Remembering With Mercy

by Rabbi Avi Weiss
Special To The Jewish Week

Candlelighting, Readings:
Candles: 8 p.m.
Torah reading: Numbers 30:2-32:42
Haftarah: Jeremiah 1:1-2:3
Shabbat ends: 9:04 p.m.

This is about memory; God’s memory, human memory. It’s an appropriate topic as we live within the Three Weeks leading to Tisha b’Av’s memorial for the destruction of the Temples.
On one level, God’s memory is perfect. In the words of the High Holy Day liturgy, “God remembers all forgotten things.”

And yet, the haftarah this Shabbat points us in the opposite direction. God says, “I remember for you the kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days. How you followed Me into the wilderness,

in a land that was not sown” [Jeremiah 2:2]. Jeremiah, who foretells the destruction of the Temple, comforts Israel by declaring that God remembers our loyalty, when we followed Him into the desert, leaving Egypt.
But isn’t God remembering imperfectly? True, the Jews followed into the desert but they weren’t exactly loyal. They complained they had no water and no food. They built the Golden Calf. The spies come back with a negative report resulting in God’s decree that the generation who left Egypt would not enter Israel. That verse from Jeremiah is revisionist history. We marched through the desert kicking and screaming.
So, which is it? Does God remember perfectly or imperfectly? Similarly, should we, created in God’s image, remember everything as perfectly as we can or selectively?
In discussing this issue, Neil Gillman of the Jewish Theological Seminary, who planted the seed of this d’var Torah, draws on a wonderful fantasy, “Funes the Memorius,” by Jorge Luis Borges.

Funes falls from a horse and is knocked unconscious. When he awakens his memory is perfect, omniscient. Writes Borges, “With one quick look, you and I perceive three wine glasses on a table; Funes perceived every grape that had been pressed into the wine.... He knew the forms of the clouds in the southern sky on the morning of April 30, 1882.... He was able to reconstruct every dream, every daydream he had ever had. Two or three times he had reconstructed an entire day... but each reconstruction had itself taken an entire day. ‘I, myself, alone, have more memories than all mankind since the world began’... ‘My memory, sir, is like a garbage heap.’”

The result was that Funes was paralyzed. In the story it was a physical paralysis, but Gillman posits that the paralysis was metaphysical, “He was paralyzed by his memory. Because he couldn’t forget anything, he couldn’t move [and] lay in bed for the rest of his life.”

One wonders, then, is it a blessing to remember? The Torah commands that we remember. Zachor, remember you were slaves in Egypt. Zachor, remember Amalek. Holocaust survivors implore us to remember.

We’re all aware of the horror of memory’s loss, of Alzheimer’s. Many of us have painfully seen someone who can’t recognize his or her spouse, or child. One suffering friend had a terrible first marriage but a romantic 25-year second marriage. His wife, in tears, said, “My husband doesn’t recognize me, he only recalls his first wife.”
In severe loss of memory one doesn’t recognize others; in more serious loss one does not recognize even himself/herself. In losing memory we lose our identity. We are the sum of our experiences: memory connects those experiences. Still, as Borges writes, isn’t it the case that memory can sometimes paralyze? Isn’t it the case that sometimes it is preferable to forget?

Sometimes a relationship can only survive if we forget past slights. Sometimes marriage can only endure if we forget how we’ve been wronged. Sometimes it is important to forget the mistakes of our children, and children the mistakes of their parents.

God is omniscient. He “remembers all forgotten things.” But the verse from Jeremiah is an example of how God remembers with mercy. Yes, there was disloyalty after the Exodus but God remembers the many loyal moments, including our following Him into the desert.

We should follow in this path. On the one hand, memory is critical for self-dignity, self-respect, self-identity. Memory is important as a means to assume responsibility. Not everything can be simply washed away. On the other hand, if we’d remember everything, like Funes, we’d be paralyzed. At times we must know what to forget in order to move on. We must remember selectively.

In these, the Three Weeks, we sense the High Holy Days on the other side of Tisha b’Av. Rosh HaShanah is called Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance, but remembrance with mercy. In that sense, Yom HaZikaron means, to some extent, the very opposite, a day to forget. We can do that by forgiving, or remembering selectively.
No wonder that one of the proof texts in the Rosh HaShanah liturgy of God’s power to remember is that very same sentence from this Shabbat’s haftarah: “I remember for you for the kindness of your youth, the love of your bridal days. How you followed Me into the wilderness, in a land that was not sown.” n

Rabbi Avi Weiss is founder and president of Yeshivat Chovevei Torah Rabbinical School, and senior rabbi of the Hebrew Institute of Riverdale. His new book, “Spiritual Activism: A Jewish Guide to Leadership and Repairing the World” is published by Jewish Lights.

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