A couple of weeks ago, a close friend’s elderly aunt passed away peacefully at the age of 94. She was a widow and had no children. Her extended family largely lives in England, where she grew up. She had suffered from dementia; unable to see to her own affairs, my friend served as her guardian. In this capacity, he took responsibility for managing her financial obligations and also for seeing that her final wishes would be honored after she died. She chose to donate her body to science, after which she would be cremated. Her will stipulated that the ashes would be sent to her brother’s family in England, where they were to be scattered at a location of their choosing. Under no circumstances, she instructed, should her ashes be buried.
The day she died, my friend and I spent time looking through some of the sentimental things he kept for her when he helped her move into assisted living, where she spent her final years. There were scrapbooks, detailing her early adulthood spent working as a dancer and showgirl, with mementos from trips across the world, photographs of her and her fellow dancers, and glowing review articles in entertainment newspapers and magazines. And there were folders and binders of letters, providing a window into the relationships that were most important to her throughout her life.
Honestly, we weren’t sure what else to do. She wasn’t having a funeral, so there would be no formal ceremony or gathering to mark her passing. There would be neither a body nor ashes to bury, removing the possibility of a place dedicated to her memory. She had no children or grandchildren – it was hard to imagine who might want to take the items that my friend had held onto. It felt unsettling, knowing that she was just gone, that there would be no ritual to honor her life, that there was no one to assume the sacred responsibility of keeping and passing on her memory.
As Jews, this is contrary to our entire way of being. The moment we are about to enter in our service, Yizkor, is our 4-times-a-year opportunity to step into remembering deliberately, consciously, with a sense of purpose and responsibility. But remembering is something we do every day, in our prayers and in our lives. It is baked into who we are.
In English, the word remember comes from the Latin root meaning to call to mind again. It is something we do internally, as individuals. It is a mental and emotional process. The Hebrew meaning is different. The שורש/Hebrew root ז.כ.ר., translated “to remember,” appears in the Tanakh upwards of 350 times. Looking even at just a few of those places in the text paints a different picture of what it means to remember.
→From B’midbar 15:39, part of the text that becomes the third paragraph of Shema:
"וְהָיָ֣ה לָכֶם֮ לְצִיצִת֒ וּרְאִיתֶ֣ם אֹתֹ֗ו וּזְכַרְתֶּם֙ אֶת־כׇּל־מִצְוֹ֣ת ה׳ וַעֲשִׂיתֶ֖ם אֹתָ֑ם"
“That shall be your fringe; look at it and remember all GOD’s commandments and observe them.”
The tzitzit that we put on the corners of our garments are a constant reminder. Remembering is something physical, that we carry in and on our bodies. We touch it, see it, feel its weight.
→ From Shemot 20:8, within the Ten Commandments:
״זָכֹ֛ור֩ אֶת־יֹ֥֨ום הַשַּׁבָּ֖֜ת לְקַדְּשֹֽׁ֗ו׃״
“Remember the sabbath day and keep it holy.”
→ And from Devarim 16:3, in the Torah’s review of our three pilgrimage festivals:
״לְמַ֣עַן תִּזְכֹּ֗ר אֶת־יֹ֤ום צֵֽאתְךָ֙ מֵאֶ֣רֶץ מִצְרַ֔יִם כֹּ֖ל יְמֵ֥י חַיֶּֽיךָ׃״
“[You may consume no ḥametz during Passover] so that you may remember the day of your departure from the land of Egypt as long as you live.”
Make Shabbat holy. Refrain from eating ḥametz. These acts of memory are also obligations, things we must do. Remembering entails responsibility.
→ And finally, back in Shemot, this time 2:24:
״וַיִּשְׁמַ֥ע אֱ׳לֹהִ֖ים אֶת־נַאֲקָתָ֑ם וַיִּזְכֹּ֤ר אֱ׳לֹהִים֙ אֶת־בְּרִיתֹ֔ו אֶת־אַבְרָהָ֖ם אֶת־יִצְחָ֥ק וְאֶֽת־יַעֲקֹֽב׃״
“God remembered the covenant with Abraham and Isaac and Jacob.”
