This week’s second torah portion opens with Moshe reviewing all of the 42 stops that the Jewish people made in the desert over their 40 year trek from Egypt to Israel.  We know where they have been, why recount them?  Remembering the past is a familiar feeling to us.  It can come with regret or a sense of accomplishment.  But it also can come with feelings of nostalgia.   What is nostalgia?

I don’t think nostalgia is only the feeling of pining for better times in the past.  It is more than that.   It is a wistful awareness of the fleeting and profoundly valuable nature of life.  As humans we tend to feel this more with regard to our past than our present or future.   When we look at old photos of our youth or the youth of our children or good times in the past we feel nostalgia.  Somehow those moments which were once present and now are past, by the very nature of their being past take on a value and emotional depth they did not have when we were experiencing them.   We may have enjoyed them, but ironically, viewing them with nostalgia is a much more profound feeling than actually living them.  The present is often taken for granted because we are in the midst of living it.

What would it be like to feel the kind of nostalgia we have for the past, in the present, for this current moment?  To step back and appreciate the subtle light, the depth of feeling, the profundity of a moment that is unique in history, that is utterly new and will never come again.   To feel it is an honor to be present.

Perhaps this is part of the point of living a Jewish life.  To use Jewish law, blessings, prayer, mitzvot, and Torah study, as a vehicle for living the kind of life that is as powerful in the present as in a nostalgic past.   Perhaps this is part of the message Moshe gives the people.

The Midrash compares Moshe’s review of the places the Jewish people have been to a king whose child was ill.  The king travels with the child to a healer who heals him and as they are retracing their steps returning home the King  says: “Here we slept, here we caught a cold, here you had a headache.”    This Medrash’s image is not nostalgia for better times but for worse times.   Perhaps in the story what makes the recollections nostalgic is the depth of relationship between the two, sadly this is what we often cherish more in a nostalgic look back than in a hektic present.

Let us learn from this parsha to value the eternal present which phases like the blink of an eye.