Sacred Amnesia©
Kol Nidre - 2019/5780
Congregation Shaarei Kodesh
I want you to think about this - If you God could grant you a superpower, which one would you want?
For a rabbi, I think the superpower that would help us the most, is to remember everything. As rabbis, it's kind of how we are judged. Everyone loves to play - the “Rabbi, do you remember my name?” game. One time, a guy approached me at Publix, “Hey Rabbi, do you remember my name? I attended little Rachel’s bat mitzvah at your shul.” After a couple of seconds I answered: “Well, little Rachel just graduated college last year, so please forgive me, but I don’t remember you.”
There are actually people who have this superpower, the power to remember everything, and the power has a name: hyperthymesia — the documented condition in which a person is incapable of forgetting any detail of anything that has ever happened to them.
People with hyperthymesia can remember the events of any given calendar date, usually back to puberty, with stunning and accurate detail. Superior Autobiographical Memory makes it possible for individuals to use their minds like databases, remembering unusual details such as the clothes they wore, whom they may have met that day, what the weather was like on any day, and even what they ate for lunch, decades after the original event.
There are only twelve people in the world who live with this power, but alas, I’m not one of them.
So let me ask you something - if God could grant you this superpower, tonight, would you accept it?
As I thought more about it, I thought: What a gift! To remember every single person, to remember every event, just like it happened, and to feel it again, whenever I wanted. To remember every single person’s name that I have ever met would be like hitting the proverbial lottery in the rabbinic world.
But the more I thought about, the more I realized that remembering everything may not be such a great power to have. The people who suffer, and yes, I mean that word suffer, from this condition, remember every single detail of every event that has occurred to them in their lives. They are incapable of shutting off their minds. One patient described this process as “nonstop, uncontrollable and totally exhausting.” She described it as “a great burden.” She said that it made it difficult for her to attend to present-day reality.
Imagine if you remembered everything, every scrape and bruise, every insult, every scar, just as vividly as it happened even decades ago. Imagine if someone else, a loved one or a stranger, remembered everything you did to them, especially the regretful things.
On Rosh Hashanah, we actually have a service that is called Zichronot - the Remembrance service— “You (God) remember all the events that ever happened in the world and the deeds of all humans since the dawn of creation.”
And you were worried about Apple, Google, Amazon, or the NSA listening in on your conversations…
We live in an incredible world, and it became even more extraordinary with the invention of the internet. Over these high holidays, we speak about the book of life and death - a book where God keeps all of our deeds for the year, both public and private. It sounds scary and invasive, but in the age of social media and web searches, our lives are an open book.
Today is Yom Kippur - the holiest day of the year, and this night is often given another name - Kol Nidre. Kol Nidre is one of the most memorable, pun intended, services of the year. I might have the best seat in the house on Kol Nidre - hearing all of you chant these ancient words, in Aramaic, a language that almost no one speaks, and few Jews even understand. Hearing the haunting and sacred melody that was composed thousands of years ago, is a truly holy experience. But, I want to let you in on a little secret - our rabbis from long ago REALLY disliked Kol Nidre, in fact, they tried to get rid of it.
Their main reason: because we are asking God to forget.
When the service first began, it was a mass exercise in the nullification of vows, the promises we made to God that we did not fulfill. So, the rabbis changed the language just a little bit - instead of asking God to nullify our vows from the past year, we ask God to annul the vows that we will make in the coming year. But, there was a problem, they couldn’t change the language of the prayer, so there are parts of the prayer that still give a hint to the past - forgive me for the unfulfilled promises I made. In many ways, this is what Yom Kippur is all about - we speak our sins out loud to God, our Creator who has the gift, or some say curse, of hyperthymesia, a God who cannot forget anything.
On this Holy Day, do we have a right for our some of our deeds to be forgotten? Do we have the obligation to forget the deeds of others?
I think this is what today is all about - the sacred obligation to forget. Rabbi Brad Artson, a fellow Conservative rabbi, actually coined a phrase: holy forgetting, or as I like to call it, sacred amnesia, and it's catching on in the world.
There is a law in Europe called, the Right To Be Forgotten which allows citizens to request that a company or website take down material considered old, irrelevant, inaccurate or excessive. This year, it was even tested in court.
There were two brothers in their 70’s who lived in the Italian coastal city of Pescara and owned a local restaurant. One day, they were having lunch together and they got into an argument. So one brother stabbed his brother with a fish knife.
It was a modern-day Cain and Abel story, and it was published in March of 2008 by a local journalist. Two and half years after it was published, one of the brothers demanded that the story be deleted. He said, “I have a reputation, I have been here for 50 years, I am known all over.” He sued the journalist, Alessandro Biancardi, and he won.
Biancardi initially refused to delete the story saying, “nobody will ever convince me that a law forcing you to delete truthful news can exist.”
And yet, it does, in Europe anyway.
