HOW COME A JEW? - II

 

According to Moses, the real test of a nation is, not if it can survive a crisis, but if it can survive the lack of one. Can it remain strong in times of abundance and power? History teaches us that the nations that seemed impregnable in their times, all  eventually declined and lapsed into obscurity. All for the reasons which were foreseen by Moses.

Moses did more than warn the people. He also showed how the danger could be averted. He spoke of the prime significance of memory for the moral health of a society. The word “Zakhor” (remember) is reiterated by Moses many times throughout the book of Deuteronomy.

"Remember" is a "command delivered 197 times in the Bible. As Rabbi Jonathan Sacks wrote:  “It is possible to see Judaism itself as a technology of memory, a set of practices designed to make the past present.”

Memory is essential to who we are as a people. It binds us to others. It helps us to know to whom we belong. And in Judaism, memory is not passive, it is active. Rabbi Yosef Yerushalmi wrote in his treatise on memory and history: “Only in Israel, and nowhere else, is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people.”

Memory makes us who we are as individuals. Memory helps us to find our way home – literally and figuratively. In the book, “Still Alice”, a 50 year old professor suffering from the early start of  Alzheimer’s wrote: “I find myself learning the art of losing every day. Losing my bearings, losing objects, losing sleep, but mostly losing memories…. All my life I’ve accumulated memories – they’ve become, in a way, my most precious possessions.”

Without memory there can be no identity. Judaism is learned by creating memories - around Seder tables, around Shabbat tables, through the smell of chicken soup wafting through the air. It is  learned through the songs we sing, through the stories we tell. Judaism is learned while visiting the hundreds of historical sites in Israel.

At the end of this week Jews throughout the world will be celebrating the Jewish New Year, “Rosh Hashanah”. It is also called “Yom Hazikaron”, a day of remembrance -  as individuals and as a people.

Our memory of the past guides our future. During the 2,000 years when Jews were a dispersed people it was memory which sustained them.

Throughout the book of Deuteronomy Moses warns the people fourteen times  not to forget. Moses also commands us to transmit Judaism from one generation to the next by living Judaism. Jewish forgetting is not the dementia that some of us fear as we age, but the failure to transmit Judaism to the next generation.

 

To quote Rabbi Sacks: “The politics of free societies depends on the handing on of memory. That was Moses’ insight, and it speaks to us with undiminished power today.”