A group of 50 year olds discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed that they would meet at the Ocean View restaurant because the waiters there were good looking. Ten years later at 60 years of age, the friends once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. It was agreed that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because the food and the wines were good.
At 70 years of age, the group once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. Finally it was agreed that they should meet at the Ocean View restaurant because they could eat in peace and quiet and the restaurant had a beautiful view of the ocean. Ten years later, the friends, grateful that they were still together, once again discussed where they should meet for dinner. They agreed to meet at the Ocean View restaurant because the restaurant was wheel chair accessible and even had an elevator.
At 90 years of age, the group once again discussed dinner. The friends agreed to meet at the Ocean View restaurant because they had never been there before.
Rosh Hashanah is a day often called Yom Hazikaron. The Day of Remembrance. As important as memory is, sometimes, it is important that we occasionally forget.
Mitzvah of Memory
Memory, which is of interest to neuro-psychologists as well as to rabbis, is an essential aspect of our character as human beings. When we see people that we know, our neurons ignite. When we remember from childhood, we are on fire with bursts of electrical recognition. When we love people who suffer from Alzheimer’s’ disease, we know that their loss of memory has eliminated a core aspect of their personalities and identities. To see others and integrate the eyes, nose, mouth and facial particulars into a total persona that we recognize and remember is essential to our interaction with others. On Yom Kippur when we recite Yizkor, our memories remind us of our personal history and frame the choices we make for the future. To be souls, to be conscious of ourselves and others, it is critical that we remember.
Zakhor - remember - is a key concept in Jewish life. Part of the Musaf service today is called Zikhronot/Memories. Six times the Torah tells us to remember:
· Remember the Exodus that forged your identity as a people.
· Remember Sinai when the Covenant between God and Israel was established.
· Remember Amalek who sought to destroy you.
· Remember your time in the Wilderness and the challenge of remaining loyal to God.
· Remember Miriam and the dangers of talebearing.
· Remember Shabbat which grounds your calendar and life as a Jew
In modern times, the birth and success of Zionism depended on the passionate and loving memory of the Jewish people for the Land of Israel. Following the Holocaust, we made the memory of the effort to destroy our people a cornerstone of Jewish identity. Just prior to Rosh Hashanah, 1963, Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel called upon rabbis to remember the passivity of North American Jewry during the Nazi years and not to be silent about Soviet Jews. It was the first linkage of those two events and triggered the efforts of many to act to bring about the liberation of the Jews behind the Iron Curtain.
According to the Talmud, the mitzvah to remember Amaleq involves בפה זכירה– oral memory" through the retelling of the attack on the weakest of the Israelite people following the Exodus. The Torah also tells us תשכח לא, “don’t forget”, which requires בלב זכירה – making this memory part of our way of thinking. At one site in Poland of a mass murder there is a hand-made sign. It read: לזכור המצוה - "It is a duty to remember”- לשכוח לא הזכות – “it is a privilege not to forget".
The late Menachem Begin, just days before the Six Day War, said to the Prime Minister Levi Eshkol that “when an enemy of our people says he intends to destroy us, the first thing we have to do is to believe him. People did not believe Hitler”. Begin had internalized lo tishkakh- not forgetting. Memory creates context for decisions that we face for the future.
We must remember that we - as Jews, as Canadian, and as lovers of freedom and democracy - are threatened by the potential of nuclear armed Iran and by radical Islamist Jihadists who are determined to destroy Israel, America, Canada and western civilization. We are not threatened by Islam, but we are in a life and death struggle with radical Islamist Jihadists. We must remember this and we have to speak up with clarity and strength.
Can there be too much memory?
“Memorious”, a fantasy story by Jorge Luis Borges, tells of a fictional version of Borges who meets Ireneo Funes, a teenage boy had suffered a horseback riding accident and is now unable to leave his home. “he lost consciousness; when he recovered it, the present was almost intolerable it was so rich and bright; the same was true of the most ancient and most trivial memories. … his perception and his memory were infallible. …These recollections were not simple; each visual image was linked to muscular sensations, thermal sensations, etc. He could reconstruct all his dreams, all his fancies… an entire day. He told me: I have more memories in myself alone than all men have had since the world was a world. “
Everything was an isolated event or object. There were no connections between moments. As a consequence, Funes was unable to act. He was paralyzed by memory. Funes could not forget or let go. For him, detailed memory was not a blessing, but a curse.
