A Day of Remembrance
By Moshe Kohn

Rosh Hashana is a multi-faceted holy day.

It is "a day of terua" - that is, a day of the sounding of the horn (Numbers 29:1). It is the "day of judgment" (Babylonian Talmud tractate Rosh Hashana 8a-b).

And it is "a remembrance day" (Leviticus 23:24). In fact, not only Rosh Hashana, but all the other holy days - Shabbat, Yom Kippur, the "sabbath of sabbaths" (Leviticus 16:31), and the three pilgrimage festivals (Pessah, Shavuot, and Succot) - are remembrance days. All the liturgies of those holy days, including the kiddush that opens the festive repasts of the Shabbat and festival eves, refer to "zecher liyetziat Mitzrayim," or remembrance of the Exodus from Egypt.

Remembrance - the Jews' remembrance of our destiny and mission, and God's remembrance of His covenants with us - is a central motif of our national ethos.

"Remembrance is the key to Redemption," said Rabbi Yisrael Baal Shem Tov, the 18th-century founder of the hassidic movement. It seems that more than a century before Freud, the Baal Shem Tov - and even long before the Baal Shem Tov, Jewish thinkers and halachic authorities, especially those who formulated the principles and procedures of teshuva/repentance - knew that without creative remembrance, individuals and nations cannot enjoy true liberty.

This is the burden of the assertion by George Santayana, the 20th century American philosopher and poet (Life of Reason), that "Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it."

But God also has a role in the remembrance process. As the 20th century teacher-philosopher-halachist known reverently as "the Rav," Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik, said: "Judaism and the concept of the messianic Redemption are founded on the idea that God remembers forgotten things and people" (Yemei Zikaron).

Except for the few rare ones, the rest of us - individuals and nations - are, in the Baal Shem Tov's terms, unredeemed. Because of our unwillingness - or sometimes inability - to remember our past and learn from it, we remain harnessed to the past as the threshing ox is harnessed to the grinding-stone it pulls round and round in its rut. We don't wish, or we don't know how, to remember creatively - that is: remember, and, remembering, to use that memory to enhance our humanity as individuals and as members of society.

Furthermore, for many of us, historical memory has become a burden that we wish to dump as we rush blindly into what we deceive ourselves into believing is the future.

THE IDEA of creative remembrance is well illustrated in that beautiful metaphoric explanation (whose source I don't remember) of the combination of identifying marks of kosher animals mentioned in Leviticus 11 and Deuteronomy 14: They must both chew their cud and have cloven hooves. The camel, the hare, and the cony, which chew the cud but do not have cloven hooves, and the pig, which has cloven hooves but does not chew the cud, are treif, forbidden.

The metaphoric explanation is: to be "kosher," we must possess both memory - that is, a sense of history, openness to it, and the ability to "digest" it, to handle it ("chew the cud") - and the ability and readiness to move into the future ("cloven hooves"). The camel and others in its category represent those who live only in the past; the pig and its ilk represent those who charge recklessly into the future, without regard for the past.

REMEMBRANCE is a central theme of the Tanach. But our sacred scriptures don't call on us to "summon up the remembrance of things past" merely so that we may wallow in regrets about "our dear time's waste" and all the other Shakespearean regrets, or so that we might sigh about "the good old days," which Ecclesiastes 7:10 tells us is a foolish pastime.

"Remembrance" appears in the Tanach in the various forms of its Hebrew root, z-ch-r, scores of times. Several dozen of these are in connection with God's injunctions or promises to Am Yisrael, the Jewish faith-nation, and with our pleas to God to remember the various clauses of His covenants with us, the covenants between Him and the progenitors of Am Yisrael and those between Him and Am Yisrael as a whole at Mount Sinai.

What specifically are we enjoined to remember?

Let us look at a group of remembrances that many Jews recite daily after the Shaharit morning service. One source lists four remembrances, another adds two to these four, and a third lists 10, including these six.

The first remembrance on all three lists concerns what Jerusalem philosopher Prof. Emil Fackenheim calls Am Yisrael's "root experience," the deliverance from slavery. This is the injunction: "Remember this day on which you came out of Egypt, out of the land of bondage" (Exodus 13:3), "...so that all the days of your life you will remember the day you came out of Egypt" (Deuteronomy 16:3).

THE TORAH hands us many ritual precepts the purpose of which is to remind us that God delivered us from Egyptian bondage. Reminded of this, and by virtue of this remembrance, we are to conduct ourselves toward ourselves and toward our fellow human beings according to certain standards of holiness reflecting respect for our own persons and for theirs.

