To Remember

Yizkor. We remember.

We remember her mandel bread -- with the hard edges that would break between your teeth into a thousand crumbs. We remember his scruffy face -- though he had shaved as recently as that morning, rough against our hands, like rubbing the bark of an old oak tree. We remember his tired old jokes -- told hundred of times, to the point that they had long since stopped sounding funny to us, though strangers continued to find them charming. We remember how she used to sign off of every phone call -- insisting on saying, “I love you more!” as if it were the last word on the subject.

We remember these things. Yizkor. We remember them.

Is there any verb more central to the Jewish experience than “to remember”? We gather four times a year for these yizkor services, to remember people we’ve loved and lost. The verb “to remember,” lizkor, appears in the Torah no less than 170 times -- making it one of the most frequently repeated. Every Friday night, when we chant the Shabbat Kiddush, we say zicharon l’ma’asei vereshit -- that Shabbat causes us to remember the first week of Creation; and we say zecher litziyat Mitzrayim -- that Shabbat causes us to remember our Exodus from Egypt. Each of our three major festivals is serves as a remembrance of a moment in our people’s sacred story: Passover reminds us of the Exodus; Sukkot reminds us of having wandered in the desert; Shavuot reminds us having received the gift of Torah. The fourth of the Ten Commandments, as they are originally given at Mount Sinai, instructs us not to “observe” the Sabbath Day or to “set aside” the Sabbath Day -- but rather, “to remember” the Sabbath Day and keep it holy. Indeed, “to remember” is central to the Jewish experience.

The esteemed late Columbia University professor Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi noted in his landmark book Zakhor that when the early Zionists sought to revive the Hebrew language, they found no native word for “history.” They had to invent one -- or rather, they had to borrow one. And thus, the modern Hebrew word for “history” is historia -- a word that is obviously of Greek, rather than of Hebrew origins. This is because, Yerushalmi argues, the Jewish people knows of no such thing as history. History is an academic field -- an objective, third-party retelling of what happened to other people at other points in time. We Jews, Yerushalmi argues, don’t study history. Rather, we practice memory. Memory is the art of feeling that we ourselves somehow participated in events to which we may not have actually been a party. We remember the Exodus from Egypt as if we were actually there. We remember Mount Sinai as if we stood at its base. History is “his story” -- someone else’s story. To remember is to “re-member” -- to feel that we ourselves were members of the group to whom the story happened. What happened in the past is not someone else’s story. It is our story.

And so, when we we come here together on this morning of Yizkor, and we remember her mandel bread or his scruffy face, we do so not as if those events happened in the past, but rather, as if they are still happening to us in the present. We re-member. And in so doing we re-gain those whom we’ve loved and lost. Once again, the mandel bread crumbles in our mouth. Once again, that scruffy face tickles our fingers. Once again, the beauty of his or her life -- however short or long, however imperfect -- is spread before us: a memory, yes, but not merely a memory.

I am reminded of a particular foible of Nathan Zuckerman -- the deeply flawed protagonist and alter-ego of novelist Philip Roth. In the second book of the Zuckerman trilogy, Nathan stands at the bedside of his dying father. The two have had a lifelong troubled relationship. The family goes around the room, each person taking a turn to offer parting words to the patriarch of the family. They share memories with Nathan’s dying father -- the smell of the old winepress in the cellar of the family’s house, the taste of grandma’s famous mandel bread. But when it is Nathan’s turn to speak, instead of offering a memory from his childhood, he delivers a beautiful and deeply misguided speech on the origins of the universe. He tells his father about how the universe has been expanding for billions of years, and how after 50 billion years, the universe will been to contract again -- another 50 billion year process. And on and on it will go like this -- expanding and contracting, forever. “Imagine it,” Nathan says, “A universe being reborn and reborn and reborn without end.”

And while Nathan’s speech is elegant, and its promise of future rebirth is enticing -- predictably, the speech falls flat. Rather than holding out a glimmer of hope, Nathan’s lofty speech only further drives the wedge between him and his father. Seeing the speech’s deleterious effect, Nathan thinks: “The mandel bread was a much better idea.”

We have before us two models for exploring the past: one built on the science of the universe, the other built on the stories of a family; one that looks like history, and one that looks like memory. And while the notion that our universe is ever being reborn and reborn in 100 billion year cycles may provide some comfort, it is a rather cold comfort. What human, after all, has a memory long enough to recall the origins of the universe?

Better that we remember what we can: Her mandel bread. His scruffy face. His tired old jokes. The way she used to sign off every phone call by insisting that she loved us more. Better to re-member, to re-gain: yes, a memory, but not merely a memory.

On Passover, we’re commanded to see ourselves as if we personally participated in the Exodus from Egypt -- to feel as if that distant, mythic past is not merely a memory, but is as real today as you and me.

We were there. It was only yesterday. We can see it now. We can still feel the mandel bread crumbling between our teeth.