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Active Remembering: Is Judaism a Memorial? - Rabbi Batsheva Meiri
New York is undergoing an existential struggle: how to rebuild lower Manhattan, go on with life, while at the same time remember September 11th. A competition is underway to create the most fitting memorial, and the main guideline is that the design recognize each individual who was a victim of the two Trade Center attacks. No doubt, proposals will include listing the victim’s by name. Names have come to equal an identity, defining a person by his family circle, often identifying a person’s ethnic, religious or cultural heritage. I remember a particularly effective memorial at the Umshlagplatz, the boarding platform where the trains left the Warsaw ghetto for Treblinka. That memorial is designed to look like a gravestone with a list of first names only- the most common proper names of ghetto residents compiled from a vast, but incomplete archive. Standing in front of all those names, moved me to ponder not only countless individual victims, but all the people for whom they were named, and all the people who would have been named for them- had their lives not been cut off. For Jews, names serve as perpetual memorials.
This is not the first time our nation has faced the unfortunate task of finding a way to commemorate painful historical moments. By WWI, memorials recognized foot soldiers and generals alike for their service to our country. Their names not only democratized the landscape of the battlefield, but aimed to remind those who viewed them that we pay a terrible price for war. In Maya Lin’s Vietnam memorial, one simultaneously sees in the polished black granite the names of fallen soldiers and one’s own reflection. A memorial which at first appears to be neutral about the war, reminds the visitor it could have been me. It was me.
These memorials are powerful because they call out to us, and sometimes jolt us into remembering something we’d just as soon forget.
The command to remember is at the heart of Torah and much of Jewish practice. The root lizkor, to remember, in all its forms appears two hundred and twenty two times in the Bible. We are told to remember certain days, like the Sabbath and holidays. We are commanded to remember people, like the tribe of Amalek who attacked the Israelites as they wandered in the desert. We are summoned to remember the redemption from Egyptian bondage, how with a strong hand and an outstretched arm, God brought our people out of oppression. In Judaism, we are taught to remember so often that remembering seems to become the goal.
Rabbi-Philosopher Emil Fackenheim, teaches that the Holocaust forces us to observe a new, 614th commandment: do not give Hitler a posthumous victory. For Fackenheim remembering the Holocaust, making memorials to the Holocaust, isn’t enough. We must avoid doing anything that leads to the obliteration of the Jewish people. And we must do everything that leads to the flourishing of the Jewish people. Fackenheim’s remembering is not just a memorial, it is a call to action.
But you and I don’t live in the ivory tower of the philosopher-theologian. Our lives are fraught with incredible stresses that all but expend our limited energies: carpooling our children to school and their activities, running to the hospitalto sit at the bedside of our loved one or visiting doctors for our various ailments. We have financial worries, our children give us a hard time. When we get to Temple, so often, all we want is to be lost in the world of memories, to be comforted and granted a full measure of the peace we richly deserve.
How nice it would be if the synagogue were merely a place to get relief from the tensions, the conflicts, and the defeats that punctuate our lives. Here we would allow ourselves to be lost in the music, to recite the words of the prayerbook as a mantra. We’d meditate on the familiar stories from Sunday school, the memories of the class on Jewish cooking we took in the Temple kitchen, and making noise makers for Purim. When our kids came home from religious school all we would need to know was that they had a good time, and had friends in their class. The Rabbi and Cantor smiled at us after services, said gut shabbos or gut yontiv, and we all went home feeling good. The thing is, friends, Judaism and the synagogue need to be all of those things and more. We do want the music to move us, to take this time to reflect and reminisce, to have our children feel at home and positive when they are here. But just as an orchestra playing only Vivaldi’s Four Seasons, or an opera playing only Puccini’s sweetest arias would be boring and dissatisfying, so with Judaism: if we allow it touch us only as a memorial, all comfort, all peace. If we are not open to the action that Jewish remembering demands, Jewish life will be forever stuck in the past. It won’t live in our lives today, and it may not live in our children’s lives tomorrow. When our tradition tells us to remember, it is never just about the past. The kind of remembering one does when visiting a memorial, and the kind of remembering one does at the Seder table, haggadah in hand, are different. This is what Leon Wisletier wrote about: "The preservation of [these customs] is not an anthropological imperative. It is a moral imperative... With these particulars, we prove that we are alive and that we are free. When, on the eve of Passover, I chop apples and walnuts and cinnamon with wine precisely as my parents, and their parents, chopped them, I mark the defeat of our enemies. In our kitchen, empires fall again." (Kaddish) The empires of which he speaks are not the empires of old, they are of today.
