The Jewish Power Blog: Memory – Power over the Past

It makes me smile to hear the announcement on the Israeli train, “Please don’t forget your personal belongings when you exit the train.”  My experience is that forgetting is not a voluntary action on my part, but something that happens to me (or happens in my brain).  If I forgot my umbrella on the train, it was not a choice I made.  The airlines’ “Please check to make sure you have all your belongings with you” is helpful advice.  “Don’t forget – to take out the garbage, or your brother’s birthday, or the quadratic formula, or your father’s example as a mensch” is not helpful, because I can’t make a conscious choice to remember or forget; indeed, when I do forget I am usually sorry to discover it after the fact.  If it had been in my power to do so, I would have remembered.

Obviously, there are tools I can use to reduce the danger of forgetting: making lists, setting reminders on my phone, not putting my umbrella on the overhead rack, using various mnemonic tricks to help me remember that formula, wearing my father’s watch.  And if the particular act of remembering is important to me, I will be sure to use those strategies.  Interestingly, sometimes I find myself frustrated that something I want to forget I can’t; it lingers in my memory (a slight, a stupid fear, an upsetting image) and troubles me, unhelpfully.

Collective memory is more complicated, because the “memories” we transmit from generation to generation are the result of conscious choices.  There are things we can actively teach our children so they will be collectively remembered, and there are things we can decide to keep from them so they will be collectively forgotten.  The Torah is very concerned about such transmission, the prime example being the repeated admonition to teach the next generation the story of the Passover redemption:  “When your children ask you…” (Ex. 12:26);  “You shall explain to your son on that day…” (Ex. 13:8); “And when, in time to come, you son asks you…” (Ex. 13:14); “When in time to come your children ask you…” (Deut. 6:20).  So we have the four questions and the four sons and an entire elaborate multisensory ritual designed to prevent the nation from forgetting that formative event.

While that ritual, the Passover seder, originated in the Torah and was given its current shape by the rabbis of the Mishnah, it has continued to grow and develop throughout the generations, adapting to historical circumstances and the cultural environment.  Throughout, it has remained central to the calendar, the community, and the family, as it carries the foundation stone of the belief in a covenant between God and Israel.  If we were to forget the exodus, the whole structure of Jewish law and belief would collapse.

In 1959, the Knesset legislated the setting of 27 Nisan as Holocaust Remembrance Day, officially observed by two minutes of silence in the morning (demarcated by a siren), and the closing of restaurants and places of entertainment.  In the face of the enormity of the Holocaust – historically, psychologically, theologically, and, for the time being, personally – it seemed clear that a formal mechanism for maintaining the collective memory was called for.

However, unlike the exodus, the meaning of which is clear (especially after three thousand years of thinking about it), we still don’t know the “message” of commemorating the Holocaust: For our sins were we exiled?  For our powerlessness did we suffer?  All the world wants the Jews dead?  Never again?  As the ultimate victims, we occupy the high moral ground, so no one dare criticize us?  In their deaths they commanded us to survive?  Don’t count on God?  Don’t count on humanity?

Personal memories are viewed through the lens of subsequent experience..  Memories of my father’s menschlichkeit are more relevant and important to me now that I have children than they were when I was an angry young adult; and conversely, my memory of the quadratic equation mattered a lot more to me in eleventh grade than it does today.  So too with collective memory: impressive as the exodus was, it took a while for the collective memory and its meaning to be established – the first months of freedom were marred by doubts and ingratitude; e.g., “Why did you bring us up from Egypt, to kill us… with thirst?” (Ex. 17:3).  Ultimately, though, the memory gelled into a foundation for our belief in the covenant.

It is interesting to consider how the memory of the Holocaust will gel over time.  Already now, when it is still fresh and even personal for some individuals, it has been harnessed and exploited and engineered according to ideological and political needs.  Grief, loss, perpetuating the memory of those who went before us – and finding strength and values in it – these have always been part of Jewish life and practice: saying kaddish.  However, when memorialization becomes a form of rumination on (and thus perpetuation of) our victimhood identity, seeing every doubt as a threat, every critic as a Nazi, suppressing empathy, fostering feelings of moral superiority – then we become imprisoned by our past, not sustained by it.

In the early years of the state, Israelis tended to be ashamed of the Holocaust.  It took a while for us to discover the benefits of victimhood; but now, diplomatic visitors go from the airport to Yad Vashem where they can be photographed shedding a tear (or perhaps, now, to the site of the Oct. 7 Nova massacre).  Our own eleventh graders we send to visit Auschwitz.  We resent those who don’t stand at attention for the Holocaust Day siren.

We choose the future we want when we choose the collective memories we perpetuate.