With the Israelites suffering under the cruelty of the Egyptians, God remembers the divine relationship with our ancestors. This is where the story of the Exodus begins, and we know very well what ensues after God remembers. Remembering spurs us to take action.
Our Jewish tradition teaches us that memory is a physical, tangible thing, one that makes demands of us. When we remember, we accept a sacred obligation and a call to action. Memory is a mitzvah.
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I came across People of the Book, by Geraldine Brooks, on a recent trip to the library. I’ve enjoyed her writing in the past, so I added it to my pile when I went to the checkout counter. The book is a fictionalized account of a real artifact - the Sarajevo Haggadah.
The actual Haggadah has quite a story. It dates to northern Spain in the mid-14th century, possibly created as a wedding gift. After the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492, it escaped with its owners. Somehow it wound up in Italy – a 1609 imprint indicates it was cleared by Catholic Church censors rather than burned, as was the fate of thousands of other Jewish texts. It next surfaced in Sarajevo in the 19th century, sold to Bosnia’s National Museum by one Joseph Kohen in 1894.
There it stayed until World War II. When Nazis came looking for it – as they did with many Jewish treasures and artifacts – it’s told that the director of the museum, a Catholic, tricked them, passing the Haggadah secretly to the head librarian, a Muslim, who then took it to safety in a nearby mountain village. After the war, it came back to the National Museum, locked in a safe in the basement.
During the Balkan wars in the early 1990s, the museum was aggressively shelled, flooding the basement. The Haggadah was again rescued, this time by an archaeology professor, who had it secured in a bank vault with the help of the police. It was presented back to the Jewish community at a Passover seder in 1995, carefully restored in 2001, and has been kept and displayed with pride by the National Museum ever since.
People of the Book, jumping through history, imagines its restoration in stages, but then envisions the life of the Haggadah in each of the places and times where it was found. Through the pages of the novel, Brooks’s thesis begins to emerge: this Haggadah survived expulsion and exile, severe persecution, even war. The fact that it is still with us today is due to the courageous and selfless actions of those who touched it along its journey.
Each of the Haggadah’s fictional stewards – among them a young Jewish scribe, a Muslim scholar and his wife, a sympathetic Catholic priest – has their own reasons and motivations for saving the Haggadah. One is preserving his faith and family legacy at a time when his community is being threatened. One has a deep reverence for the culture that produced the Haggadah, as well as personal sympathies for Jews in his circle. One does so as a defense against forces of intolerance and hatred that are closing in, and out of a belief in the shared destiny of all humanity. One sees the Haggadah and its story as proof that people of deep difference can live together and thrive, a source of inspiration in a time of devastating ethnic conflict.
Taken together, these motivations weave a tapestry of history and memory, adding new dimensions to our concept of what it means to remember. Memory is ritual, resistance, renewal. When we remember, we bring together our values, our deepest wishes for ourselves and for our world, and our empathy. This kind of remembering inspires us to find compassion for those in danger, common ground with those who differ from us, and courage to preserve and uphold, even at personal risk.
*******
The Jewish historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi z”l (1932-2009) argued in his influential book, Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, that the primary Jewish mode of reckoning with the past is not history, but memory. God is revealed through history – we often refer to God as God of our ancestors, or God who took us out of Egypt – but events are not recorded in historical fashion, for future generations to ponder and study. They take on mythic status, embedding themselves in our identity. In the Jewish consciousness, he explains, the past doesn’t remain the exclusive province of the past. “If history is real, then the Red Sea can be crossed only once, and Israel cannot stand twice at Sinai,” he writes. And yet, we recount and inhabit these events regularly, even daily, refracting those ancient events through the lens of our contemporary experience.
This is yet another dimension of memory: because we remember what happened before, we have the ability to see shades of it in our world today, recognizing repeating patterns and understanding current events as part of a larger edifice, as details that continue to fill in a bigger picture.
Memory is a powerful force. It activates our values and reinforces our identity. It expands our perspective, enabling us to see the current iteration of our world as a result and reflection of what came before. It compels us to assume responsibility, to take ethical action in the present and ensure that our world is staying on the right track.
