The Jewish Power Blog: The Power of the Past

As I have suggested in previous posts, collective responsibility is a central feature of Judaism: the nation is punished for the sins of individuals – and individuals suffer the punishment of the nation even if they themselves are innocent. That can be hard enough to deal with in the present – but what about across generations? Is moral identity inheritable? Is victimhood – or guilt – part of a nation’s cultural heritage? Does it make sense to speak about “national character?” For example, the rabbis describe Jews as “merciful ones descended from merciful ones;” and there is a constant refrain in Israeli political and popular discourse ascribing terrorism to Palestinians and antisemitism to Poles as “imbibed with their mother’s milk.”

So, do we believe in free will or not? Do we have the power to determine our own moral course in life, or are we powerless against genetic and cultural determinants?  For if we are indeed powerless, then teshuva – repentance – is impossible. And that implies that cultures are eternally static, never changing. The Bible, and the rabbis, struggled with this dilemma.

For example, consider Amalek: According to the account in Exodus, immediately after the Red Sea crossing, with no mention of motive or warning, Amalek attacks, and Moses sends Joshua to lead the troops – which he does, victoriously. There will be other battles in the course of the journey and upon entering the Promised Land.  However, none of them is marked by such a strange and severe commemoration: The nation is to remember God’s commitment to “utterly blot out the memory of Amalek;” and God will “be at war with Amalek throughout the ages.” (Ex. 17:14-16).  Assuming Amalek is a real nation, not a mystical-symbolic embodiment of evil, what does this commandment demand of future generations? Am I, three millennia later, obligated to kill any Amalekite I happen to meet? The rabbis escaped this question by positing that when the Assyrians conquered Israel and the surrounding area in 720 BCE, they engaged in forced population transfers, and the resulting ethnic mixing erased the continued identity of any of the nations they conquered (which is how Israel’s ten lost tribes got lost…); thus, there is no chance of meeting an Amalekite today (Tosefta Kiddushin 5:6).

Meanwhile, the Torah clearly forbids intergenerational transfer of guilt: “Parents shall not be put to death for children, nor children be put to death for parents: a person shall be put to death only for his own crime.” (Deut. 24:16). And yet, it is not hard to find, in the traditional literature, examples undermining this absolute rejection of intergenerational responsibility. For example, in 2 Sam 21, the Gibeonites complain to King David that Saul, in his time, had committed a massacre of their nation, in violation of Joshua’s covenant with them (Joshua 9); they seek not compensation, but simply the execution of seven of Saul’s sons, to which David agrees. And more central to the tradition are the repeated expressions ascribing divine mercy toward the Jewish people to God’s memories of the Patriarchs’ loyalty 3000 years ago – and conversely describing our current state of punitive exile as retribution for the sins of our ancient forbears.

Indeed, it seems that the belief that collective personality passes from generation to generation is fundamental to Jewish identity; it is impossible to disentangle Jewish religious belief from Jewish national history. At the same time, this belief represents an internal contradiction, undermining another central “article of faith” – individual free will and personal responsibility.

The Talmud offers a way out of this dilemma: “‘Visiting the sins of the parents on their children’ (Ex. 34:7) refers to when the children continue in their parents’ immoral footsteps; ‘children shall not be put to death for their parents’ [crimes]’ (Deut. 24:16) refers to when the children reject the immoral ways of their parents.” (Bab. Talmud Berachot 7a). This solution recognizes the possibility of cultural transmission but also allows individual responsibility. We are our past, but that is not all we are.

My grandparents fled Russia; I grew up in the United States, a child of privilege. Am I a victim of Tsarist oppression? Born in the United States in 1946, am I a victim of the Holocaust? I made Aliyah in 1990. Do I bear guilt for the 1956 Kfar Kassem massacre of Palestinian Israelis by the IDF? Historian and Holocaust survivor Yehudah Elkanah warns:

Collective history and memory are an inseparable part of the culture of a people, but the past should not be allowed to control and decide the future of a society, and the fate of a people. The existence of democracy is in danger when the memory of the victims of the past participates as an active force in the democratic process. All the ideologues of fascist regimes well understood this… Using the suffering of the past as a political argument is like inviting the dead to participate in the democratic process of the living. (Haaretz Mar. 2, 1988)

Commanded to remember and resent Amalek’s injury forever, the Rabbis indeed remembered – but they defanged the memory by removing Amalek from current reality, relieving us of our victimhood and of our obligation of violent revenge.  Collective memory, what a group passes on about its past, is not composed of immutable, objective facts, but is largely determined by filtering images of the past through present needs. That is, we have a great deal of power over how we remember our collective past; it just makes us uncomfortable to admit it. If we would wield that power wisely, perhaps we could build a better future.