And I wonder if we would be served well by keeping the law of the right to be forgotten. To forget the bad deeds of our loved ones who have hurt us, to forget the small slights and snubs, the times we were overlooked in life.
Rabbi Artson writes, “How many marriages could survive if each partner remembered everything? There isn’t a successful marriage around in which both partners have not cultivated the art of holy forgetfulness, forgetting the missed opportunity, the offhand remark, the inappropriate comment or gift, and just letting it go.”
I remember someone telling me a story about a fight they had with a business partner. Every day, they would get off at the same exit on the highway to go to work together. After their business dissolved because his partner was dishonest, this man used to still drive that same route, but he wouldn’t get off at that exit. As he passed by the exit every day on his way to his new office, he would remember how his partner wronged him, how his partner hurt him, and he went to work angry every day. Then he heard some news - his partner had died…three years ago. He admitted, “this man who wronged me, whom I wouldn’t talk to or even look at, died three years ago, but he’s been living in my head rent-free for all these years.”
Sometimes, we don’t get the apology we needed, sometimes we may never forgive, and sometimes, for our own good, we have to let go, we have to forget.
And today, I want to let you in on a little secret: even God doesn’t remember everything. The Midrashic work, Tanna De-Vei Eliyahu, quotes from another ancient rabbinic text, Pirkei Avot, the Ethics of our Fathers (4:1): “Who is truly wealthy? One who is content with their portion” (Mishnah Avot 4:1). The sages of Tanna De-Vei Eliyahu ask, Who would be the richest of all? Their answer: God. But here’s the catch. If God remembers everything then what God would remember is our abundant shortcomings, our bickering, and our disappointments, our pettiness, and our violence. How is it possible for God to be happy while burdened with all of these horrific involuntary memories all the time?
Brilliantly, the Midrash points out that God actually does not remember everything! One of God’s greatest traits is the ability to determine what is worth recalling, and what is worth forgetting. In the words of the Midrash, because “God deliberately remembers the good, and deliberately forgets the bad, for that reason, God is content with God’s lot.”
The Midrash goes on to say that the way God trained to forget was by focusing on Shabbat and this day, Yom Kippur. If the only time you took a look at the Jews was on Shabbat and Yom Kippur in the Synagogue, you would say: “Well they may be imperfect, but they’re certainly putting in a lot of effort! Look at them fasting all day long! Look at them opening up the Mahzor Lev Shalem and being inspired all day long. Watch them come to the synagogue and be so moved when their child reads from the Torah! On such days, we surely seem to be a striving, lofty people.
God deliberately says, “For the rest of the week, I’m not going to look.”
If God can forget our misdeeds, can we ‘forget’ those who have wronged us?
Yizkor, the service of remembrance that we will say tomorrow, is arguably one of the most popular prayer services of the year. People come to shul just for this service and leave right after.
In our Mahzor, there is a new prayer, a meditation in memory of a parent who was hurtful written by Robert Saks:
“Dear God,
You know my heart. Indeed, you know me better than I know myself, so I turn to you before I rise for Kaddish. My emotions swirl as I say this prayer. The parent I remember was not kind to me. His or her death left me with a legacy of unhealed wounds, of anger and of dismay that a parent could hurt a child as I was hurt. I do not want to pretend to love, or to hold on to grief that I do not feel, but I do want to do what is right as a Jew and as a child. Help me, O God, to subdue my bitter emotions that do me no good, and to find that place in myself where happier memories may lie hidden, and where grief for all that could have been, all that should have been, may be calmed by forgiveness, or at least soothed by the passage of time. I prayer that You, who raise up slaves to freedom, will liberate me from the oppression of my hurt and anger, and that You will lead me from this desert to Your holy place.”
If God can forget our worst deeds, maybe we can learn that we are better than our own worst deeds; that maybe we can forgive ourselves.
In the age of the internet, our reputations are our capital, as I spoke about on Rosh Hashanah, our keter shem tov, the crown of a good name, our reputations, is the most important crown of them all. How many of us are haunted by our bad deeds, even after we have done teshuvah?
If hold on to each and every offense, each and every slight, we will be consumed by anger and hate. But if we can engage in holy forgetting, sacred amnesia, the ability to hold on to the things that are good and meaningful, and forget the things that torture us and drive us apart, together, tonight, then we can truly move on to the New Year with a clean slate.
And so we return to Kol Nidre, the opportunity for a new beginning. Tonight, all of us, together, cancel our vows, and God lets us start over. It shows that none of us are perfect, but we stand together, arm in arm, showing that we are constantly striving for perfection, together, as a holy community.
My blessing to us all is that we retain the ability to know what is best forgotten, and what is best remembered and that we train ourselves in the ability of holy forgetting, of sacred amnesia, of those unintended, and sometimes intended, insults, that simply, in the scheme of God’s plan, don’t matter.
In this new year, let us embrace holy forgetting, the superpower that God has granted us on this sacred day, Yom HaKippurim.
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