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A couple of weeks ago, I was in the middle of my annual “dig myself out of my High Holidays hole” personal day off from school when I received a text message from my oldest and closest friend. It read: “Nothing says learning from history like invading Poland in September.” Of course, it was September 10, not September 1. And it was Russian drones in the midst of an aerial assault on Ukraine and not Nazi tanks rolling into Warsaw. And Poland shot them down rather than acquiescing to the aggressive show of force. But still. My friend’s reaction was tongue-in-cheek, but it was also a perfect example of how memory, as I’ve described it, operates.
At this moment of memory on Yom Kippur, and at this moment in the world and in our country, we must ask ourselves: Are we paying enough attention to what our memory is showing us? Are we upholding it or are we allowing it to be distorted? Are we properly harnessing its power?
Memory requires us to notice what’s happening around us and to us, to recognize it, to feel its urgency. And there is just so much to notice right now. One can hardly take a step without running right into something that begs us to activate our memory. Having that moment of recognition is not enough. The imperative to remember includes the obligation to act. If we look closely enough, our tradition – the unbreakable cord that binds together religion and history, connecting us through and beyond time – tells us exactly what we have to do.
So what is it that our memory is showing us?
The story of our world today is one where immigrants, the most vulnerable among us, are demonized, treated as threats, pulled off the streets with no warning or arrested trying to do the right thing. They are being held in deplorable conditions, with little access to communication and legal assistance, even their ability to care for their basic needs is often compromised.
This has been going on for months and months. Here are a couple of noteworthy pieces of news from this past week:
The United States deported a planeload of people from Iran, sending them back to Iran. It is unclear exactly who was deported, but officials report that nearly all had made asylum requests. Some had been denied, many had not yet come before a court. The US plans to deport at least 400 Iranian immigrants, at least some of whom currently hold legal residency status.
All of these immigrants left Iran legally, and with good reason. The human rights record of Iran is shameful. Iran persecutes women’s rights activists, political dissidents, journalists, lawyers, religious minorities and members of the L.G.B.T.Q. community, among others.
And we are sending them back there.
ICE is profiling and targeting Latino men and those who share their appearance in their current sweeps. There have been a good number of cases where those arrested by ICE are US citizens. Even when they declare their citizenship after being confronted by ICE agents, they are still being arrested. In some cases they have been handcuffed, kept in holding cells and immigration facilities overnight, and in at least two cases held without access to a lawyer or even a phone call.
One person was arrested as he was handing out resumes, searching for work. Another had his car pulled over for a traffic stop with unclear cause. Although the Department of Homeland Security asserts that their operations are highly targeted and that their officers are trained to follow specific protocols in identifying possible undocumented immigrants, these reports indicate that the procedures are not being universally followed.
I am the granddaughter of refugees from Nazi Europe. Although my family was largely of the “never speak of this again” variety of Holocaust survivors, their story is etched into who I am. It is a piece of my memory.
The first Jews to land on these shores were refugees. Having fled Brazil, once again under the rule of Portugal and the Inquisition, they were seeking safe harbor. Along the way, their boat was attacked by pirates and they arrived with nothing. Peter Stuyvesant wanted to send them away, concerned that they would be a burden on the fledgling colony, that they would take opportunities away from people already settled, and that their religious practices would be offensive. It could not have been easy for those first Jewish immigrants to what would become the United States.
And going generations back, we are all descendants of people who escaped enslavement in Egypt carried on eagles’ wings. We know what it is to be marginalized. We know what it is to be newcomers. We know what it is to seek a place we can truly call home. The Torah tells us 36 times to love and care for the stranger, if not out of a desire to seek justice, then out of pure empathy. When approaching the stranger, we must respond with love, because we remember.
Today’s story includes an alarming trend of militarizing our cities. Deploying the National Guard during peacetime to suppress protest and civil unrest, to combat supposedly rampant violent crime, is unprecedented. The targeted cities share a number of things in common. They have large minority populations, high levels of poverty, and falling crime rates. No one denies that these cities struggle with crime, but their local governments are making enormous strides toward improving life for their residents. They don’t seem to need the help the National Guard is purporting to provide.