In the instance of our relations with our fellows - our Jewish and non-Jewish neighbors alike - the Torah commands us to maintain certain ethical and moral standards, standards of decency and compassion, deriving from our experience as slaves who were liberated, the experience we are bidden to remember.

Remembering, we are commanded: "You shall not pervert justice... You shall have honest scales, honest weights, honest measures [because] I am God, your god, Who brought you out of Egypt" (Leviticus 34-36).

Much of the Torah's social legislation is based on our slavery-deliverance experience: "You shall not deprive strangers and orphans or take a widow's garment in pawn... When you reap the harvest in your field and forget a swathe, do not go back to pick it up... When you beat your olive trees, do not strip them afterwards... When you gather the grapes from your vineyard, do not go over it again: what is left shall go to the stranger, the orphan and the widow. Remember that you were a slave in Egypt: that is why I [God] command you to do this" (Deuteronomy 24:17-21).

Furthermore, "You shall not oppress a stranger [i.e. the non-Jew living among us], for you know the feeling of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in Egypt" (Exodus 23:9).

Not only must we not oppress the stranger, but, in the identical language in which we are told, "Love your neighbor as yourself" (Leviticus 19:17), we are commanded 16 verses later to "love [the stranger] as yourself, because you were strangers in the land of Egypt."

As for the Egyptians themselves, the Torah commands us: "...you shall not despise an Egyptian, for you were strangers in his land" (Deuteronomy 23:8). The Egyptians who enslaved and tormented us for 210 years, who ordered our newborn sons drowned - we are forbidden to hate them, because they were our hosts (which indeed they were, especially during the lifetime of Joseph, the viceroy of Egypt, who brought his father, Jacob/Israel, and the rest of the clan down to Egypt).

THESE ARE only a few of several dozen precepts concerning decent behavior to our fellow human beings - behavior that we are to practice because we remember our personal experience of the travails of slavery and the joy of deliverance. We are not merely to remember, not merely to think about it. But, as the Haggada tells us: "In every generation, each person is to see himself" - is to put himself in the frame of mind - "as if he personally [has suffered enslavement and he personally] has been delivered from slavery." And Rambam (Maimonides) adds: Each person is to "show himself as if he personally has been delivered..."

And how does one thus "show" oneself? By be-having according to the relevant precepts of the Torah.

SECOND on the long list of remembrances is the fourth of the Ten Utterances or Declarations (Aseret Hadibrot or Aseret Hadevarim, incorrectly translated as "Ten Commandments" ). This is the precept concerning Shabbat observance.

As stated in its two versions (Exodus 20:8-11 and Deuteronomy 5:12-15), this Utterance contains the two central elements that, in the Jewish world view, distinguish humanity from the beasts on the one hand, and from the angels on the other hand. These are recognition of a purposeful Creation by a purposing Creator, and liberty, but in partnership with responsibility.

The first version tells us: "Zachor - Remember to keep Shabbat Day holy.... on that day you are to do no work: you, your son and your daughter, your slave and slave-girl, your cattle and the stranger living among you. For in six days God made Heaven and Earth... and on the seventh day he rested: that is why God blessed Shabbat Day and hallowed it."

Here we are told, in effect, to "remember" that the ordered world, ordered life, are not an accident, a product of certain coincidental cosmic circumstances. "Order is an arrangement that is inherently improbable," wrote physicist Edward Teller (The Pursuit of Simplicity).

The second version: "Shamor - Keep Shabbat holy... you shall not do any work - so that you... your slave and slave-girl... any of your cattle, and the stranger in your localities... may rest as you do. Remember that you were a slave in the land of Egypt and God, your god, freed you from there... That is why God... has commanded you to observe Shabbat Day.

In the first version, then, we are to observe Shabbat in remembrance - in celebration - of God the purposeful Creator. In the second version we see one of His purposes as we observe Shabbat in celebration of God the Liberator.

Indeed, freedom, including freedom of choice, may be the main purpose of Creation. For interestingly, both versions of the Ten Utterances begin with, "I am God, your god, Who brought you out of Egypt, out of the land of slavery."

Neither begins with a declaration like "I am God Who created you," though the first version, as noted, cites Creation as the rationale for Shabbat observance.

Rabbi Mordechai Hacohen commented: This is to teach us that our deliverance from slavery was tantamount to the granting of life itself. He noted: We are taught (Eruvin 13b): "It were better if Man had not been created." But having been created, Rabbi Hacohen said, Man was created to be free, not a slave (Min Hatorah).

