Time travel has always fascinated humans. “What if I could go back in time and rewrite history?” and “What if I could see how things were back then and experience a totally different life?” are just some of the questions that capture our collective imagination. Full entertainment franchises are devoted to this fixation.

What if I told you that, in some ways, you really can travel back in time? OK, you won’t be able to transport yourself onto 1776 American soil and help the Revolution (if that’s what you want), but you most definitely can go back into the annals of your own life and rewrite the script.

The key to your time machine is right here, in your own mind.

Name That Location

Parshat Devarim begins with Moses’s farewell speech to the people:

These are the words which Moses spoke to all Israel on that side of the Jordan in the desert.1

Why does the Torah name the location so vaguely, “on that side of the Jordan?” Just one verse earlier, at the conclusion of the book of Numbers, the Torah describes the same spot as, “ . . . in the plains of Moab, by the Jordan at Jericho.”2 Why omit the name now?

Two Different Stories

The different names for the same location stem from a fundamental difference between the two books: Numbers and Deuteronomy. Numbers, or as it’s titled in Hebrew, Bamidbar, meaning “in the desert,” is the story of the Jews’ 40-year sojourn—their trials and tribulations, the lows and the highs. In that context, the final encampment within the desert deserves a unique name, as it is part of the desert story.

In contrast, Deuteronomy pivots away from the desert and towards the Land of Israel. It is the story of how Moses gathered the people and delivered his farewell speech just before bowing out. The entire thrust of the book is future-oriented, with eyes on the land.

For this reason, the location is no longer associated with the desert, but explicitly Israel-oriented—“on that side of the Jordan.”

Sublimating the Desert

There’s a deeper layer here.

According to the Kabbalists, the journey into the desert was far more than just a punishment for misbehavior or due to the lack of a working GPS. Rather, it was a program for spiritual transformation.

You see, a desert is a desolate place—dry, arid, lifeless, home to harmful creatures, and too hot for human habitation.

In a spiritual sense, a desert represents an ungodly space, for G‑d is the source of all life and vitality. The death and danger lurking in the desert are thus symbolic of the negative forces in this world that conceal G‑d’s expression and run counter to His will.

Dispatching the Jews to wander around the desert for 40 years was an effort to alleviate some of this negativity and introduce a bit more G‑dliness into the world, specifically in the places where His presence is least comfortable.

In that context, the final location represents the final struggle, the last and most difficult layer of evil that had resisted all efforts up to that point. And so, it’s named in Numbers, because that particular strand of evil and the tremendous effort expended to sublimate it is an integral part of the desert story.

But in the book of Deuteronomy, our eyes are no longer focused on past efforts to combat evil. The perspective shifts towards the Promised Land, where evil no longer exists and there’s only light, positivity, and purity. As such, the name of the specific brand of negativity disappears, forgotten forever. It is simply “on that side of the Jordan”—a slice of land on one side of Israel.

Jump Into the Time Machine of Your Own Life

This “rebrand” of one location that occurs over the span of two books brings us back to our time-travel discussion.

One of the most powerful tools we humans possess is the ability to rewrite our own past by reframing the story.

It could very well be that you suffered traumatic experiences throughout your life. Or perhaps you made egregious mistakes with long-lasting ramifications. Even if your life hasn’t been that dramatic, there’s always one event, something that happened to you, or by you, that you wish had never happened.

It could be a moral mistake, a religious mistake, a crushing life event, or all of the above. There’s hardly anyone on the planet who has a perfect, painless, and mistake-free life.

But it happened already; it’s part of history. What happens now is your choice. The story you tell yourself, the baggage you carry forward throughout your life, is yours to choose. You can remember the terrible parts, the pain, the loss, the hurt, and the feelings of remorse and regret. Or you can hyper analyze it and pick out the parts that don’t hurt as much. If you look hard enough, there are surely some positive elements you can whittle away from the experience, something you learned or gained that became part of the foundation of your strong and meaningful life.

There’s always something, some way to jump into the time machine and reconstruct. And when you do, you are ready to forge forward with a positive, hopeful bounce instead of sad, baggage-laden drudgery.

And the amazing thing is that it’s not self-delusional or untrue at all. Memory is not an exact science. Try asking 10 people who attended the same wedding, “How was it?” and you’re bound to get 10 different answers; 10 different versions of ostensibly the same event. That’s how it works: everyone is just going back in time and picking and choosing what best fits their own self-narrative.

So, go ahead and make the choice for yourself. You can call your past traumas and failures a yucky, desert-name, “The Plains of Moab” or you can call it, “Right Next to Israel.”

I trust you’ll make the right choice.3