Misty Watercolored Memory

Hey there, my name is Rabbi Jen Gubitz, and I'm pumped to be joined by Rabbi Jodi Gordon as we welcome you to the OMFG podcast, Jewish wisdom for unprecedented times.

Hey, Jodi. Hey, friend. OMFG, what a fabulous 4-letter word. Those 4 letters really do the trick. From "OMFG, I'm so tired" to "OMFG, are we there yet?" to "OMFG, what do we do with all our leftover matzah?" As rabbis, we have come to know that when the stories of our lives meet the stories of Jewish tradition, transformation, growth, and something awesome occurs.

Jodi and I are experts in the letters J and G, Old Navy Luxe tank tops, seltzer with lime, and Indigo Girl song lyrics. And we want to bring to you our conversations that express our love for Judaism and make it relevant in the world as we mine Jewish wisdom for strength and resilience in these unprecedented times with a dose of humor, because as the poet E.E. Cummings wrote, "The most wasted of all days is one without laughter." This week, We're talking about memory.

Memory is so core to the Jewish tradition. It's built into what we do, what we say, and how we tell stories. This month, the modern Jewish calendar notes two distinct days dedicated to commemoration and remembrance. The first, Yom HaShoah, the day of Holocaust remembrance, and Yom HaZikaron, Israeli Memorial Day.

Memory is so interesting and important, so let's warm up with a round of Do You Remember? Jodi, do you remember your first memory?

Totally. My first memory is getting out of the back seat of my grandparents' Pontiac on 13th Street in Manhattan and jumping out onto the sidewalk where my grandpa was crouched down with his arms open. I love that memory. Jen, do you remember your first grade teacher's name?

Her name was Mrs. Gevers, Ms. Gevers, because I went to her wedding where she became Mrs. Ackerman. I remember the dress I wore, and I remember also getting in trouble in class because she asked everyone— the class was loud— and she said, "Do I need to turn the lights off?" And everyone else said no, and I said yes. And thus was the beginning of me as who I am, and I got a frowny face. That week. And I also remember that she gave Easter cookies to me, but it was right before Passover. And so I took them home and my parents said, you can't eat them. But I did the whole week of Passover. I took tiny bites.

I feel like we learned a lot about you just now.

I know.

I know. Okay.

So Jodi, do you remember your childhood telephone number?

I do, because I had the best phone number. It was so easy to remember. 8-6-7-2-7-2-7. What was yours?

4-5-6-5-0-6-7. True story though. So my brother had, we had another phone line and it was something like 4-5-6-Ron-G. That was his private phone line. But true story, I cannot remember Matan's cell phone. It's such a problem that one time I forgot my phone and I needed him to know that I forgot my phone. But I didn't have his number in my head, so I made the person I was with email him because that's the only thing I could remember.

I think it might be time to commit that one to memory, Jen.

I'm trying. It's so hard. It's so hard. Well, I love remembering stuff like this, but it feels like when we talk about memory in the Jewish context, we're talking about something much deeper than phone numbers. And first grade teachers. Memory is embedded in our history and in our lived tradition in such important ways, and this time of year is no exception. Having just observed Yizkor, a special memorial service held at the end of Passover, this month now directs us into those two specific days that you mentioned, communal acts of memory, and in the context of Jewish history, they're related in interesting ways. Jodi, can you tell our listeners a little bit more about Yom Hashoah Yom Hazikaron?

Absolutely. So Yom HaShoah, which is colloquially known as Holocaust Remembrance Day, was first instituted as a national day of remembrance in Israel in the 1950s. That word shoah, which means utter destruction or catastrophe, was the largest and most systematic attempt to destroy the Jewish people during World War II. And I think it's important to note that we are not yet 100 years out from the Holocaust, And yet this Day of Remembrance does have its own unique ritual to it, right? It already is entrenched in our behavior in a certain way. In many communities, people will stay up through the night reading out loud each of the names of those who died. In other communities, there are special programs with music and poetry and storytelling, all of which are central to Yom HaShoah. And on the other hand, Yom Hazikaron, or literally the Day of Remembrance, is essentially Memorial Day in Israel. Except, unlike here in the US, where Memorial Day is largely a 3-day weekend with barbecues and a sort of kickoff to summer vibe, Yom HaZikaron is quite personal and important to most families in Israel. It's a day for visiting the cemetery and participating in special remembrances of soldiers who died while serving in the Israeli Defense Forces.

Yitgadal v'yitgadal sh'mei rabbah, b'almah divrah, kiruteh.

