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September 6, 2002/Elul 29 5762, Vol. 55, No. 1
Remind God of happy memories
DR. NEIL GILLMAN
Rosh Hashana
The most striking liturgical theme in this generally enigmatic festival of Rosh Hashana is memory. The festival itself is identified as Yom HaZikaron, literally, "the Memory Day."
Whose memory? Ostensibly God's. We pray that God remember the loyalty of the patriarchs, Abraham's readiness to sacrifice his son and the covenant with our ancestors at Sinai, and in return, grant us life and a year of blessing.
But why do we need to remind God of all of this? One of the most notable of the images of God in this festival's liturgy is that God remembers everything. The Zichronot (or "Memories") prayer, one of the three units added to this day's Musaf service, states: "You remember everything that was done from eternity, all that You created from of old. Before You, all that is hidden, all that was concealed from the beginning of time, is revealed."
If so, why does God need reminding? Because, sometimes God's memory, like our own, goes astray. That Zichronot passage includes 10 biblical passages where God is described as remembering something. One of these is Jeremiah 2:2: "Go proclaim to Jerusalem," God tells the prophet. "I remember to your favor the devotion of your youth, your love as a bride, how you followed Me in the wilderness, in a land not sown."
That is an astonishing example of a distorted memory. God remembers the years of Israel's wandering in the desert following the Exodus as a period of Israel's devotion to God. Yet if we read the historical record of that period as described in the Torah, it was hardly a honeymoon.
Those years were marked by constant discord and rebellion. That desert generation so angered God that it was condemned to die in the wilderness.
God forgets nothing, we are told in the liturgy. But apparently, sometimes God does forget, or chooses to forget, some things, as do we.
We have to remember that everything we say about God is taken from human experience. We human beings know nothing objectively about God's nature. That's because God is God and we are human beings. Yet we are driven to speak of God. So we take our common human experience and project it on God.
We begin with our own experience of memory. We are acutely aware that our memory ties together our entire life experience and makes it uniquely ours. Our communal memory does the same with our identity as a people.
But we also know that sometimes the older we get, our memory distorts the past, so that we are no longer as certain as we should be that events happened just as we recall. We tend to view this as our failure, so that when we talk about God we insist that God remembers everything just as it happened.
But we also know that sometimes to forget is a blessing. When we recall our early years as parents of young children, or the early years of our marriages, our memories become selective.
That is why on Rosh Hashana, we need to tell God precisely what it is we want God to remember. We are attempting to jog the selective dimension of God's memories. We want God to remember only the golden years.
There is a delightful irony to the liturgists including Jeremiah 2:2 to the list of God's memories. He knew full well that the verse distorts what happened in those desert years. That's precisely why he put it there. Indeed, the entire list deals only with the happy memories. The last thing we need, on this day is for God to recall the problematic ones.
Have a sweet, peaceful, healthy new year, a year of only happy memories.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
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