In Memphis, the idea of military forces marching into their city raises distressing memories. “For some, the prospect of troops in fatigues has invoked one of the city’s most fraught periods, during the sanitation workers’ strike and the aftermath of the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination in 1968, when the Guard was sent to quell unrest. Even among residents who are open to the idea of federal help, there are concerns about optics and skepticism about how effective it will be.”
100 National Guard troops are also being sent to Chicago, over and against the objections of Illinois Governor JB Pritzker. One of their tasks will be to protect ICE facilities in the city and its surrounding suburbs, which have been sites of regular protests. Local officials, however, report that ICE agents have responded to protesters and journalists aggressively, firing tear gas and pepper rounds at them. One reporter shared that an ICE officer shot a chemical agent through an open window in her car as she drove past the building, even though there were no protesters nearby. Groups of federal agents are seen wearing face coverings and carrying rifles, patrolling busy tourist areas, and stopping people for questioning, seemingly at random.
We are a people with a deep and abiding respect for the rule of law. Our leaders have many expectations and limits placed on them. The Torah is wary of kings, forbidding them from having too many horses, too many wives, or too much silver and gold.
Our laws must be enforced fairly. Vayikra 19:15 reads:
"לֹא־תַעֲשׂוּ עָוֶל בַּמִּשְׁפָּט לֹא־תִשָּׂא פְנֵי־דָל וְלֹא תֶהְדַּר פְּנֵי גָדוֹל בְּצֶדֶק תִּשְׁפֹּט עֲמִיתֶךָ׃"
“You shall not render an unfair decision: do not favor the poor or show deference to the rich; judge your kindred fairly.”
Moreover, as we read in Devarim 16:20:
"צֶדֶק צֶדֶק תִּרְדֹּף לְמַעַן תִּחְיֶה וְיָרַשְׁתָּ אֶת־הָאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר־יְהֹוָה אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לָךְ׃"
“Justice, justice shall you pursue, that you may thrive and occupy the land that the ETERNAL your God is giving you.” The repetition of the word צדק, justice, is often interpreted as an exhortation to ensure that our justice system must itself be just.
To engage this part of our memory, we must remain vigilant, speaking out when we see justice subverted, using the freedoms and tools afforded to us to help bend our world’s arc ever more toward justice.
Our world’s story has rapidly become one where the words we hear and use become supercharged, where the consequences of speaking freely can be dire, where taking an opposing viewpoint can lead to retaliation and even violence.
In our current moment, with the might of the law being used as a cudgel to punish opponents, political and corporate power being wielded to endanger our freedom of speech, and the acceptance of violence as a legitimate response to deep disagreement, we can feel the echoes of authoritarianism reverberating around us. People like Stephen Colbert, Jimmy Kimmel, James Comey, Letitia James, and Charlie Kirk are at the front of our minds when we speak about this. But these trends have been developing for some time. Naming people such as Nancy and Paul Pelosi, Gretchen Whitmer, Melissa Hortman, and John Bolton reminds us that retaliation and violence threaten us all. When our enemies become scapegoats, our civilization is at risk of collapsing underneath our feet.
In the section of the Talmud dealing with the harm we cause others through speech, there is a tragic story. Rabbi Eliezer ben Hyrcanus refuses to back down in a halakhic debate. He continues to oppose the majority and the leadership and as a result is excommunicated. Confined to his home, he spends his days in prayer and seclusion. His wife, ironically named Ema Shalom, is in a tough spot. It was her brother, Rabban Gamliel, who, as head of the community, approved Eliezer’s excommunication. Her husband, as you might imagine, was none too happy with his brother-in-law Gamliel.
Each day she would prevent Eliezer from saying his private petitionary prayers, fearful that God would heed them and her brother’s life would be in danger. One day, something got confused, and she walked into the room to find her husband prostrated on the floor, saying his private petitions. “Get up,” she said. “You’ve killed my brother.” And it was at that moment that the word went out announcing the death of Rabban Gamliel.
