Looking back to look forward

Every Rosh Hashanah, we wish one another Shana tova. A good year. 

It is such a simple wish. Two words we have said to one another for generations, often without thinking too deeply about what we are actually asking for. 

What is a good year? 

And, of course, the wish is directed forwards. Towards the year to come. Towards whatever lies ahead for us over the next 365 days. 

Is it a year without sorrow? Without disappointment? Without fear or uncertainty? Is it a year in which everything goes according to plan? If that is the test, most of us have probably had very few truly good years. 

Life doesn’t work like that. Even our happiest years contain sadness. Our hardest years contain moments of extraordinary joy. People arrive and people leave. Children grow up. Parents grow older. Businesses rise and fall. Friendships change. We lose people we thought would always be there. 

And still, every Rosh Hashanah, we say it again. Shana tova. May it be a good year. 

I’ve been thinking about those words differently this year, perhaps because I find myself at an interesting point in my own life. I turn 60 in January, which is an age that once sounded incredibly old and now seems, quite reasonably, rather young. 

I remember my dad’s 40th birthday when I was a child. It was a big occasion and 40 seemed to me to be the very definition of middle age. And here I am, almost 20 years older than he was then. 

Over the past few months, I have also been doing something I never really intended to do. I’ve been writing about my childhood. 

Not about my career. Not about business or advertising or leadership or any of the things that have occupied so much of my adult life. I’ve been writing about being a little boy growing up in Port Elizabeth in the 1970s and 1980s. 

About Walmer, the suburb where I lived. 

About riding bicycles and going to the movies. About my mother and father. My grandparents. My friends. Shabbat dinners. Family holidays. School. Corner cafés. Fish and chips wrapped in paper. The smell of coffee roasting in Russell Road. The sea. The aloes. The strange, funny, difficult, and wonderful characters who populated the small universe of my childhood. 

I’ve called the book Being Abel in a World of Cain. 

Whether anybody eventually wants to read it is another matter entirely. 

But something unexpected has happened to me while writing it. I have discovered just how much of our past remains available to us. 

A smell can bring back a room. A song can return someone to you. A remembered expression on your father’s face can suddenly make him present again. 

You can hear your mother’s voice. 

You can sit once more at a Friday-night Shabbat table surrounded by people, most of whom are no longer here, and somehow, for a few moments, they are. There is sadness in that, certainly. But there is also enormous joy. 

We are often warned not to live in the past, and rightly so. Nostalgia can become a place of retreat. The past wasn’t perfect either. Mine certainly wasn’t. Childhood contains cruelty and fear and embarrassment alongside wonder and innocence. The South Africa in which many of us grew up was itself profoundly unjust, and remembering one’s own happiness can never mean forgetting somebody else’s pain. 

But acknowledging that doesn’t require us to surrender our happy memories. There is true nourishment in remembering what was good. 

Perhaps especially when the present is difficult. 

These haven’t been easy years to be Jewish. Talk about understatement. There is an anxiety in Jewish communities around the world that many of us haven’t experienced before. We have watched events unfold that have shaken assumptions we thought were settled. We have heard awful language we hoped belonged to another time. We have worried about antisemitism, about our children, and about what kind of world they will inherit. 

It would be very easy to enter another year carrying only that weight. But Jews have never understood memory that way. 

Memory is one of the beautiful foundations of Jewish life. 

We remember leaving Egypt. We remember receiving the Tablets. We remember Jerusalem. We remember destruction and exile and persecution. We remember those who came before us. 

But Jewish memory isn’t only a catalogue of suffering. Although, occasionally, we could be forgiven for thinking so. And Jewish guilt is also a thing. 

We remember around tables. We remember songs. We remember recipes and jokes and melodies and peculiar family customs whose origins nobody can quite explain. 

We remember grandparents. We remember being children. 

We remember being loved. 

And perhaps those memories matter because they remind us that darkness is never the whole story. A better time doesn’t prove that another better time will come. But it reminds us that it can. That distinction matters. 

Hope is not the belief that nothing bad will happen. Jewish history would make such a belief absurd. Hope is the refusal to believe that what is bad now is all that there will ever be. 

Perhaps that is why, as another Rosh Hashanah approaches, I find myself looking backwards in order to look forwards. 

I think about the people who made me. Some are still here. Most aren’t. 

I think about my parents, my grandparents, and great-grandparents. About those who crossed oceans and started again. About people who knew hardship far greater than anything I have experienced and nevertheless built homes, raised children, laughed, argued, celebrated, worked, and sat down together on Friday nights. 

They didn’t know what was coming next. Neither do we. 

That may be the great conceit of adulthood: the belief that because we understand more of the world, we somehow control more of it. 

We don’t. 

The little boy riding his bicycle through Walmer didn’t know what his life would become. The almost-sixty-year-old man writing about him doesn’t know either. And perhaps that’s okay. I believe it is. 

Rosh Hashanah doesn’t ask us to know what the coming year will bring. It simply asks us to enter it. 

To reflect. To account. To repair where we can. To forgive where we should. To appreciate what we have. To remember where we came from. And then, despite everything, to hope. 

So this year, when I say Shana tova, I think I will mean something slightly different. I won’t be wishing you a year untouched by difficulty. None of us can promise another person that. Nor should we expect it. 

I will be wishing you a year in which the good outweighs the bad. 

A year in which there are good and special people around your table. 

A year in which you notice the ordinary things while they are happening, because one day they may become the memories you treasure most. 

A year in which you remember those who sat at the table before you. 

A year in which our children feel safe and loved. 

A year in which we find reasons to laugh. 

A year in which we remain curious about tomorrow. 

And when tomorrow occasionally looks frightening, perhaps we can allow ourselves to look backwards for a moment. Not because we want to return there, but because somewhere in the lives we have already lived, there is evidence that there has been goodness before. 

And therefore there can be goodness again. 

Shana tova. 

May it be a good year. And may we have the wisdom to recognise the good while we are living it. 

• Mike Abel is the founding partner and executive chairperson of M&C Saatchi Abel and The Up&Up Group, South Africa.