These are big days of national remembering and memory that fall under the guise of civil religion in Israel. And people are deeply religious about memorializing the Holocaust and honoring fallen soldiers, such that on Yom Hazikaron, the entire country stops. Still in its tracks. Cars stop, traffic stops, everything stops for 2 whole minutes as the Yom Hazikaron siren calls everyone to memorial attention. Do you remember that experience while living in Israel?

I do. And you know, the, the siren telling everyone to stop in their place, I remember that part. But Yom Hazikaron in Israel is really vivid to me for another part of the day, which was that my Hebrew class went to a special ceremony at the local high school. And in so many ways, it looks just like a high school assembly, except that all of the speeches and all of those special choral arrangements of this wistful, sad music was to remember their own older siblings and cousins and neighbors and people who had graduated from that very high school within the last 5 years. I think about that ceremony every year on Yom Hazikaron and just remembering how it's not this distant or sort of historical day on the calendar, right? But that, you know, each and every year it's real and it's present and it's personal for all of these people and their families.

There are numerous ways that memory shows up further in the Jewish calendar. As I mentioned, we do Yizkor memorial services on Passover, but we actually observe Yizkor 4 times a year on the pilgrimage festivals like Pesach, Shavuot, and Sukkot. And on Yom Kippur. And I really appreciate this sort of quarterly check-in with our memories and with our losses. The pilgrimage festivals are joyous celebrations. And so now we have these opportunities to both celebrate, but then we have the opportunity in our joy to also acknowledge those we miss, those who we wish could sit alongside us to celebrate too. The word Yizkor comes from zachor, the imperative to remember, and zikaron, memories themselves.

Memory, as we know, is not only a function of utility. You know, if you look into your own family narratives, right, we have memories that are both lived and inherited. We remember both as individuals and as parts of a collective. And this is where I always think that the heart of our tradition is so wise, and it's in our holiest text. It's right there in Torah that we're reminded that memory is a communal act. And yet, and I think we know this to be true sort of in our modern context as well, memory and the act of remembering doesn't always feel like pleasant nostalgia. We see this in a really interesting twofold command that comes out of a special Shabbat reading that we read on the Shabbat before Purim, which happens to be called Shabbat Zachor, or the Shabbat of Memory. And this text comes out of the book of Deuteronomy, where we read, "Remember that which Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt." Right.

So in this text, the Torah commands us first to remember how Amalek came upon the Israelites from behind, attacking the weakest and weariest members of the community. And that name Amalek echoes forward into Jewish history, becoming a stand-in for the ultimate evil those who would seek the destruction of the Jewish people, from Amalek to Haman to Hitler. The parallels are not hard to find.

But wait, Jen, what's so interesting and complicated here is that the Torah there actually continues. So the first part of the command is, remember what Amalek did to you, but then it goes on to say, blot out the memory of Amalek from under the heavens.

That sentence feels at odds with itself. Zachor, remember, timcheh, blot out. Which one is it? How are we supposed to simultaneously remember what Amalek did to us and yet blot out the memory of Amalek?

So true. Here's how I make sense of it, because this question feels in some ways more relevant than ever to me. Because the question is, what kind of mental gymnastics do we have to do in order to simultaneously remember and blot out the memory of pure evil right here in the guise of Amalek? This seems to me to be like the spiritual challenge of our time, and the answer, I think, is somewhere in the tension where we currently live. So on the one hand, how do we remember Amalek? How do we acknowledge and face and stand up to and mourn and speak out against the acts that threaten the weakest and the weariest among us? But then how do we blot it out? How do we soften the edges of that really fearful memory so so that we can actually continue to go on with our daily lives. The reason I think it feels like a spiritual challenge to me is because it makes us reconcile this real cognitive dissonance. And it's one that I think we see at the core of human experience throughout history. You know, it's a paradox that makes me think of something that Anne Frank wrote in her diary, where she wrote from her attic, hidden away, right, watching life go by, where she wrote that despite all of that, she still believed that people were good at heart.

Feels so challenging to do. I, I was so deeply captivated by Anne Frank as a kid, and I remember like writing down those quotes of her optimism, her capacity to be so optimistic even though she was hiding behind a wall so quietly. And just as an adult remembering like, first of all, how I think brave she was, but also how complex this paradox is and how, as an adult, I'm not sure how well I do it.