This story lives in our memory, keeping us perpetually aware of the impact of our words and of the damage that can be done when a desire for revenge is coupled with access to power. We must guard our words carefully, never letting our disagreements reach the point of revenge or violence.
Our story right now, both as Jews and as citizens of the world, includes Israel. For nearly two years, we have been praying for the release of those held hostage following the Hamas attack of October 7 2023. During that time we have felt the poignance of hostages returning to their families and slowly returning to good health. We have been devastated by the deaths, both accidental and deliberate, of those we hoped would be coming home whole and alive. We have seen friends and family send their children off to war, unsure how, if, or when they would come home. This is our shared trauma.
And we have also seen Palestinians in Gaza suffer through hunger, displacement, and daily fear. We have understood how they have been used as pawns by corrupt leaders, with grave consequences. Too many, especially children, have died. In the name of eradicating the Hamas terrorist organization, we have seen the Israeli government prosecute a war whose aims are no longer clear, embrace a coalition that seeks to remove Palestinians from Gaza and resettle it as Jewish territory, and ignore over and over and over again the cries of their citizens to end the war.
We have witnessed antisemitism in word, speech, and action increase worldwide in frightening proportions. We have seen opposition to Israel’s policies reveal itself as just another instance of anti-Jewish rhetoric.
Attempting to fend off the Jew haters, we have also defended the indefensible, refusing to engage with sincere criticism of the Israeli government and their actions. We have shut each other down, and closed each other out. It seems that one cannot advocate for an end to the war without being called a self-hating Jew, a traitor. And one cannot express support for Israel without being called a colonialist Zionist, a baby-killer.
There is so much of our collective memory that is instructive here. Two particular pieces of text spring to mind. They exist somewhat in tension with each other, and that’s part of the point.
In Pirkei Avot (5:17), we learn that a מחלוקת, a dispute, that is for the sake of Heaven will endure, while one that is not for the sake of Heaven will not endure. The mishnah then brings examples. A dispute for the sake of heaven - the ongoing debates of Hillel and Shammai. One not for the sake of Heaven - that of Koraḥ and those he brought in opposition.
A midrash (Bereishit Rabbah 8:5) imagines that when God prepared to create humanity, God’s ministering angels formed opposing factions. The angels of kindness and righteousness wanted God to create people. The angels of Peace and Truth did not. So God took Truth and cast it to the ground, paving the way for the creation of humankind.
Our memory reminds us that מחלוקת is a constant and even welcome part of life. The whole bit about 2 Jews, 3 opinions isn’t a joke, it’s a Jewish value. And our memory reminds us that when we are in disagreement with one another, neither side may have a handle on what’s objectively true. Truth might not even be available to seek out.
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The story of our world today is an exhausting one. I’m exhausted. I know so many of us are as well. Our exhaustion comes not just from lack of sleep or lack of time to get it all done. It is existential exhaustion, spiritual exhaustion.
We might respond to our exhaustion with desperation. Seeing no clear solution, no obvious way to keep our world on track, we peripatetically search outside of ourselves for someone, something, anything to help us.
We might respond to our exhaustion with resignation. Inundated and overwhelmed by what we see coming at us from all directions, we dissociate, taking a step outside of our own lives.
These are both understandable responses. However, this is our moment of memory. And we are a people who possess both the power and the obligation to remember. It’s exhausting, but we can’t force our memory into a box.
Our memory instructs us to love and care for those who are most vulnerable, who – though they seem so different – are just like us.
Our memory tells us to root out corruption and pursue justice - justly.
Our memory challenges us to value our words, to be mindful of how we use them, and careful not to let differences of opinion tear us apart.
It positively yells that disagreement isn’t simply unavoidable, it’s part of who we are. We need to embrace it and learn to talk to each other again.
Memory is a mitzvah, an act of sacred obligation. More than ever, we need to step into that obligation and take action. Our current world is a reflection of what came before and we are seeing too much of the past in our present. It’s time to bring our world to a different, better place – for our present selves and for those who will carry our memory forward. כן יהי רצון.