A little while ago, we recited the Yizkor prayers. Yizkor of course is from the Hebrew word lizkor, meaning "to remember". The modern Hebrew poet Yehuda Amichai has a wonderful poem about memory that I want to share with you this Yom Kippur:
All the time messengers keep running back and forth
To my childhood to retrieve what I forgot or left behind
As if from a house that is about to be demolished
Or like Robinson Crusoe, from the slowly sinking ship
To the island -
so I salvage from my childhood provisions and memories
For the next installment of my life.[1]
In Amichai's vision, the process of remembering is like a salvage operation. We can't take everything with us; we can't remember everything. As the ship slowly sinks, meaning as the years pass, we've got to decide what few things to rescue, and the rest we need to let sink down to the bottom of the ocean. On what basis do we decide what we need? How will we Robinson Crusoes know what is crucial as we proceed into hemshech hayenu -- "the next installment" of our lives? Since memory is not a voluntary function, the choices of what we remember and what we forget don't reflect the culmination of a rational thought process. We remember what we remember, and we forget what we forget. But if we consider what we remember and what we forget, perhaps we can learn something important about ourselves.
First, two personal observations about memory that maybe some of you will share: the first (suggested by the philosopher Avishai Margalit[2] ) has to do with the way we remember dramatic events that happen in the world. Often we retain vivid memories of where we were, and what was happening to us, when we heard the news. Take 9/11 for example. If you're like me, you remember exactly where you were when you first heard about the attack, who told you, and how you spent that day. For me, I had just walked in the door with Linda's cousin visiting from Israel. I was standing in our family room. The phone rang. Linda picked it up. It was my mother, calling from New York, who told us to turn on the TV because something had happened at the World Trade Center. Now if you think about it, it's not necessarily obvious that I would remember those details. After all, the big thing about 9/11 is not what where I was standing when I heard the news or who told me. The big thing is that the calamity happened. And yet, those seemingly trivial details of my own actions and reactions are emblazoned in my memory. There are a few of these moments in our lifetimes that are just so vivid for us. Maybe for you it's the Kennedy assassination, or the day the Challenger exploded. We've each got our own list. Why is it that our own whereabouts and actions when we hear such news are so prominent in our memory of these events? To use Amichai's imagery, why were these memories worthy of salvaging from the sinking ship?
And now, a second personal observation about memory: I don't know about you, but I have great difficulty remembering very basic things about my children at various stages in their lives. Now my kids are only 14 and 6, and they are two of the most important people in my life, and I spend a good deal of time with them, and I love them. One would think that I would remember everything about them. And yet when people with babies for example approach me and ask when my kids started sleeping through the night, or how many naps they had at various stages, or what things helped to settle them when they got fussy, or what they ate, or what their first words were, I admit my memory is terribly fuzzy. Now in the span of my life, it really wasn't that long ago that they were babies! And at the time, these things about our kids were among the most important things that were happening in our lives, but I now only have the dimmest of memories of them. We have photos of course, so I have a pretty good sense of what they looked like at various ages. But the day to day stuff seems to fade quickly every time they move on to the next stage. Something about these memories is apparently not deemed salvage-worthy by my unconscious.
I'm thinking a lot about memory this year, for at least two reasons. One has to do with the Shoah. As I mentioned on Rosh Hashanah, I visited the new Yad Vashem museum in Jerusalem when we were there this summer. One of the innovations of the museum is that as you walk through, in every section, there are videotapes of survivors speaking about the experience they had in that aspect of the Shoah. If the section was about Kristallnacht, or about the construction of the ghettos, or about the partisans in the forests, or about Righteous Gentiles - for each one, in addition to artifacts and photos, there were several flat screen TVs with recordings of survivors speaking about their experience of that aspect of the Shoah.