A Seder calls us to remember the bitterness of slavery and to call out to those who are hungry to come and eat at our tables. A Seder demands we open up our doors, not to an imaginary Elijah of the storybooks to rid ourselves of the barriers which separate us and distance our world from the Messianic time. The Seder only makes sense when eating matzah, the bread of affliction, we relive being strangers in a strange land, and then go out to make our community, our children’s schools, our country, our world, places where all share in the gifts of freedom, and where no one is the "other," a stranger, and where no one suffers hunger or malnutrition. In exactly the same way, a successful religious education encourages our children not just to have a good time, have friends and feel good, but also to ask themselves whether file-sharing on the Internet is compatible with Jewish values. Or whether gossiping about their friends and neighbors is a moral thing to do. Our children have a great need to hold themselves up to the ideals of Torah and to know that there is such a thing as right and wrong, that they have important choices to make, and that they are judged, too. And parents need to encourage and be involved in making that the central part of their children’s Jewish education.
Living Judaism is a discipline of active remembering, of continually finding ways that the old stories, the old events, the old empires are entwined in and are acted out in the stories of our own lives. But when it comes to worship, no rabbi or Cantor can do it all for you. That is why we call worship, avodah, work. Because it is work, not just peacefulness, not just spiritual quietude. It’s work. During these days of Awe, the clergy and choir make a setting for the words on the page, they sing what could be in your hearts.
We blow the horn of broken notes but only so you actively assess your own choices, your own life and only you can find the strength and the courage to make it whole. Start now. It’s not too late to leave here changed by the themes of the service, to be touched and to be moved. These services are anything but a memorial. They call you to action. The Al Chet prayer asks you: have you withheld your love from those who depended on you? Have you distorted the truth for your own advantage, indulged in despair, been silent when you saw an injustice, forgotten the poor? If only on this day of Yom Kippur, you take one of those lines and truly realize your fault, feel great remorse, and are moved to spend part of everyday of the coming year changing, then these few hours that we spend together will bring you the true peace and satisfaction that you wish for and need. You will have taken the memorial of our past, and transformed it into religious living.
This afternoon, we will recite the Ashamnu again. Can you find the courage and the insight to recognize a personal failure, just one. Arrogance or bigotry, cynicism or deceit, egotism, greed, jealousy, quarrelsomeness, selfishness. Atone for just that one. Ask God to forgive you for that one sin and let the natural courage and strength that is within you well up into the days ahead, taking small and then larger steps towards your better self. This is why we are here together. Because a living faith offers us freedom from of the prison of the past to change and grow. And isn’t that real source for the peace we seek.
We all still remember the day the space shuttle Columbia exploded. Ilan Ramon, the Israeli astronaut on that mission was remembered in many obituaries for what he had brought with him into shuttle, a picture of a moonscape drawn from the imagination of a young boy who did not survive the Holocaust. I imagine he brought it up there as a tribute of sorts to how far the world has come from being a place where Jews faced certain death and could only dream of the moon, to a world where an Israeli could practically touch it. A beautiful thought. But a more lasting remembrance is one I heard about Ramon’s character. NASA wanted the seven astronauts to bond before going on their mission. So they decided to have the crew hike up a mountain together with 35 pound backpacks. Midway through their trek, it became clear that only Ramon and McCool were in condition to reach the summit. The group decided to stop part way up and continue climbing in the morning. At dawn, five of the astronauts awoke to see their backpacks missing. While they were sleeping, Ramon and McCool had carried all of them, 250 pounds worth, to the summit for the others. In that way they acted upon the directive of our tradition that to lighten another’s burden, to help him carry the weight, is to truly love him.
Today, we are all undergoing an existential struggle. The ancient words of our Torah exhort us today: "Uvacharta bachayyim," choose life. All at once we must choose how to build our lives now, moment by moment, on the central values of our past. To learn each day, how we can lighten another’s burden, grow in commitment to honesty and deepen our love for those around us and our world. From these acts, may we all draw comfort and peace.