But "Freedom threatens to degenerate into arbitrariness unless it is lived in terms of responsibleness," psychotherapist-philosopher Prof. Viktor Frankl emphasized again and again. Indeed, we have seen again and again in history and in our own days that unbridled freedom, freedom without standards and rules, degenerates not only into arbitrariness, but into murderous relativistic chaos.

Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, who was Ashkenazi chief rabbi of Tel Aviv, saw an intimate connection between Pessah, the Freedom Festival, and Shavuot seven weeks later, the Festival of the Giving of the Torah. Pessah and Shavuot are "physically" linked, as it were, by the Counting of the Omer in the evening prayer service daily during those seven weeks.

Rabbi Amiel said: At Pessah, which is also the Festival of the Month of Spring (as Nissan is called in the Torah), we celebrate our flowering as a free, sovereign entity. At Shavuot, which is also the first-fruits festival, we celebrate our "first fruit" as a free people, the receiving of the Torah. "Flowers," Rabbi Amiel said, "are wonderful to behold, but they do not nourish and sustain. The departure from Egypt was only a means; the purpose, the goal, was the Torah."

The Torah itself reports Moses' demand of Pharaoh in God's name: "Let My people go so they may serve Me." Not "Let My people go so they may have self-determination for the sake of self-determination," but in order to serve a transcendent purpose.

In our own time, no less than it did in past times, humanity is paying a very, very heavy price in blood and misery for the un-responsible freedom of individuals and peoples. As that great American jurist Judge Learned Hand said: "[W]hat is this liberty which must lie in the hearts of men and women? It is not the ruthless, the unbridled will; it is not freedom to do as one likes... A society in which men recognize no check upon their freedom soon becomes a society where freedom is the possession of only a savage few..." (Collected Papers and Addresses of Learned Hand, edited by Irving Dillard).

GOD THE Liberator did not create us to be good, nor did He create us to be evil. He created us with both possibilities: "I [God] have put before you life and death, blessing and curse" (Deuteronomy 30:19). He immediately urges us: "Choose life..." The choice is ours.

The freedom to choose bequeaths to us the privilege of responsibility. Responsibility means both enjoying the blessings of choosing wisely and suffering the consequences of choosing wrong. But choosing wrong once does not doom us forever. We are blessed not only with freedom and responsibility. God created the human being also with the ability to feel guilt and remorse over a wrong choice, and with the possibility to repent and make amends, thereby regaining our self-respect. This is the process of teshuva that is central to the Rosh Hashana-Days of Awe period. Of course, we can repent and make amends for errors we commit every day of the year. In fact, the talmudic Sage Rabbi Eliezer tells us: "Repent one day before your death." Asked how we know which day we are going to die, he replied: Precisely - repent every day of your lives (Shabbat 153a; Mishna Avot 2:10). Well, let's devote at least Rosh Hashana-Yom Kippur time to checking our accounts and straightening them out.

Concerning guilt and repentance, philosopher Prof. Leo Strauss wrote: "Man is the only being that can be concerned with self-respect. Man can respect himself because he can despise himself... His dignity is... based on his awareness of what he ought to be or how he should live" (Liberalism Ancient and Modern).

Viktor Frankl considered it "a prerogative of Man to become guilty," yet Man has "the responsibility to overcome guilt." For "once we deal with Man as the victim of circumstances and their influences, we not only cease to treat him as a human being, but also lame his will to change" (The Will to Meaning).

According to psychologist O. Hobart Mowrer, "recovery - constructive change, redemption - is most assuredly attained not by helping a person reject and rise above his sins, but by helping him to accept them." For "so long as a person lives under the shadow of real, unacknowledged and unexpiated guilt, he cannot - if he has any character at all - 'accept himself'... He will continue to hate himself and to suffer the inevitable consequences of self-hatred. But the moment he begins to accept his guilt... the possibility of reformation opens up, and with this the individual may... pass from deep, pervasive self-rejection and self-torture to a new freedom of self-respect and peace" (quoted by educational psychologist Solomon Schimmel in Judaism magazine of fall 1977).

UNLESS WE accept responsibility for our acts, feel guilt and shame where appropriate, and are aware of the need and possibility of teshuva, several dehumanizing things happen to us. We become inured to wrong-doing, lose our sense of shame, and cease to have any values except "self- actualization" - a development we have now seen for several decades. Or we become morbidly preoccupied - obsessed - with the past and begin to despise ourselves and our fellow human beings. The Sages tell us: God saw that if He created the world by the quality of Justice alone, it would not endure - for human beings with free will are bound to err. But He also saw that if He created the world by the quality of Mercy alone, wrongdoing and wrongdoers would prevail. So He said: "I will create the world by a combination of Justice and Mercy. May it endure!" (Bereshit Rabba 12:15).