Why this format for the new museum? Well, if we think about it, this is an appropriate and utterly necessary technique for a Holocaust museum at the beginning of the 21st century, because we are now seeing the passing of the generation of survivors. We are approaching the time when we will no longer be able to learn about what happened to our people during those horrific years directly from those who actually went through it. Thus the survivor videotapes at Yad Vashem, and thus the urgent effort by various organizations to collect as much survivor testimony as they can before it's too late. With regard to the Shoah, the vast majority of Jews living today are like the generation of Israelites born in the desert. We heard about the Exodus from Egypt, and the miracle at the Sea, from our parents. But we weren't there ourselves. B'chol dor vador hayav adam lirot et atzmo k'ilu hu yatza mimitzrayim. The key word there is k'ilu. We are commanded to see ourselves as if we went forth from Egypt. The "as if" tells it all. We weren't there. And so we have to employ various techniques to help us receive and transmit the memory. When it comes to the Shoah, l'havdil elef havdalot obviously a very different sort of memory, we are face that same challenge. We've got some new technologies to help us retain and transmit our memories, technologies our ancestors certainly didn't have. But we still have to decide - out of the vastness of that calamity, what do we keep, and what do we let go?
The second reason I've been thinking so much about memory this year has to do with the seemingly never-ending Arab-Israeli conflict. Having been in Israel this summer during the Lebanon war, I have to ask how will Israelis and Arabs each remember the injustices and the bloodshed perpetrated on them by the other? What will they salvage from the last 100 years of living side by side, often in terrible conflict, and what might they let go for the sake of the present and the future? The stakes are so high, because the way we remember the past so often determines how we act in the present. The amount of guilt, anger, and grief is so plentiful on both sides. Will we and the Arabs be able to find a way to remember our history without reliving it, a way to salvage from our bloody past only what we need to move forward and jettison the rest? The answer to that question will determine the prospects for the peace we all dream of.
In so many ways, our tradition is about memory. Both our Scripture and our rituals help us to remember events that happened long ago. We read in the Bible about the Patriarchs and Matriarchs, and about Moses, and about the prophets and the judges. In the Musaf service for Yom Kippur which will begin in just a few minutes, we will read the unique section called the Avodah, which recounts the way in which the High Priests of old conducted the rituals of Yom Kippur. We light the Chanukah menorah to remind us of the Maccabees, and we recite Kiddush on Friday night to remember both the Creation and the Exodus from Egypt. We build a sukkah each fall to help us remember the fact that our ancestors dwelt in booths.
But these texts and traditions also represent a salvage operation, to be sure. There is so much that the Bible omits. I'd love to know what Abraham's childhood was like - what preceded his being chosen to found a new covenant people? I'd love to know if Moshe knew that he was a Hebrew when he was growing up in Pharaoh's palace, and I'm anxious to know what the experience of being a slave in Egypt was really like. I'd like to hear more about the women characters in the Bible. How did they view their relationship to the Covenant of Abraham, and what did they experience at Sinai? The Torah doesn't tell us any of this, because the Torah is not a history in anything remotely like what we mean by the word history today. It is not a recounting of past events in order for us to know what happened in the past, for its own sake. The information that is shared, is shared for a religious purpose - to help us better understand who we are, and what our obligations to the Covenant are. The best example is the Haggadah, which has a very clear and powerful agenda, which is very different from a recounting of the historical events of the Exodus. Anything that doesn't serve the purpose of that agenda was deemed not worthy of being salvaged, no matter how curious we might be about it, and so is not found in the Haggada. Most conspicuously, Moshe's role is completely eliminated. We might have made different choices about what to retain about that experience than did our rabbinic ancestors who created the Haggada. But just as we don't consciously choose what memories we retain from our own lives, so too are the criteria for what our tradition remembers not necessarily the criteria that we would go by.
* * *
Now in what sense are these ruminations about memory relevant for us today, on Yom Kippur? In three ways, I think. First, in the context of Yom Kippur, we need to ask how our religion functions with regard to the guilt we feel over various things we might have done for which we feel remorse or shame. On one level, Yom Kippur raises the issue and - with all of its focus on sin and confession in the liturgy, it seems like the purpose of the day is to make us recall all of our sins, and feel horrendously guilty over the various ways in which we fell short of the best that we are capable of. Guilt is of course one of the most powerful feelings any of us ever has. But I think we need to probe a bit further: what is the function of Yom Kippur with regard to this guilt? Is it actually to make us feel guilty? No, we've done what we've done and we feel what we feel, and the guilt we experience doesn't well up according to the calendar. Yom Kippur will not cause us to remember and feel guilty about something that we don't already remember and feel guilty about. So what does Yom Kippur do? By using the forms of religious rituals and traditions, it helps us to contain the guilt we feel over things we've said or done in the year just past, cool it down to a place where it is not self-destructive, but rather manageable.
