Ekev-Tu B’Av: Time to Remember, Time to Forget

One of the stories, which may be true and may just be a story conveying a true general situation, is the story of the boats from Europe arriving at Ellis Island with Jewish immigrants so excited to see the Statue of Liberty and the New World, they would through their Tefillin of the New York Bay. 

The 2004 film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, based on a science fiction screenplay by Charlie Kaufman, tells the story of Joel Barish, a young man so broken by his relationship with his estranged girlfriend that he goes to a New York-based pharmaceutical company and undergoes an experimental treatment that makes him completely forget that relationship. 

“Beware that you do not forget the Lord, your God, by not keeping His commandments, His ordinances, and His statutes, which I command you this day…lest you eat and be sated, and build good houses and dwell therein. and your herds and your flocks multiply, and your silver and gold increase, and all that you have increases…and your heart grows haughty, and you forget the Lord, your God, Who has brought you out of the land of Egypt, out of the house of bondage…and you will say to yourself, “My strength and the might of my hand that has accumulated this wealth for me…But you must remember the Lord your God, for it is He that gives you strength to make wealth, in order to establish His covenant which He swore to your forefathers, as it is this day…And it will be, if you forget the Lord your God and follow other gods, and worship them, and prostrate yourself before them, I bear witness against you this day, that you will surely perish.”

Rabbi Naftali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin, the Netziv, in his commentary here, explains that this commandment is very different from what the Torah says earlier (6:12) when it asks the Jewish people not to forget Hashem. Earlier, the Torah tells them not to forget Hashem while conquering the land. Here, the Torah tells us not to forget Hashem once everything is peaceful and we are prosperous in our land. 

As Jews, we are a living testimony to more than 3500 years of history. No nation in the world is a living monument to so much history across so many continents, countries and conditions, like the Jewish people. We carry our story and the story of the countries we have lived in, in ways that no other nation has. 

We have coined the term “never forget” for a world that wants to forget. 

We helped erect Holocaust museums from Jerusalem to Washington DC, from Brazil to Berlin, from Australia to Austria, and from Russia to South Africa, Ukraine, and Greece, and recently also in Dubai, we have kept reminding the world it must never forget the horrors of the Holocaust. Many of those lessons are now being forgotten, but we will keep reminding the world. There are no people in the world with a better ability to remind the world of something than the Jewish people. 

Yet, as Jews, we have also, sometimes, understandably, chosen to forget. There are times when the trauma, the pain, or our desires lead us to want to forget. So desperate are we for quiet, for peace, for sitting under our fig and grapevine, that we choose to forget certain things. Sometimes, the pain is so profound that forgetting becomes our very life’s mission. It is hard to blame others for forgetting this.  

Jews like Lothar Herman came out of Dachau, blind and beaten, and chose to raise his daughter Sylvia Catholic and not share with her anything about his being Jewish. It wasn’t until his daughter came home at the age of seventeen and told him she is dating a young man named Klaus Eichmann that he got a stark reminder of who he is. There are Jews like Josef and Anna Korbel, Czech diplomates, who survived the war, fled to the United States, and raised their children as Roman Catholics until their daughter, Secretary of State Madaline Albright, discovered she was Jewish in 1997, leading to her discovering that three of her grandparents and many of her cousins were murdered by the Nazis. 

But there was also another type of forgetting; there were Jews who moved to the Wild West, small farms and ranches, and remote locations around the world, on whom the many years of exile have brought the curse of forgetfulness. 

In the 1990s, when my grandmother was teaching English in the northern Chinese city of Harbin, she went to a local bakery one Friday and was shocked to see Challahs being sold. When she asked the person at the bakery why they sold Challas, she was told they did not know; they just knew that they made that bread every Friday and sold it there. There is a kind of forgetfulness that comes with time, with the erosive nature of time, which is why God tells us we must make sure we do not make an effort to forget, but we must also fight as hard as we can to remember. 

