Memory Loss Is Not Good For the Jews©

Photo by Kelly Sikkema on Unsplash

Parashat Mishapatim 2022/5782

Rabbi David Baum

How many phone numbers do you have memorized? Before cell phones, even as a child, I had at least ten phone numbers memorized. Today? Maybe one or two. We have outsourced a lot of our memory skills to our smart phones, and, consequently, our ability to memorize numbers and names has diminished. It seems like a silly issue to write about, but it has deep implications because, a world with no memory is not a good for the Jews. 

History is fact - you can’t change history, but we can change how we ‘remember’ history.

I bring this up because of a news story this week that coincided with International Holocaust Remembrance Day. Just days before this day, a Tennessee school board voted unanimously to remove “Maus,” Art Spiegelman’s graphic memoir about his father’s Holocaust experience, from its curriculum. Although unrelated, but somewhat related, we had yet another famous person, in this case, Robert F. Kennedy Jr. said those who refuse vaccinations against Covid-19 are actually worse off than Anne Frank who hid in an attic and was murdered by the Nazis. 

Just 70 years after the Holocaust, we are seeing the history and memory of the event being challenged. According to a 2020 Claims Conference survey, 63 percent of Millennial and Gen Z participants did not know that six million Jews had been killed in the Holocaust, 11 percent thought that Jews caused the Holocaust and a surprising 48 percent could not name even one concentration camp, including Auschwitz.

History doesn’t change, but memory can. 

I believe this week’s parashah, Misphatim, speaks to this juxtaposition of laws and memory. 

Our parashah this week contains an enormous amount of laws, more so than any parashah that preceded it, even last week’s parahsha when we received the Ten Commandments.

It contains civil and criminal law, laws of how we treat the less fortunate in Israelite society, and much more. There’s even a law that warns against sorcerers. This parashah is an attorney’s or judges dream; for everyone else…it can be a little dry. 

The question is, why do we have this dumping of so much law that is seemingly out of context? The answer is - it is in context, but we have to look backward. 

I want to share one example:

וְגֵר לֹא תִלְחָץ וְאַתֶּם יְדַעְתֶּם אֶת־נֶפֶשׁ הַגֵּר כִּי־גֵרִים הֱיִיתֶם בְּאֶרֶץ מִצְרָיִם׃ 

You shall not oppress a stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt. (Exodus 23:9)

It seems pretty straightforward - don’t oppress the stranger, but the Torah includes the reason as to why you should not: because you too felt what it was like to be powerless, vulnerable, and exploited. 

It isn’t an argument based on reason, even though good and practical reasons could be found; the prohibition is based on memory and experience. We too were strangers once, we were persecuted, humiliated; we know what it feels like, so let’s make sure no one in our society, be they Israelites or not, feel that again. 

I think we take this for granted. 

Rabbi Shai Held, in his article, “Turning Memory Into Empathy: The Torah’s Ethical Charge”, points out how the law could have been written: “The Torah could have responded quite differently to the experience of oppression in Egypt. It could have said, Since you were tyrannized and exploited and no one did anything to help you, you don’t owe anything to anyone; how dare anyone ask anything of you? But it chooses the opposite path: since you were exploited and oppressed, you must never be among the exploiters and degraders. You must remember what it feels like to be a stranger. Empathy must animate and intensify your commitment to the dignity and well-being of the weak and vulnerable. And God holds you accountable to this obligation.”

What is interesting to me is how people look at the Torah. Because the only time we are forced to learn the Torah is when we are children, most people think the Torah is a story for children. But read through the Exodus narrative and you tell me if it's rated G. We read about infanticide, torture, plagues, war, and bloodshed. The Torah and Midrash do not shield us from the brutality of slavery, quite the contrary, it is visceral, because if it sugarcoated our shared experience, then we would not truly understand why we shouldn’t oppress the stranger. 