That does not mean a deliberate decision to forget our sins, an effort which is futile anyway. (After all, the best we can do is repress our memory of them, and Freud has taught us about the dysfunctionality that repressed memories can cause.) No, those sins need to be brought out into the open, but once in the open, religion (and here of course I disagree with Freud) can help us deal with them. After Cain murdered Abel, Cain cried out gadol avoni minso - my sin is too much for me to bear (Gen.4:13). And God, in response, put the mark of Cain on him not to stigmatize him but to protect him from those who would harm him, because God had decided not to take Cain's life in response to his deed. Cain can now live without fear of retribution, but that doesn't make his crime go away[3]. He has to live with it and deal with it and make amends for it, safely. It is only when we have overcome our worst fears that we can safely process the experience of having done wrong, and take from it what we need in order to be better in the future. Yom Kippur functions in much the same way in that it provides a safe framework for thinking through our memory of offenses we have committed, and learning from them.
We have all sinned, but we have also all been sinned against. Been hurt or betrayed by other people in our lives. So the second, related, area where this dynamic is applicable is anger and forgiveness. Being hurt is part of the human experience, and it's hard to forget these painful moments. The Yom Kippur question is, do we have an obligation to remember them, or might there be times when we can actually let them go? As we've seen, most memory is involuntary; Amichai's messengers don't operate according to conscious decisions that we make, and we don't deliberately choose what we remember or what we forget. However, there are times, are there not, when we will ourselves to remember and relive offenses committed against us, even when they don't actually help us with hemshekh hayenu the "next installment of our lives"? Yom Kippur asks us to reflect on those nursed grudges, and see whether perhaps it's time for some of them to be cast off.
Maimonides, the great medieval codifier of Jewish law, says that it is a commandment that we be "easy to appease". When asked by an offender for forgiveness, one should forgive with a sincere mind and a willing spirit. If we take the mitzvah of teshuvah seriously, then we will not bear grudges or hold onto our anger and resentment. We must be prepared to forgive. That, says the Rambam, is the halakhah. It's the law, like keeping kosher. That doesn't mean that we're required to forget what happened. Forgetting is not a mitzvah, like forgiving is. By definition, forgetting cannot be commanded. And when it comes to something like the depredations of Amalek for example, the Torah specifically says Lo Tishkach. If we think of the Amalek moment of our own time, which is certainly the Shoah, we realize that there are certain enormities which contain within them such important lessons for us and all humankind that it is a moral obligation to remember them. Even with regard to the Shoah, however, we simply can't remember it all - the experience was just too vast. And simply remembering it gives us no self-evident information about what we're supposed to do with the memory. Do we refrain from buying German cars? Do we become a Darfur activist? Do we raise money for Holocaust education? Do we move to Israel? Do we give money to the Wiesenthal Center? All these and more are possible responses, none self-evident on the basis of the memory alone.
Most offenses are of course not on the scale of the Shoah, and if we've been hurt by someone but the memory does start to fade a little, or if the pain begins to subside just a bit, we don't have to force ourselves to relive the offense. In so doing, we don't have to worry that we're appeasing evil or betraying the truth. Rather, we are salvaging what we need, and only what we need, for the next installment of our lives. Even the commandment not to forget Amalek comes with its own irreconciliable paradox built in, because just prior to the words Lo Tishkach, the Torah says Timheh et zekher Amalek mitachat hashamayim (Deut.25:19). We should blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heaven. Even as we don't forget, we must make that horrible memory disappear; almost as if it doesn't deserve to be remembered. I can't resolve that biblical paradox, but I do think that we are asked by our tradition, especially on Yom Kippur, to think about the grudges we have nursed against various people in our lives, the hurt we have forced ourselves to relive time and again, and consider whether, or under what circumstances, we might be prepared to let it go.