In 2006, the case of AJ was reported by a University of California neurobiologist. AJ, was later identified and interviewed by Diane Sawyer. She initially came forward and said, “I have a problem. I remember too much." She had "nonstop, uncontrollable and automatic" memory of her personal history and countless public events. She could recall events that occurred in relation to her life, remembered what day of the week it was and even what the weather was like. Three similar people have come forward since then, each with spectacular autobiographical memory. These people don’t just remember the past, they feel it—vividly, but only insofar as an event affected them.
I thought of these unusual examples of memory on this day which our tradition calls Yom Hazikaron, the Day of Remembering, when we speak of God as “zokher kol hanishka’hot”- You who remember all that we have forgotten. That may be all right for God, whom we declare to have the fullness of memory and forgiveness, but what about an unforgiving memory?
Andrew Feldmar, a Canadian psychotherapist in his late 60s lives in Vancouver. His children live in the States and he often goes to visit. In 2006, on his way to Seattle, he was stopped at the border. A Google search for Dr. Feldmar had revealed an article written in 2001, in which the psychologist mentioned he had taken LSD in the 1960s. He was held for four hours, fingerprinted, and after signing a statement that he had taken drugs decades before, was barred from further entry into the United States.
I am not advocating the use of LSD, but the Colbert Report points to the absurdity of the situation:
[T]the saga of how a Canadian drug lord,a fiend, an occasional user, a guy who dropped acid a couple of times thirty years ago, will no longer be allowed into America to visit his son. Our country is now safe from Andrew Feldmar, an internationally respected psychotherapist who had the gall to try LSD in the 1960's and write about his far-out experiences in an academic journal. The professor's long, strange, trip now ends at the border, thanks to an incredible new crime-fighting weapon known as Google. Go ahead kids, turn on, tune in and drop out...just know that you'll never return from the outer-edges of consciousness known as the Great White North.
Here is the Frydman-Kohl Report: My search of Google has disclosed that, in his autobiography, US President Barack Obama acknowledged the use of an illegal substance. The US Homeland Security Service is considering whether to deport him to Canada.
How much memory?
The digital revolution means that we are watched, recorded and known to others far more than ever before. Potentially embarrassing content on Facebook is preserved in cyberspace. I was surprised when Google announced that it will no longer preserve the records of our searches for more than nine months. I don’t remember for what I searched last week. I’m pretty boring, but the loss of privacy was astounding. The digital realm remembers what we have forgotten.
I watch young people who post stuff to Facebook or share information on Twitter that surprises me. Old friends can post photos or other information about childhood buddies - even if it is embarrassing - without permission. Whether looking at a university applicant, going out on a date, checking on a potential employee, or doing family research, the Internet has the potential of linking us to everything that has ever been written about us.
Sometimes this accessibility is quite pleasant. I was at a shivah recently when the mourner showed me an article that had been published in 1965 about his bar mitzvah and what his mother and sister wore on that occasion. His nephew in Australia had tracked it down.
But what about a mistake you made? You can’t simply move to another community to re-invent yourself. Don’t get me wrong. It is a good idea to be warned about some people. I want the Mounties and CSIS to track down potential home grown terrorists. I don’t want a pedophile to live near the shul or school. Some acts should not be forgotten, expunged or purged.
Yet we cannot and should not remember everything, lest we become like the Borges character or the woman who remembered everything. In Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger writes of the importance of “societal forgetting.” By “erasing external memories our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behaviour.” In contrast, a society in which everything is recorded “will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them…. Without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking.”
The written word made it possible for humans to remember across generations. Now digital technology is overriding our natural ability to forget. Memory helps us to make decisions aided by “remembrance of things past”. Forgetting helps us to make decisions without that burden. It allows the possibility of second chances.