Leviticus and Deuteronomy take the care for the stranger a step further. Not only are we not allowed to oppress them, but we must love them, because, you too were strangers in the land of Egypt (Deuteronomy 10:17-19)

Rabbi Held wrote: 

“Literature scholar Elaine Scarry hauntingly asserts that “the human capacity to injure other people is very great precisely because our capacity to imagine other people is very small.” By reminding us again and again of our vulnerability in Egypt, the Torah works to help us learn to imagine others more so that we allow ourselves to hurt them less.”

And so I return to the story in Tennessee and other places, and the politicians, the leaders in our country, and their followers, our fellow citizens, who wear yellow stars with the word Jude in the center. 

I wonder what they learned about the Holocaust in school. Were they taught the opposing views of the Holocaust as a Texas school board official suggested we must teach? Or were they presented with an ‘impartial’ view about Nazis as Indiana State Senator Scott Baldwin suggested when he presented his Education Matters bill which would ban divisive concepts in school classroom, stating that lessons about fascism and Nazism should be taught impartially. Or here in the city of Boca Raton, when a principal of a local high school would not confirm that the Holocaust was a factual event, and stuck to his opinion despite the push back he received. 

Or when Congressman Warren Davidson wrote the following to a link about how the unvaccinated are treated:

“Let’s recall that the Nazis dehumanized Jewish people before segregating them, segregated them before imprisoning them, imprisoned them before enslaving them, and enslaved them before massacring them.”

I read through the entire minutes of the school board meeting in Tennessee. I tried to do what Rabbi Hillel taught us in the Talmud - learn about the other side so well that you could teach it. As I read the comments, I need to report that they didn’t want to ignore the Holocaust, but they said that Maus was inappropriate for 8th graders. They said there was nudity in it, but keep in mind, it is a graphic novel and the characters are mice and cats. They said there were curse words in it and they might repeat those words. 

As a parent, I get where they are coming from. They want to protect their children from trauma; they can learn about it when they are adults, but not now. 

The problem is, later never comes. So they learn a sanitized version of the most horrific genocide in history; and then, well, it's the same other things that we feel objectionable. 

Judaism teaches something different. When we enter into physical maturity, even if we seem like we are just children, we are part of the community. We cannot sugarcoat the past, because if we do, we will not perform the mitzvoth needed to create a just and righteous society. 

When we sugarcoat history, we lose the power of memory and what it spurs us to do in this world.

Memory powerfully shapes our identity, our behavior, and how we grow and change.

But we cannot have memory, if we do not have history…all of it. This is the battle that is raging all over this country in school board meetings, but it will not end there. I will never forget when I was in college and my friend, a southerner with a thick accent once quipped to me, “you know, slavery wasn’t all that bad. Black people had three meals a day, jobs, and a roof over their heads. I think they might have been better off.” And as I listened to him with my mouth agape, and thought, imagine if he said that about my ancestors. 

In the Spring of 1945, Generals Dwight D. Eisenhower, Omar Bradley, and George Patton toured the Ohrdruf concentration camp, the first camp liberated by Americans. 

General Eisenhower later wrote, “I have never felt able to describe my emotional reactions when I first came face to face with indisputable evidence of Nazi brutality and ruthless disregard of every shred of decency. Up to that time I had known about it only generally or through secondary sources. I am certain, however, that I have never at any other time experienced an equal sense of shock…I visited every nook and cranny of the camp because I felt it my duty to be in a position from then on to testify at first hand about these things in case there ever grew up at home the belief or the assumption that “the stories of Nazi brutality were just propaganda.” . . . I not only did so but as soon as I returned to . . . headquarters that evening, I sent communications to both Washington and London, urging the two governments to send instantly to Germany a random group of newspaper editors and representative groups from the national legislatures. I felt that the evidence should be immediately placed before the American and British publics in a fashion to leave no room for cynical doubt.” Eisenhower famously brought the German inhabitants of the city nearest Buchenwald to see with their own eyes the horrors that were committed in their name. 

Imagine if he didn’t share this horror with the world; imagine where we would be today.

This is why we say Never Forget, because without Never Forget, we cannot say, Never Again.