The final area I'd like to talk about with regard to memory this Yom Kippur is grief. How do we choose to remember someone close to us who has died? Which memories stay with us, and which fade away? How badly should we feel if certain aspects of the person start to recede with the passage of time? What if the dailiness of that person, their voice, the way they moved, their laugh, becomes harder for our memory bank to access over time? Is that a betrayal of someone we loved? I don't think so. In a way, the rituals of our religion might provide a helpful model here. The most concrete example I can think of is the ceremony of keriah - the cutting of the garment -- just before a funeral. It is the general custom today that mourners cut a ribbon, although some people still cut their own garment. Regardless, the symbolism of the cutting is that we've experienced a tear in our hearts when we've lost someone close to us.
But we don't cut ourselves in our grief - that is explicitly prohibited in the Torah. Rather, our religious tradition finds a place for us to cut that is a safe place. All the traditions of Jewish mourning - the keriah, the funeral itself, the shiva, the recitation of kaddish, yahrzeit, the yizkor prayers we have just recited -- help the bereaved not to avoid the fact of their loss, but to face it head on, see it for what it is and what it is not, and channel the emotion we feel over our loss to a safe place that allows us to go on living despite our loss. If that's how our rituals function, perhaps that's how our memory is functioning unconsciously as well. Saving the memories we need to save in order to go on living. There's no betrayal here. We still honour the person, love the person, miss the person. We hold onto physical photos of the person, and we also hold on to mental snapshots of them, those moments - sometimes wonderful or sometimes not so, that stand out clearly in our mind when we think about that person because they teach us something, usually about ourselves. We salvage what we need to salvage for the life before us.
So I return to the question, why do we remember so vividly where we were when we first heard about the attacks on 9/11? Avishai Margalit suggests[4] that our seemingly trivial memory of what we were doing that particular day allows us to feel personally connected with the dramatic events of the day, participate in it -- as it were. When something dramatic happens in the world on the scale of 9/11, or (from what I hear) Pearl Harbor, or the Kennedy assassination, we want to feel part of a community of people that all went through it. And so we hold on very vividly to our memories of what we were doing because in some way, even if we weren't actually there, that memory places us in the scene, rather than being just an observer of it.
And on the other hand, why do we sometimes forget very basic facts about previous stages of our lives, or our kids' lives, facts that our conscious minds anyway deem to be quite important? Why do these memories seem to so easily slip away? I can only speculate that there is a lesson here about the need to relate to the people in our lives baasher hem sham (to borrow language from the Rosh Hashanah Torah reading regarding Ishmael), to relate to them as they are, today. We can't hold on forever to the way they were in the past, because they are no longer the same people they were in the past. The imperative is to relate to them appropriately as they are today, not how they were then. Like Robinson Crusoe, We can't rescue everything from the ship, we'd be too laden for our lives and our relationships in the here and now. We salvage what we need to salvage, even with regard to the people closest to us.
In September 1942, Mordecai Shenhabi, member of a secular kibbutz, suggested setting up a memorial for the Jews murdered in Europe under the name Yad Vashem[5]. It is poignant to consider the fact that at the time he made this suggestion, most of the people who would become victims were still alive. The name Yad Vashem is based on the pasuk in Isaiah (56:5) which promises a memorial even to the pious eunuch who is described as an etz yavesh, a "dry tree", in the sense that no one will carry his name after his death. God says, "I will give them a yad vashem, a monument and a name within My walls better than sons or daughters. I will give them an everlasting name which shall not perish." God's memory is limitless; ours is not. We can set up memorials and museums. We can take photographs, and erect headstones. We can write poetry and keep diaries and scrapbooks and create all kinds of rituals designed to evoke the past. But the project of memory will inevitably be selective; we can't salvage it all. We can take comfort, however, from our faith that God does remember; there is a place in the universe where all those memories are stored, a divine archive if you will, the original Yad Vashem. God frees us from the impossible task of remembering it all. When we forget, there's usually a reason, even if we don't understand it. We've taken what we need, for the next installment of our lives.
References
[1] Open Closed Open. Heb. 107. English 105.
[2] The Ethics of Memory, p.52.
[3] Example suggested by Avishai Margalit, The Ethics of Memory, pp.198-99.