Rosy Retrospection In The Wilderness

Rosy Retrospection in the Wilderness
Rabbi Rachael Houser 

In Bryant Park back in July, I enjoyed a picnic with some classmates from rabbinical school. Though we had gone to different campuses—two in New York, two in LA, two in Cincinnati—we became dear friends through our extended summer semester in Jerusalem. We reminisced about how six of us shared a tiny apartment in Rehavia, about the mulberry tree by our porch and some of our bigger cooking failures, including homemade mac ‘n’ cheese made with vanilla cream. Yum. Caught up in all these memories, I declared, “I would give anything to go back and live even just one week of that summer over again.” 

On the subway home, I kept asking myself, “Wait, why did I say that?” It wasn’t that I didn’t have good memories of that summer. Yet the statement felt dishonest somehow, or otherwise incomplete. So I perused the diary from that summer to unearth the source of my discomfort. I soon found it. Written in that diary were pages of personal pain! Homesickness, COVID, identity theft, and saying goodbye to my grandma, who died that July. As if that weren’t enough, I had a hospitalization stint where the doctors didn’t speak enough English and I didn’t speak enough Hebrew, so the resulting diagnosis was, “It’s either food poisoning or appendicitis—come back if you start dying!” The diary describes what was undoubtedly a difficult summer.

But why don’t I remember it that way?

There’s a term for what might be going on with my memory of Jerusalem: rosy retrospection. Rosy retrospection is the tendency to see our pasts through rose-colored glasses, focusing on the good and minimizing the bad.

My own rosy retrospection made me feel like Moses this week in Parshat Eikev. Moses delivers his final messages to the Israelites, who stand poised on the threshold of the Promised Land after forty years of wandering. Listen to what he tells them, the reason he gives for that forty-year wait: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that [God] might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts: whether you would keep [God’s] commandments or not.” But let’s rewind the tape, Moses: Is that why God made the Israelites wander in the desert? 

When we go back to Numbers 14, those forty years of wandering were not a test of commitment via hardships, but instead, they were God’s punishment. Once the scouts returned from their recon mission to the Promised Land and made an intimidating report, the Israelites lost their faith and courage. And yet…isn’t it interesting—or telling—that Moses recounts it differently at the end of his life? When he brings up the forty-year punishment in this speech, it’s no longer a punishment. Those forty years were reframed as an opportunity to test his people’s mettle through the challenges they encountered.

Moses does this again in the next verse. He explains that the reason God gave the Israelites manna, little flakes of food, in the desert was to teach the Israelites that man does not live on bread alone, but on the word of God. But if we go back to read the first version of this story in Exodus, we see that’s not why God gave the manna. The episode of manna was a trial of obedience, to make sure people only took what they needed and nothing more. Nothing about spiritual nourishment. For two verses in a row, Moses takes an episode from the Israelites’ journey and tells a different, new-and-improved version of the story. A version where the Israelites learn valuable lessons about trusting God instead of being punished by God.

I have my diary to fact-check myself. Moses has the Torah, which our tradition tells us he wrote himself. Couldn’t he have double-checked his notes on these two episodes before he started his speech? Is he misremembering in his old age? Or is he choosing to deliberately reframe—or even rewrite—the events? 

This is where rosy retrospection comes into play. Maybe Moses chooses not to remember God’s anger and disappointment the same way I choose not to remember the rancid falafel from Hummus ben Sira! But there is a cognitive function to rosy retrospection. Its primary goal is to improve our perspectives on ourselves and our experiences. During a challenging period, we often feel frustrated and thwarted. But given time, and the power of rosy retrospection, we can look back on that same challenge and see it as something that fostered personal growth. 

Though Moses knows what actually happened with the manna and the scouts, he chooses to help the Israelites remember their past in the wilderness through a rosier lens, essentially telling them: “These years weren’t meaningless. They were a meaningful struggle. You were preparing for this moment, learning skills so you could learn to love God, build a new society, and be ready for the Promised Land.” Moses turns rosy retrospection into a foundation myth where punishments are turned into lessons and fortitude. He’s giving his people a gift. The Israelites enter the Promised Land with purpose and perspective, able to look back on their time in the wilderness as a learning experience that strengthened their relationship with God. 

It took rereading my diary to remember how much I struggled that summer, because like Moses, I shifted perspective given time. Homesickness, identity theft, hospitalization, those memories faded. What gained strength were memories of my roommates making cards for me and leaving food outside my door when I had COVID, of engaging in lively debates about whether a robot could be considered Jewish if its inventor was Jewish. Forty years in the wilderness, reframed, taught the Israelites who they were. My summer in Israel taught me about how I functioned in adversity and who my true friends are.

It might be easy to see Moses’s reframe as a lie. Those moments—those memories—didn’t happen the way he recounts them. The summer I lived through in Jerusalem and the summer I remember don’t match, either. Many of us in the congregation tonight might be rethinking memories of our own and wondering how we’ve colored in our own pasts. But rosy retrospection isn’t anything we need to resist. It’s a vital process. It helps us to see how far we’ve come in difficult life periods, shields us from our more negative memories, and gives shape to our more complete narrative about ourselves. Rosy retrospection is a meaning maker. It can reveal a great deal not just about the stories we tell ourselves about ourselves, but the lessons we hope we’re learning along the way.