I remember the exact moment that my orientation to the Jewish story crystallized into its current form. I was 19 years old and on a gap year in Israel, sitting in a classroom in Jerusalem and watching a video of a talk by renowned Jewish educational pioneer Avraham Infeld. His talk was about the five-legged table of Jewish identity, and it is his explanation of the first leg that struck a chord that continues to reverberate. He says, quoting his own father, that “There is no such thing as Jewish history! Jews don’t have history; Jews have memory!” History, he explains, is knowing what happened in the past. Memory is asking, “What does what happened in the past have to do with who I am today?”
Perhaps more so this week than others, the Jewish people wrestle with this question through our textual tradition. Our parsha this week is Va-et’chanan, in which Moses continues recounting the journey of the Israelites through the wilderness and the laws that God commanded them. In a multitude of verses, God, through Moses, commands the people to remember, not to forget, and to impart the stories and teachings to their children and their children’s children. One of these passages is the text of the first paragraph of the Shema and V’ahavta, in which we recite the command to teach our children and to literally bind the words to our bodies and our dwellings. This is a powerful act of living memory.
In the midst of our reading of this week’s parsha, we also take a day to live out and internalize different memories. This week marks Tisha B’Av (which ends here in Seattle a few hours after this will be posted), when we traditionally read the book of Eicha, which recounts the aftermath of the destruction of the First Temple in Jerusalem. This day, the saddest on the Jewish calendar, is our commemoration of the destruction of both Temples in Jerusalem and many other calamities suffered by our people through the ages. This is why, in addition to reading Eicha, Jews traditionally fast and engage in mourning customs on Tisha B’Av, as a way of taking on generations of grief as our own.
To live with and within a collective memory can feel like a great burden, but we lighten it when we share it together. When we engage these moments in our story, we are engaging with the family of Jewish peoplehood through time and space, connecting us to others whom we may lift up and by whom we may be lifted. Let us delve into our Jewish memory and ask ourselves how the story of our people drives and defines us. When I began to think of and engage with my Judaism through this lens at 19, I did not yet know my response to the question of what the events of the past have to do with who I am. Now I know the answer: Everything.