Remembering the Future

Why Liberation and Storytelling Belong Together

And when your children ask you, ‘What do you mean by this rite?’ you shall say, “It is the passover sacrifice to the Lord, because God passed over the houses of the Israelites in Egypt when God smote the Egyptians but saved our houses.” (Exodus 12:26-27)

And when, in time to come, your child asks you, saying, ‘What does this mean?’ you shall reply, ‘It was with a mighty hand that the LORD brought us out from Egypt, the house of bondage. (Exodus 13:14)

“We are never real historians, but always near poets, and our emotion is perhaps nothing but an expression of a poetry that was lost.” (Gaston Bachelard, Poetics of Space)

When I was a young teen, my friend and I would attend monthly Civil War roundtable discussions with septuagenarians off the New Jersey Turnpike. I don’t remember how we came to be obsessed with the Civil War, but at the time the only thing that seemed odd about the fluorescent-lit hall next to the Popeyes where we discussed arcane battles was that we were boys (the content itself seemed entirely reasonable). We found a mischievous thrill in joining a camaraderie otherwise reserved for what we thought were average adults. Isn’t this just what normal people do when they grow up?

The Exodus story, which we read this week in parashat Bo (10:1-13:16), by contrast, is a story whose very purpose is to be remembered—the act of remembrance not subsequent to the Exodus, but the heart of the story itself. While Civil War buffs are a kind of sociological oddity, there is no such thing as an Exodus Buff (and not just because any archaeological record of the Exodus is basically non-existent). Everyone, including children, are required to know the story. Moreover, the act of teaching the story to children is the most important commemorative act. Storytelling ensures intergenerational transmission. It also ensures that, in sharing the story with children, one experiences the story anew, as if a child oneself. To remember the past in the presence of children is to be forbidden from taking the past for granted.

What differentiates a Civil War Roundtable from a Passover Seder is more than just sociology. The origins of the Passover Seder are to be found in the Book of Exodus itself. The very same generation that is tasked with leaving Egypt is tasked with commemorating the event. Usually, the task of commemoration falls upon later generations, but in the case of the Exodus, the act of leaving and the act of telling the story about leaving are interwoven. The Israelites are not simply to reflect on their Exodus in hindsight, but to reflect on it as they are leaving. Remembrance—or the anticipation of remembrance—is what distinguishes those who leave from those who stay. And when God decides to take the people out of Egypt it is because God remembers them. Memory doesn’t come after the fact, but is part and parcel of what the facts are. To put it radically, we might even say, memory, or the anticipation of it, precedes actuality.

Daniel Kahneman claims that if you want to fashion a happy life, focus on creating happy memories, rather than happy experiences. How we remember a surgery or a vacation matters more, over the long-run, than how it actually went. His comments on memory are aligned with the kind we find in the Torah:

“We do not choose between experiences, we choose between memories of experiences. Even when we think about the future, we do not think of our future normally, [as in] the experiences. We think the future of our anticipated memories.”

God tells the people explicitly and repeatedly that the purpose of the Exodus is so that it will be recounted. The question of why God hardens Pharaoh’s heart is one that has long troubled commentators. How can God take away Pharaoh’s “free will”? But if you bracket the metaphysical and moral problems of hardening Pharaoh’s heart, it makes sense from the point of view of a directorial decision. The event must be designed in such a way that it is maximally memorable. A version of the story in which Pharaoh lets the people go after only a few plagues might have the right short term effect, but it won’t stick in cultural memory. A story without plagues, and especially without the terror of the tenth plague, might not have become seder-worthy.

If you consider God’s decision to harden Pharaoh’s heart as an aesthetic one, it remains challenging. All this collective suffering so the play can be pedagogically effective? What poetic license does a creator have when representing truth? What artifice is justified in the name of conveying insight? Does the Exodus story “tell all the truth, but tell it slant”? (Emily Dickinson) But on a meta-level, the Exodus story is a story not just about leaving a bad place, but a story about how storytelling—whether true, false, or true and false—preserves meaning and memory. Without the right narrative frame, and without a commitment to transmission, the toppling of a great civilization by an underdog is just dust in the wind.

The Israelites who left Egypt were enjoined not just to have faith that God would save them, but that their actions would prove meaningful and memorable for posterity. When we read the story each year, and recount it at the Passover Seder, we fulfill their hope, we merge the slanted truth of a literary text with the historical truth of a past that remains a black box to scholars, but an heirloom to us. In telling a story of those who lived their lives so that we might tell the story, we discover our own sense of “living in history,” our own sense that our actions, too, might become tales and parables for those to come. Our rituals, if we are so blessed, will also one day contain the aura of the ancient past. The Exodus is an investment in memory, and in remembering it, we are encouraged to invest ourselves in the project of memory.

The “moral” of the story matters, of course. But before we can get to the moral, we must first realize that there can be no morality without a story, no insight without remembrance. Track the Biblical commandment to observe the holidays and you’ll find that it is the same commandment: to remember. The ethical charges of the Torah are also underwritten by a summons to memory. Be compassionate to the stranger, “for you yourself were strangers in a strange land.” I would posit that the text isn’t simply saying that you should be good to others, because you know what it’s like to be in their shoes. It’s saying that if you want to remember your own story, you must encounter it in the fresh stories of the Other before you. Every ethical moment is simultaneously a moment that invites remembrance of our own lost story. The rejection of the ethical is perhaps a rejection of memory.

Memory carries with it, by definition, a sense of loss. Not just because the past is far away, and thus abstract, but because what we keep of it is inherently selective. The act of remembering is an act of sorting essential and inessential, and for the devotee (or the hoarder) this can be an unbearable task. This is what Gaston Bachelard describes when he says that all emotion is a yearning for a poetry that was lost; all poetry an homage to the poem that was destroyed. I find in the Exodus story not information, but layers of yearning, yearning for yearning for yearning for a poetry that once was. And yet this derivative yearning, handed down and altered through generations, is itself a poem.

Does the Torah speak to posterity or only to its time? And what does it mean to address an audience yet to be born, for thousands of years to come? The Exodus tale suggests that not only is the Torah written for all time, however difficult it may be for us to wrap our heads around that idea, but that we must ourselves accept the intense possibility that we are making and not just receiving history.

When God speaks to Moses at the burning bush, God reveals Godself as “The God of your ancestors, Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob.” No matter how much life has changed for us moderns, one feature of monotheism is the sense that we belong to the same world, the same process, and the same story. Our God and the God of our ancestors are one. And our story is a continuation of their story, a continuation made possible by memory.

We should live with a sense of responsibility and hope that we, too, can one day be ancients, and that when we are remembered it will be for a blessing.

Shabbat Shalom,

Zohar Atkins @ Etz Hasadeh

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