The Art of Memory

We live in an age of information overload and scarcity of wisdom. Even with the revolution promised by AI, much of our lives carried in our phones, and all variety of synthetic distractions addling our brains, memory remains one of humanity’s superpowers.

In the ancient world, in the absence of indexes or mechanized printing, sages memorized full systems and collections of text for lifelong use. Though we could go back much further into the ancient traditions of the Hebrew Bible, a good place for understanding the roots of memory in the Jewish tradition is the destruction of the Second Temple in 70 C.E. and the configuration of the tradition known as Rabbinic Judaism. The rabbis employed many tools—Torah trope, the distinctive hermeneutical system of midrash; the liturgical poetry, or piyut; esoteric and mystical traditions; and much more—to reshape ancient Judaism’s fragments into the memorable core elements that have served Jewish life until today. At the heart of all of these systems was a technique shared in some form by all pre-modern peoples: the art of memory.

Frances Yates’s monumental 1966 study The Art of Memory, which was a cornerstone of my doctoral dissertation as well as the book I wrote about Bob Dylan, claims that the art of memory was so embedded in human function for millennia that scholars essentially forgot to study it. It was, she writes, an academic discipline “omitted because it was no one’s business. And yet it has turned out to be, in a sense, everyone’s business.”

The art of memory adapted by the Rabbis is traditionally attributed to the poet Simonides (c. 556 BCE–468 BCE). The method trains the mind to use templates of familiar places to house images and forms to store voluminous amounts of data, be they epics, numbers, names, laws, or anything else. This memory system is, I believe, a main driver for much of what makes life worth living—poetry, Shakespeare, rock and roll, and surely what we call the Oral Tradition of the rabbis, just to name a few.

Here in Israel—and for me personally as I mourn the loss of my father—memory is everything this week. Following Yom HaShoah with the days of Yom HaZikaron and Yom Ha’atzmaut, we navigate the losses of war and terror, the realities of hostages bound underground while our leadership disambiguates and dismisses pleas for action, and the miraculous establishment of the State of Israel in an endlessly complex performance of collective memory.

The legend of Simonides recalls a poet not only surviving a communal disaster, but also saving the core of society by using his intellect and sensitivity to remember whom and what has been lost. Without the poet’s wisdom and remembrances, a world would have disappeared forever.

Archetypal stories and core human systems migrate across cultures to affirm universal truths. In the Israeli and Jewish consciousness, we know very well that bitter losses in our generation as well as those absorbed before us shape who we are today and who we will become tomorrow. In the broadest sense, the art of memory animates politics and policy, poetry and peoplehood, and all that comprises life itself. How we remember defines who and what we are. As we like to say in times of mourning, but also need to ensure in our deeds at all times, may the memories that shape us be for a blessing.