And so the difficult though it may be, the Torah reminds us to remember, not to forget who we are. We should not forget what God has done for us and continue to live by that memory. The Torah repeats this commandment in this chapter more than any other chapter because of the human ability to forget. There is a famous joke about the person rolling down a hill towards the cliff and saying to God: “If you save me now, I will keep every Shabbat for the rest of my life.” Suddenly, a tree appears; he grabs onto it and is saved. The man raises his eyes to Heaven and says to God: “Never mind, I figured it out on my own”. 

Yet being Jewish does not only come with an inescapable imperative to remember, it also comes with a profound sense of being forgotten. “And Zion said, “The Lord has forsaken me, and the Lord has forgotten me.” (Isaiah 49) 

How often did the Jewish people, Knesset Yisrael, have that feeling of being forgotten, of being left out. The prophet describes here two separate powerful feelings the Jewish people experience after the destruction. “Azavani Hashem”, God has knowingly abandoned me. Va’Hashem Sh’chechani, if God had not abandoned me, he must have forgotten about me. It is not difficult to understand why it is that so many times throughout our history, we have felt this way. Who can blame them? A recent study by Brandies University shows 15% of non-Jewish college students hold a hostile view of Israel, and 16% a view hostile to Jews. It is not hard to understand how the feeling of being abandoned is felt so strongly by Jews.  Like Joel in Charles Kaufman’s story, they want that medication that will just make them forget everything. Like Lothar Herman after Dachau, like Joseph and Anna Korbel, we feel forgotten and would like to forget. 

Yet, in the Haftorah, God answers Knesset Yisrael: “Shall a woman forget her baby?! from having mercy on the child of her womb!? These, too shall forget, but I will not forget you. Behold on [My] hands have I engraved you; your walls are before Me always.” (Isaiah chapter 49)

Like a mother unable to forget her own child, God cannot forget us either. Why? Because like a parent made into a parent by the birth of a child, nothing will change the fact that God, the very concept of monotheism in this world, came forth through the Jewish people. Our own existence only came into being through our own faith. And so it is this Parsha and this Haftora complementing one another that compel us with the narrative of memory. Those memories sometimes might be painful or inconvenient, but it is who we are and the source of our strength. “Remember Hashem your God who gives you strength”. God does not criticize the beautiful homes and estates the Israelites built when they entered the promised land; He just asks them to remember where all those blessings have come from. 

Yet despite memory being at the bedrock of who we are as a people, there is also a time to forget. The Mishna tells us that then 15th of Av is one of the happiest days in the history of Israel. The Mishna describes how the young women of Jerusalem would go out to dance in the vineyard, where young men would gather to find their prospective wives. The historical source of this day, however, is far less rosy than that. The historical source for the day of Tu Be’Av–the 15th of the month of Av- goes back to the dark episode of Pilegesh Bagiva. After members of the tribe of Benjamin committed an unthinkably cruel act of immorality, the rest of the tribes of Israel decided to go to civil war with the tribe of Benjamin. The tribes of Israel also make a vow: no one may allow their daughter to marry someone from the tribe of Benjamin. 

After a devastating civil war that leaves only a few hundred men from the tribe of Benjamin alive, and tens of thousands dead on both sides. The tribes realize they have two options: they can keep to their vow and let the tribe of Benjamin disappear forever, or they can change their plans. The poeple of Israel change their plans, and though in a grotesque way, the tribe of Benjamin is reunited with the rest of the people of Israel. This story is the precursor to the holiday of Tu Be’Av. 

How did the happiest holiday in the year emerge from one of our greatest tragedies? 

The lesson of Tu Be’Av teaches us that when it comes to our identity, who we are, and our history, remembrance is sacrosanct. Yet when it comes to love, marriage, and the harmony of our people, forgetting can be the key to our future. If the tribes of Israel stuck to their grudges against the people of Benjamin, that entire tribe would be eradicated. For love to happen, we must know when to forget. For the people of Israel to exist in harmony, we must forget our past grudges.