THE PAST, THE PRESENT - WHERE IS THE LINE?

     I have been drawn back time and time again to the topic of the past and the present and their connection with and to each other. I recently wrote a posting about it and continue to think and muse. We know and have been told often enough that if we ignore the past it will rise up to bite us in our rears. We all know that according to some the past is not even the past for its circles of cause and effect just keep rippling through time.
     And then, yesterday I came across this passage in one of the books I read over this reading marathon Saturday. It goes like this: "The past....is a foreign country where things are done differently. This may be true - indeed it patently is true when it comes to morals or customs, the role of women, aristocratic governments...But there are similarities, too. Ambition, envy, rage, greed, kindness, selflessness, and above all, love have always been as powerful in motivating choices as they are today."
     And then I read of this slogan for the Clinton campaign - “do all the good we can, in all the ways we can, for all the people we can.” Tis a platitude indeed, but one that raises hackles in me for it smacks of much religion and I have maintained that religion has no place in politics, and certainly not in the Oval Office. And I think of an article, a brilliant one, that I read a few days ago and it raises the question as to why in a certain portion of the Torah or Old Testament, in a prayer said three times daily, why there is a repetition of words when twice we are told if we listen, listen, things will be good and we will live the right life. The author states that one of the commentators of the Torah explained that the two listen commands are actually one for the past and one for the present, that if we judge the present by how it continues to represent the truths of the past, then we will not only listen but hear - and act accordingly. That means that one has to truly and deeply evaluate the values which we keep from the past and those we need to toss away, get rid of the poison which mankind has often ingested.
     The past and the present, forever intertwined, sometimes good and quite often, deadly. We have learned, bitterly, the evils that religion and politics have wrought upon us, the evil that one religion has inflicted on another and it almost does not really matter by which name the offending religion is called, for the result is the violation of morals and morality, of justice, the indecency of using religion and its terms in order to justify the very opposite. So yes, I get nervous when a slogan smacks of religion - on either side. And love? I cannot love all my neighbors, be they here or in the world at large, but what I can do is not hate them, I can treat them humanely, I can practice justice and truth and have them guide my life. There is much we can do that is possible and realistic if we truly listen and heed the truth - "shamoah tishmi'oo - the Hebrew phrase of the 2x admonition to listen. We must listen to our hearts in the positive sense of the word, demand realistic behavior, decent behavior and the necessity of mankind to treat each other with humanity, if not love. Simple. A lesson of the past and one which we must learn, heed, internalize if we are not to repeat the evils and the mistakes of the past while we live in the present and plan for the future. And yet look around at the world and see if we still have not listened to these lessons, if we still continue to be deaf to the points of the past and see how we have so often and so badly and so deadly in result and consequence repeated the errors and the actions of the past and how we see them today in our world. Is it not time that we learn this historic truth and reform ourselves before it is too late and the past precludes any future?