There is something interesting to think about, like, is there something embedded within youth, right, within the young, where there is like a greater openness or capacity for that kind of complexity? But in some ways, then, did Anne Frank get it exactly right, how to remember Amalek and also blot out the memory? I don't think it's easy. Like you, I don't think I am particularly good at it. I actually read something that this neuropsychologist Rick Hanson wrote where he talks about how our brains handle memory, right? It would— it's sort of in the way of explanation. And he writes, it's as if our brains are Velcro for the negative and Teflon for the positive in our lives, which, A, feels so true, right? How much easier it is to really hold on to and cling to the things that are not so good, right, that maybe still bother us, that cause us pain, and how easily we forget joy or positive things. But if we expand that out as a people, I think that Jews know what it is like to live with both the Velcro and Teflon versions of memory, right? So our collective and historical memories, both the positive and negative, are at the core of everything we do as a people— how we think, what we believe, and how we live. You know, in our tradition, the importance of memory hovers over everything we do as we live out the rituals and rites of Jewish life. I think about this a lot when we make kiddush on Friday nights and we sing "Zecher Litziat Mitzrayim," right? So each and every Shabbat, we sing "Zecher Litziat Mitzrayim," that we call this glass of wine a reminder, a memory of the Exodus from Egypt. Which means each and every week we're meant to recall what it felt like to shed the bonds of slavery and to taste freedom. But like Nelson's analogy of Teflon, that's not always the first memory that rises to the top of our communal conscience. So in other words, remembering Amalek might come more naturally to many people than blotting out his name and finding a way to move forward.

Feel like that's how many of us were educated in Hebrew school in the late '80s and '90s, where the history of antisemitism and the horrors of the Holocaust were at the forefront of our education. So our collective Velcro memory taught us that we must never forget. We basically learned though that antisemitism and the Holocaust were the reasons to live Jewish lives. In the psychological arithmetic done by those educators, somehow we could make up for the 6 million lost simply by sitting in those uncomfortable chairs each week and encountering their suffering.

And then, because that was totally my experience as well, but then once we get beyond those childhood experiences, over the course of the past 40 years, now we've borne witness to a different kind of conversation in the progressive Jewish public square, a conversation around antisemitism and Holocaust remembrance that's one of discomfort. You know, I think I certainly grew up around a lot of people who as adults felt that the narrative of never forget as the sole motivator for Jewish engagement was insufficient at best, and at worst a turn-off for them as young Jews trying to engage in their culture and religion. There's a great book written in 2006 called Gonzo Judaism, written by Rabbi Niles Goldstein, who warned readers of the perils of remaining too entrenched in the victimhood model. And he basically says that A 21st century model of Judaism has to move away from fear and towards something that is joyous, vigorous, vivacious, and even audacious. What we must create, according to Goldstein, is a Jewish culture and community rooted in affirmation, joy, and celebration, not guilt, fear, and sentimentality. And right now, the question of how to do this in some ways has felt sort of never harder than to answer. So we live our Jewish lives today by trying to do it all, by absolutely holding on to memory and history and also seeking out and creating joy that can sustain new memories.

I don't know about you, Jodi, but this question of Jewish joy feels so relevant and pressing right now as congregations and communities around the country try to figure out what reopening and coming back means.

Totally. We've been asking this question a lot at the congregation that I serve. You know, how do we slowly re-emerge after a year of such devastation and loss and balance the need to remember and also not get swallowed up by memory? I know one thing I've been thinking about a lot is how we might ritualize the way we remember this pandemic experience.

What are the stories that need to be told about what has happened this past year? What are the songs, the art, the poetry that need to be created to help us create some kind of sacred container for this experience? What are the rituals? Will there be a day to commemorate all of the loss this year? I think an aspect of the tremendous amount of time the Jewish people devote towards memory and memorializing is because there is so much profound grief and trauma. And we need rituals, private, public, civil religion, to help us hold our grief.

As we come to the end of this conversation, I'm thinking of that thing that we say to one another when someone dies. Traditionally, we say, "Yehi zichra," or "Yehi zichro baruch," "May her memory be a blessing." And then this past year, for me, it was when Justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg died, I learned For the first time, I learned of the custom of saying, "Yehi zichra mehafekha," "May her memory be for a revolution." And so as we move through this season of communal remembrance and towards some next normal, that is my blessing for all of us. May the memories of this past year, that which we have lost, and those whom we have lost be for a revolution, spurring us to create a more whole and peaceful world.

Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen! Amen!

Amen!

Oseh shalom imromav huya oseh shalom aleinu ve'akoyeser ha'imro amen.

This episode of the OMFG podcast was brought to you by Rabbis Jen Gubitz and Jodi Gordon, sound effects by Leslie Gubitz, digital editing by weeditpodcast.com, original music by singer-songwriter Stephen Brickman, and brought to you by the letter F.

Yes! What's your favorite F-word? Focus.