The Power of Souvenirs, Personal and National

Last week, I heard a high school rebbe relate to his students the standard explanations for why Jews eat dairy on Shavuos, including the idea that we are meant to have a dairy meal and a meat meal in order to require separate loaves of bread, mirroring the ritual שתי הלחם, two loaves of bread brought in the Beis haMikdash on Shavuos.

One of the students challenged his rebbe on the grounds that such memorials are irrelevant; in a world that has not known such an offering for nearly two thousand years, why bother commemorating it in this way? Of course, the student meant to challenge not only this custom, but many similar commemorative customs.

My instinctive response was that we have these commemorations because we value that past and long to return to it. But then, on Shabbos, I happened to notice a small, unfinished wood night table my Rebbetzin and I have had since we got married. It was originally part of a desk in my Rebbetzin's apartment when she was in school. We took the desk apart when we moved into our first place, and this piece of it has moved with us ever since. We could easily get rid of it - it doesn't really serve much of a purpose at this point - but I feel like the souvenir anchors me.

I am not only the person I am today, I have a story, a life, a continuum and a history. I am anchored; making a decision to uproot and alter my existence would be an uprooting of more than just a moment. I am more than a cartoon on a single page in a flipbook, an individual moment connected to other individual moments creating the illusion of a narrative; my souvenir, my memories, demonstrate that I am a whole story.

Some people call such souvenirs "baggage", in a negative sense, because they can forestall necessary, refreshing change - but anchors have a positive aspect as well, keeping us from floating adrift.

Which brings me back to the two loaves of bread, and other such national souvenirs.

There are times when I wonder about the evolution of halachah and machshavah (Jewish thought), managed as it is by human beings who are doing their best to be faithful to a tradition. We are easily swayed by today's isms, all claims of fealty to masorah aside.

In the realm of modern Jewish thought, Rav Hirsch and Rav Kook and Rav Soloveitchik were all quite clearly influenced by their philosophical contemporaries. Halachah, too, displays such influences, ואכמ"ל. And beyond the big thinkers - in hundreds of small communities around the world, despite the Internet and higher Jewish education, Judaism tends to become more or less what the rabbi of that time and place says it is. There is a sense that the inmates really can take over the asylum, overthrowing what is there overnight.

Here, too, the souvenir is valuable as an anchor. These objects and their rituals are our anchors, reminding us that we have a past, a continuum, a history, and that changing it is not an uprooting of a moment, but of a whole story. This, too, may be rejected as "baggage" - but I see great positives in the anchor as well.

Remembrance of Injustices Past - Good or Bad?

The other day someone was kind of enough to remind me of how I had wronged him years ago – a decade ago, in fact.

I apologized long ago.
I did my best to right the wrong.
I committed myself, verbally and through actions, to never repeat the error.
But, evidently, that wasn’t enough; teshuvah may cause Gd to erase sins, but we human beings never forget being wronged.

Lest I come across as self-righteous, I’ll cop to being the same way – I don't think I brood over sins against me, but I don’t think I ever really forget being wronged, either.

I needed all of thirty seconds just now to come up with a short list of injustices committed against me in childhood:

• A parental accusation that I had stolen a friend’s inherited ornamental tallis clips, when I came home with them one Shabbos afternoon. I was eight years old, scared stiff, but I knew he had told me to take them.

• A Spelling Bee moderator who mispronounced a word, causing me to misspell it. She said ‘legislature’ but she meant ‘legislator’. I was in 4th grade at the time, too timid to call her on it but angry enough to remember it vividly almost thirty years later. I could tell you her name, what she was wearing, everything.

• A high school Social Studies teacher who accused me of copying my paper on “The Good Earth” because it was so good. I had simply followed her model for essay-writing (a very good model, by the way), but I ended up dragging in my English composition instructor as a witness to my abilities, and the ribbon from my Canon Typestar 7 as proof of my trial-and-error process, before she dropped her complaint against me.

And the list goes on.

Maybe it’s a Jewish thing. As Jews, we institutionalize both forgiveness and remembrance of injustices past.

