This year Memorial Day and Chag HaShavuot fall out the same
week. On Memorial Day we commemorate those who have sacrificed for our
nation, but it is not only a day to memorialize but also to remember.
As Dianne Frapier wrote a few weeks ago as a mother of a fallen soldier, “Keep your service member’s memory alive. We keep David’s memory alive in our house. His pictures are
proudly displayed in our living room. His flag from his burial is with us.
Matthew’s purple heart hangs on our wall. I love sharing about their service
when I can. It doesn’t matter how many years go by, I always love making new
memories by sharing their stories with others. This Memorial Day, like every
year, will be a time of remembrance. Our David is gone but through
sharing, serving, and surviving we will keep his memory alive.”
Memory is “The ability of an organism to record
information about things or events with the facility of recalling them later at
will. Memory is a facility common to all animals.” To
remember “To recall from one's memory; to have an image in one's memory.”
To remember is an active human behavior.
Susan Crane, professor of history at University of Arizona, in
the article “How Memorials Help Us Remember- And Forget” highlights that “When you lose someone you cared about, people talk about having
memorial services or a gravestone or a marker of some kind... The reason people
want that is so that they have a location for their memories, something external,
outside your own head. It’s a place where you can go and think about a
person you lost or a cause you cared about or an important event. If enough
people care about the same thing, they can also gather there with a common
purpose. I think the impulse is wanting to externalize the memory and the
caring into some kind of physical object...And
then, over time, sometimes, the immediate urgency and passion that people
associate with that memory fades. There’s not that impulse toward memory that
there was before.”
To remember is to internalize the
memory.
In essence, our goal is to commemorate a “Remembrance Day”
instead of a “Memorial Day” through actively keeping the memory
alive.
Shavuot in essence is also a day of remembering. As with
any Jewish holiday we are not interested in the history of the event of
receiving the Torah, but rather the remembering of the event. The question is,
how can we remember something we never experienced?
In Devarim 29: 13-14 Hashem says to Moshe,
But not only with you am I making this
covenant and this oath,
|
||
|
who are not here with
us, this day.
|
ידכִּי֩ אֶת־אֲשֶׁ֨ר יֶשְׁנ֜וֹ פֹּ֗ה עִמָּ֨נוּ֙ עֹמֵ֣ד הַיּ֔וֹם
לִפְנֵ֖י ה אֱלֹקינוּ וְאֵ֨ת אֲשֶׁ֥ר אֵינֶ֛נּוּ
פֹּ֖ה עִמָּ֥נוּ
הַיּֽוֹם:
|
Rashi quotes the Midrash
Tanchuma and says that Hashem was giving the Torah to also those who are in
future generations as the Midrash describes:
“It does not say [at the end of the verse], ‘with us standing
today’ but rather, ‘with us today’; these are the souls that will be created in
the future, who do not have substance, about whom ‘standing"’ is not
mentioned. For even though they did not exist at that time, each one received
that which was his.”
This is the source for what we learned as young children
that all Jews were at Har Sinai. Every soul that was ever to be born received
the Torah first-hand. Therefore, we are actually able to actively remember
the receiving of the Torah as we were there. We are not simply
memorializing an event of history. We are remembering.
As Mendel Kalmenson says, “He is not just the G-d we
heard about, but the G-d we heard from.” He is not the G-d of our
ancestors. He is our personal G-d. And, He was speaking to each one of us
individually as He said, “אנכי ה’ אלוקיך” “I am Hashem your
G-d.” “אלוקיך” is in singular, not plural. Each of us personally experienced
receiving the Torah. And, so it is not part of our history, but part of a
living remembrance.
And, thus before Moshe dies he leaves Bnai Yisrael with the
mitzvah of hakhel- hearing the Torah read by the King every seven years.
Hakhel was meant to be a reenactment of Sinai. As the Rambam writes in the Mishneh Torah, Laws of the Festival Offerings 3:6. “They
would prepare their hearts and alert their ears to listen with dread and awe
and with trembling joy, like the day [the Torah] was given at Sinai . . . as
though the Torah was being commanded to him now, and he was hearing it from the
mouth of the Almighty . . .” Even small children came as they too were able
to reenact and remember the day they were at Sinai.
