Deuteronomy 32:1-52
II Samuel 22
by Rabbi Stephen Pearce
Memory is important because it makes us human and defines who we are. Without it, there is no identity, history, culture, vision or planning. Animals have instinct and can be loyal, faithful and even intelligent, but they may not remember their parents or childhood and learn little from experience.
Memory, the keystone of Jewish life, was often all Jews had. Tormentors could, and often did, take everything, but they could not steal memory. Jews remembered Jerusalem, even when living in lands distant from the Holy City. Jews remembered the Sabbath day and their Egyptian enslavement. Jews remembered the law and sacred texts, even when books were banned or burned.
While memory is important, at times, it is good to forget, because living in the past can make it difficult to live in the present. People who are trapped by past memories are unable to move on and rebuild shattered lives. That is why Judaism wisely prescribes an 11-month limit to mourning.
There is even one occasion when it is a mitzvah to forget: the mitzvah of sh’chee-cha, of forgetting to collect sheaves of grain and crops left behind during the harvest, so that the poor may enter a field without asking permission to glean what has been purposely forgotten.
However, there is often a fine line between forgetting and remembering. For example, while the Torah commands the faithful to blot out from memory and history the name of Amalak, who attacked the Israelite stragglers and the weak as they traversed the desert, it also commands the reader to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19). Indeed, there are times when we feel the paradox of remembering when we should forget and forgetting when we should remember.
While memory can be used to recall and even savor the past, memory also can be used to distort or pervert the past. British court proceedings pitted Holocaust denier David Irving against American academician Deborah Lipstadt.
Irving sued Lipstadt for calling Irving “one of the most dangerous spokespersons for Holocaust denial,” claiming that “the deniers’ claims have no relationship to the most basic rules of truth and evidence” in her 1994 book “Denying the Holocaust: The Growing Assault on Truth and Memory.” The judge’s verdict stated, “In the absence of any excuse or suitable explanation for what he said or wrote, Irving is an anti-Semite.”
The most troubling feature about memory is that it is too short, a reality that is, perhaps, no more obvious than in thinking about modern Israel.
For 2000 years when denied citizenship, persecuted or expelled, Jews had no place that would say, “Come home.” That is what the Zionist dream was, not some distortion of that ideal that anti-Semites call a racist, imperialist, xenophobic scheme. What is unforgivable is the mockery that they have tried to make of the Zionist dream championed in “Hatikvah”: “to be a free people in a land of our own.”
Even Jews have forgotten what the world was like when stateless Jews had no country that would accept them, when the British turned away ships of Holocaust survivors from pre-state Israel, and why Israel is so vital to worldwide Jewry.
It should come as no surprise then that Moses rebuked the Israelites in his farewell address, found in this week’s Torah portion, Haazinu: “You forgot the God who brought you forth” (Deut. 32:18).
Indeed, the Israelites demonstrated that they had forgotten the power of the God who rescued them from Egypt when their fear of the size of the inhabitants of the Promised Land immobilized them in their efforts to settle there (Numbers 13:27-33); when they demanded to return to Egypt, where the food they had once eaten in bondage seemed preferable to manna eaten in freedom (Numbers 11:4-6); and when they cheered the construction of the Golden Calf with the words, “This is your god, O Israel, who brought you out of the land of Egypt (Exodus 32:8).”
The Torah emphasizes what modern Jews would do well to remember: Even in a short span of time it is possible to forget what and why predecessors held an ideal to be sacred. When we consider why modern Israel is so important to worldwide Jewry, may our historical memories be long, so that we can support and rejoice in the continued existence of the modern Jewish state.