For Israelis and Palestinians, memory sustains but also inhibits. For Israelis to remember all the details of the bus bombings, car shootings and terror attacks would immobilize them and prevent the prospect of seeing a different future. The hurts and humiliations of the Palestinians must also be partially forgotten by them in order to pursue the possibility of peace. Rabbi Donniel Hartman recently commented:
As we begin what may be our last effort at a political solution to the Palestinian-Israeli conflict, it is essential that we internalize our belief in the possibility of change. The Palestinian people and Authority have much to give account for and much which is in need of significant change if we Israelis are to believe peace and security can coexist. However, it is critical that we not look at past behavior as predetermining future actions. … To believe that Palestinian society can never change is not only a self-fulfilling and destructive belief; it is also antithetical to the concept of tshuva. We must believe that nothing is inevitable, that no future is predetermined and that people of good will can indeed both transform themselves and in so doing, transform our future.
Although we state that God reads and records our thoughts and deeds in the book of life, the mahzor also teaches that God over-writes the book for those who acknowledge their sins, atone for their actions and ask forgiveness of those they have wronged. Moreover, Jewish law tells us that people have an obligation not to remind others of their past misdeeds, on the assumption they have done teshuvah, turned in a new direction and transformed spiritually from their mistakes. “If a person was a repentant [sinner], one must not say to that one, ‘Remember your former deeds.”
The idea that a human being can change and evolve, learn from mistakes and grow in wisdom, is a belief developed by our Prophets. But the Torah tells us of a mitzvah that you can fulfill only by being forgetful. In fact, as you become aware of your negligence, you are not supposed to rectify that shortcoming.
This is the mitzvah of שכחה (shikhehah), the commandment to “forget”. “When you reap your harvest… and forget a sheaf in the field, do not go back to fetch it; it shall be for the stranger, for the orphan and for the widow.” (Leviticus 24:19). There are two other related mitzvot that refer to olives and grapes that were not harvested in the first sweep of the produce. “Leave what remains for (the most vulnerable and poorest among you,) the stranger, the orphan and the widowed.”
What is common to this set of mitzvot is the idea that forgetfulness leaves space and opportunity for others. Sometimes, without deliberate action, without thinking, we can be of help to others. The mitzvah of 'forgetting' is about the inadvertent nature of helping others.
One way to think about memory and forgiveness is in relation to the spiritual work we are called upon to do during these Days of Awe. Forgiveness requires some forgetting on the part of the one who feels injured. Repentance requires memory on the part of the one who has caused pain. They are not the same and they should not be confused.
There was a famous family, the Flying Wallendas, who were known for their daring and skill. Karl Wallenda, the father, did not use a safety net. In March 1978, Karl attempted to walk between two buildings, lost his footing and fell to his death. Different reasons were given for his fall: the wind, the tightness of the wires. But most commentators agreed that Wallenda did not let go of his pole. Karl was insistent that his family never let go of the pole. This time he should have dropped the pole, and, it was thought he would have lived.
It is hard to let go. This sacred season reminds us the importance of memory as a significant element of who we are as human beings. We survive and give meaning to our lives through the power of reliving and recreating our memories. But the Torah, during this sacred period, also has another teaching. God remembers, but human beings must learn what to remember and how to forget. There is a time to hold on and a time to let go.
So very open that it will never close again, so
very closed that it shall never reopen...
Forget, remember, forget
Open, close, open
(From Y. Amichai's Patuah, Sagur, Patuah)
“Memorious”, Jorge Luis Borges: http://evans-experientialism.freewebspace.com/borges.htm
Woman who couldn’t forget:
http://www.wired.com/medtech/health/magazine/17-04/ff_perfectmemory?currentPage=all#ixzz0yDx7Lk2O
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age http://press.princeton.edu/titles/8981.html
Jeffrey Rosen, “The Web Means the End of Forgetting”. http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/25/magazine/25privacy-t2.html?_r=1&emc=eta1
I am grateful to Rabbis Samuel Press and Haskell Lookstein for ideas related to this sermon.
