Wednesday, March 26, 2014

Jewish Memory - Avraham Infeld

When I came to study in Israel, I wrote my dad a letter saying I would be studying Jewish History. He said "What, they teach Jewish History at the Hebrew University? There is no such thing as Jewish history. Gentiles have history, Jews have memory." The most important part of being a Jew is a sense of Jewish memory.

That is why the verb that appears most in our ritual is Z'chor, Zecher, Zicharon. Remember, remember, remember. If someone asks me to describe who is a Jew in one sentence, I would say, "a Jew is one who is strictly forbidden from suffering amnesia.

Imagine a couple about to get married, they are in love. Their parents have spent a fortune on the caterer. They get under the chuppa, and what is the first thing they do? Break a glass. Why? To remember the destruction of Jerusalem.

Believe me, I have never met a couple who have spent the first night of their marriage worrying about the destruction of the Temple. But you cannot build a Jewish family, build a new Jewish home, you cannot create Jewishly without calling upon Jewish memory. And my father was right. What is the difference between history and memory? History is knowing what happened in the past. Memory is asking how does what happened in the past impact on who I am today.

That is why we don't teach our children that our forefathers came out of Egypt. We teach them that each person must see oneself as if he or she personally came out of Egypt. The challenge to the Jew is how do you take this collective memory of this people and make it a part of your life.

As a child in South Africa, a major holiday in our home was Shavuot. I used to walk around the dining room table with a basket of fruit singing songs about fruits and the harvest. But it was stupid. It was the wrong season. I was in the wrong hemisphere! You pray for rain at the wrong time. You know why? Because as a Jew you don't function out of your own personal needs, you function out of a collective memory of a people.

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