The Power of the Past

The Power of the Past
D’var Torah for Shabbat Zachor
By Rabbi Boaz D. Heilman
March 2, 2012

In 1947, two years after the end of the Holocaust and World War II, my father received a letter from his brother. It was actually written four years earlier, but because of the war, it wasn’t sent until postal services resumed.

The letter detailed the deaths of my father’s family during the Holocaust. He had a father, mother, two brothers and a sister, all of whom were murdered by the Germans. The uncle I never met wrote this letter on his way to Auschwitz. He managed to somehow smuggle it to a Polish neighbor, asking him to mail it to my father. He gave no address; smartly, the Polish man sent it to an Israeli newspaper which somehow found my father in the kibbutz where he lived at the time.

The letter changed my father forever. I won’t discuss the many ways, just focus on the role that memory played in his life from that day on.

Memory became a kind of religion to him. Though my parents started a new life in Israel, built a home and raised a family there, the past was never far behind them. I remember how my father, sitting down to a meal, used to bury his face in his hands and, after a moment of silence, heave a deep sigh before allowing himself to begin eating. Was he praying, I once asked him. No, he said. He was talking with his mother and father.

When my children were growing up, at bedtime he would tell them tales of heroism featuring his brothers and sister and a long-gone dog named Lordie.

And every couple of years he would send me a postcard with just one message on it: “Remember that which Amalek did to you.”

Amalek was one of the tribes the Israelites encountered during their 40 years of wanderings in the Sinai Wilderness following their Exodus from Egypt. The difference between Amalek and all the others was that Amalek waged war against the Israelites. They attacked by night, by stealth and—much, much worse—they struck at the rear of the camp. This was where the stragglers were: the weak, the ill, the ones who had lost hope. The very ones we are commanded by the Torah, as sacred, holy deeds, as mitzvahs, to reach a hand to and help. What Amalek had done was the exact opposite of holy. It was evil.

Memory is a major pillar of Judaism. We commemorate our liberation from Egyptian bondage by reciting the haggadah at the Passover Seder. We remember how Mordechai and Esther saved the Jews of Persia from persecution when we tell the story of Purim. Hanukkah retells our miraculous victory over our Greek oppressors. And Shabbat, of course, ties us ever closer to the Eternal by reminding us of our obligation to participate in Tikkun Olam, the completion and repair of God’s unfinished business of Creation.

The act of remembering, however, isn’t so simple. It’s more than just reading and re-reading a story. Memory is triggered by many agents. Smell is a big memory-trigger. It can take you back years! So can pictures, stories, music, words and traditions.

How do we remember something we did not participate in? And more—why should we remember something we weren’t a part of, that wasn’t a part of our personal experience?

Because everything that has happened in the past really is part of our experience, in that it helped shape us. There is no question that I—and millions of other 2nd and 3rd generation survivors of the Holocaust—can’t possibly know what it was really like to be hunted, to forage for food in the daytime or look for safe shelter as the afternoon turned into evening. But the emotions—even the memories—associated with these experiences can be transferred. The anger, the hurt, the fear—these become a part of who we are as much as they will always be a part of those who physically lived that moment.

Our memories—our past which we carry with us wherever we go—are part and parcel of who we are.

In the last 2000 years and more, there were many who attempted to annihilate the Jewish people physically. I won’t go through the list. But just as many were those who tried to destroy us spiritually by erasing our memory. See what the Inquisition tried to do to our people in the 15th and 16th centuries. It wasn’t enough to burn us as heretics, or expel us from one country after another as unwanted, untrustworthy pariahs. They forced those who remained behind to renounce their past, to take on a religion that wasn’t theirs. To leave their memories behind. To forget their past.

In Czarist Russia and under Communism, after the bloody pogroms came the equally destructive orders to stop the practice and teaching of Hebrew and Judaism. To stop being Jewish.

Such efforts—to claim our Jewish past and erase it—still continue this day. In the posthumous baptism by some well-meaning Mormons of the souls of Jewish victims of terror and the Holocaust; in the denial by Arabs—and others—of the ancient ties between Jews and the Land of Israel; indeed, in the very denial that the Holocaust ever happened. These, among others, are some of the ways in which some people try to make us forget who we are.

I know how to defend myself against those who would rise up and kill me. But how do I resist those who would take my soul from me? My past? My memories?

Simple—by remembering. By actively recalling the past and retelling it. By singing it. By cooking and eating traditional foods. By studying the texts—the stories, legends and laws that shaped us as a people. And by teaching them to next generation of Jews, and the one after that.

Purim tells the story of Esther, a heroine who wasn’t always so heroic. Told by her uncle, Mordechai, to hide her past, she was all too willing to comply. It was dangerous to reveal that she was Jewish. It could mean that all the luxury, power and comfort which now surrounded her would be stripped from her. And so she complied. She buried her past, leaving it behind as so much unwanted baggage, and she tried her best to become something she really wasn’t. Esther became a hero only once she realized that her own personal danger was far less than the danger of total annihilation that her whole people faced. And so she remembered her ancestry and tradition. She embraced her hidden past. At that moment, her role became clear to her, and the strength of generations of warriors and survivors came to her aid. And that’s how Esther became the hero of our people.

This Shabbat, the Sabbath before Purim, is called Shabbat Zachor, reinforcing the commandment zachor, “Remember!” On this Shabbat, we learn and recall Esther’s lesson: That our past is not a burden. Rather, it is our might. By remembering, we discover the wells of strength that lie within us. That is the secret of our perseverance through the ages. May it help us persevere in the future as well.


© 2012 by Boaz D. Heilman