LOOKING BACK
The Gift Of Memory
713 remember the past is to be changed
by it. 7b remember those who preceded
us is to be redeemed by them.
DEBORAH LIPSTADT
Special to the Jewish News
if there is a commanding verb
for Jews, it is zakhor — re-
member. Jewish religion and
culture are infused with memories.
"Zakhor et asher asa lekka Amalek," states
Deuteronomy: "Remember what the tribe
of Amalek did to you when you were
leaving Egypt, how they attacked you
when you were tired and weary." "Kee
gerim h'yeetem," Remember that the
Israelites were "strangers" in a land that
was not theirs, Leviticus admonishes.
Remember. But what is it to remem-
ber? What is the function of memory?
Dr. Deborah Lipstadt, adjunct professor of
religion at Occidental College in Los
Angeles, is the author of Beyond Belief: The
American Press and the Coming of the
Holocaust.
What role does memory play in Jewish
tradition? For Jews, the past is the an-
chor for the present. It is the stuff from
which the future is shaped. But memory
constitutes more than the raw material
from which nostalgia is wrought. It is a
guide and a teacher. It gives to us, but it
also demands from us. It is a gift and a
challenge. A fragile and capricious thing,
memory can be a curse — and a blessing.
Memory is a form of history and it is
history that we invoke when we remem-
ber. The Jewish God is clearly a God who
participates in history. In the Amidah,
the prayer which is the keystone of most
every Jewish service, the first description
of God is the "God of our ancestors,
Abraham, Isaac and Jacob." When
Moses returns to Egypt to announce to
the Israelites that he is about to free
them, he says he has come not in the
name of the God who created Heaven and
Earth, but in the name of the "God of the
ancestors," the God of history. We know
this God by what He has done in history:
Made a promise to Abraham, protected
Jacob, freed Israelite slaves from Egypt,
"appeared" at Sinai.
The injunction to remember is trans-
mitted not to individuals, but to a people
as a whole. At Sinai, God said that the
Covenant was made not only with those
present, but with "those not here on this
day," with generations yet to come. This
is, as Columbia University professor
Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi has noted, an
"outrageous claim." Even Joshua,
Moses' disciple, recognized this. He knew
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