And, the last mitzvah in the Torah is the mitzvah to write sefer
Torah. When there is no longer a Beit HaMikdash and therefore no hakhel,
the way to remember that day at Sinai, is through writing a sefer Torah.
A similar theme of remembering can be found in the
midrash in Niddah 30b that
אין לך ימים שאדם שרוי בטובה יותר מאותן הימים...
ומלמדין אותו כל התורה כולה שנאמר (משלי ד ד) ויורני ויאמר לי יתמך דברי לבך שמור
מצותי וחיה ואומר (איוב כט, ד) בסוד אלוה עלי אהלי וכיון שבא לאויר העולם בא מלאך
וסטרו על פיו ומשכחו כל התורה כולה שנאמר (בראשית ד, ז) לפתח חטאת רובץ
And there are no days
when a person is in a more blissful state than those days when he is a fetus in
his mother’s womb...And a fetus is taught the entire Torah while in the womb,
as it is stated: “And He taught me and said to me: Let your heart hold fast My
words; keep My commandments, and live” (Proverbs 4:4). And it also states: “As
I was in the days of my youth, when the converse of God was upon my tent” (Job
29:4). And once the fetus emerges into the airspace of the world, an
angel comes and slaps it on its mouth, causing it to forget the entire Torah,
as it is stated: “Sin crouches at the entrance”
What would be the purpose of teaching the fetus the
entire Torah just to have it forget it when it is born? As is commonly
noted so that when one learns Torah one is remembering what one once learned.
It is familiar. It is not an external memory. It is an internalized
recollection, i.e. remembering. “Ah, I remember that!” It provides a warm,
fuzzy feeling of remembrance.
For our children to truly love Torah it has to be alive
for them, not a distant memory of the past. It is part of who they are
from even before birth and when they were simply souls at Har Sinai or in the
womb. We remember. It is a part of us, and therefore we are still engaged in
Torah. In essence by giving us the Torah before we were even born Hashem
was shaping our attitudes towards the Torah.
As parents, we too have the ability and power to shape
the attitudes of our children and what they remember. As I have been saying
over and over again in my column these past weeks, we cannot change what is
going on in the world, but we can change the way our children experience it.
This week, I add, we can change the way they remember it. As Dr.
Perri Klass says in her article “Getting Through, Making Memories and Being the
Grown-Ups” this is time in quarantine is going to be one event that defines
their childhood. Years from now, as our parents might have said, “Where
were you when JFK was shot?” or we refer to 9/11, they will refer to this time
as something they remember. Instead of the anxiety, uncertainty and
stress, we can help them remember the fun or even at times goofy “family
bonding” times together. And, those family “mantras” that we often quote
from our grandparents or parents, we can create some our own during this
time. Most importantly, let them always remember how often we told them
we loved them.
Research indicates that more than the huge trips to
exotic places or the big events, the memories that children carry into
adulthood are the ones that reflect the relationship formed between the parent
and the child. And, we remember the difficult times along with the fun
ones, as during those times as well we can recall how much our parents
supported, comforted and loved us. Research also indicates that as adults
we recollect our teenage years the most. And, of course, the discussions
we have about family events helps imprint them into our memories. The
more we try to elicit their impressions and thoughts about events, the more
they will remember them. And, the “stories” we tell our children about what they
are experiencing are the stories they will remember.
On this Memorial Day and on Shavuot, let us celebrate
those days as “Remembrance Days” - days we actively relive the events and
internalize them so that our children can feel connected to the past, internalize
those events and live them in the present.
Advisory Update:
Sixth Grade: Students discussed the all-important L.E.A.D.E.R.S. strategies in
standing up to social exclusion, and other types of bullying.
Seventh Grade: Students learned about the bystander effect and why people often
do nothing when injustice is happening around them.
Eighth Grade: As our 8th graders wind down their time in Yavneh, this week they
wrote “compliments” about their classmates which will be printed and placed in
the siddurim they receive from the school the day of their 8th grade
dinner.
No comments:
Post a Comment