Hagley Park, the Egypt of the Israelites’ memory looked glorious and alluring. The only problem was that it never really existed. Had they returned to Egypt, they would have discovered a very different reality. Their nostalgia blinded them to the possibilities of the present, and the real prize – a future that would eclipse anything the past had given them, whether good or bad.