Sure, we insist that people should forgive each other, but we never forget all of the injustices carried out by others – indeed, many of them become holidays and/or fast days, depending on how they turned out.

And we never forget the wrongs that we have committed, either.

As individuals, we are taught that even if we apologize to the injured parties and even if we pray for forgiveness on the Yamim Noraim (Rosh haShanah and Yom Kippur), we are still obligated to repeat that request from Gd for forgiveness for years thereafter.

And as a nation, much of the time we dedicate to mourning injustices committed against us is actually spent in remembering the sins we committed to deserve those injustices. (Think קינות of Tisha b'Av.)

That guilt over what we have done has certainly affected me, too; I can come up with a much longer list of injustices I’ve committed against others, but that ain’t going on this blog.

By logic’s lights, this seems unhealthy, harboring heaps of injustice in our minds.

Dragging around guilt over our own wrongdoings makes it easy to excuse our failures – “this is who I am, it’s who I’ve always been.” (אל תהי רשע בפני עצמך!)

And toting around anger over what they’ve done to you, well, that’s just a recipe for disaster on so many levels.

So why does Judaism place such a consistent emphasis on it? Does the value (contrition, presumably) really outweigh the potential cost (stress, anger, low self-esteem)?

Discuss.

Yom haZikaron: The Value of Memory without Action

They shouldn’t have died. They shouldn’t have been murdered.
Infants, children, mothers, young men and women, elderly, handicapped…
They should be here with us today, enjoying the sunshine on their faces.
So whom can we blame?

-Ourselves, for wanting to live in the land of our ancestors, the land of the Torah and the land of mitzvos, the land taken from us by force, the land promised to us by Gd? We are seeking that which we have always sought, that which we need for our survival, both physical and spiritual.

-Jews around the world, for becoming a latter-day Babylonian Jewry, sitting at home comfortably under their grapevines and fig trees, occasionally popping in for a visit or writing a check or engaging in “political action” while their surrogates bleed? Yom haZikaron is the worst day of the year for me, questioning for the nth time what I am doing outside of Israel.

-Gd, for arranging a no-win situation in which we would be expected to return to our land, but without clear Divine “air support” for that return?

-The Arab world, for acting greedily as human beings always act upon losing something they believe is theirs, for not believing the Torah’s account of our right to Israel, for their bloodthirsty embrace of death?

-The world’s nations, those United Nations, for their realpolitik self-interest, the way they kowtow to Arab oil and petrodollars, the way they always seem to find ways to beat down the scapegoat Jews even as they insist there is no Anti-Semitism?

We can always find reasons to blame, particularly when there is blood everywhere. Our fingers are flexible; we can point in every direction, and we do. But it brings no satisfaction.

At the end of the day, all the blame in the universe doesn’t bring a single soldier, a single bombing or stabbing or shooting or stoning or lynching victim, back to life. All of the petitions and protests, all of the anger and angst and Never Again, may have some impact on the future, but no human hand can reverse the past.

Which, I suppose, is why it’s important to have a Yom haZikaron, a day not to blame, but to remember.

A day not to politicize and criticize and pontificate and castigate, but to look at photographs of faces, to say tehillim and recall the long, long list of names, to cry for men and women, young and old, to remember them not so much for how they died but who they were, how they lived, whom they loved, what potential they never had a chance to express.

It’s hard to remember without following up with retaliatory or compensatory action; it seems so depressingly pointless. This lack of bombast does not satisfy any need for revenge, does not serve any eschatological drive for redemption. But I think there is a point: To ensure that what is past does not become distant past, that in our drive to move forward we do not lose the souls of those who cannot be with us. To recall the merit of those whose lives were cut short.

Memory, we are taught, is the sum of our identity. It sums up what we have experienced and how we have acted, where we have been, what we have thought and believed. It is, in a sense, the most powerful, certainly the most encompassing, force in our lives.

And in devoting this most encompassing force to those who have been taken from us, we guarantee that their souls are צרורות בצרור החיים, bound up in the bond of life, in the most literal meaning of Avigayil words.

יהי זכרם ברוך, their memory is blessed, and is a blessing.