The Power of Collective Memory

Dear Family and Friends, 

This past week, Pardes held a Winter Learning Intensive for students and young professionals from around the world to join Pardes students for a week of courses focused on the theme of Power, Privilege, Responsibility. In the last week, our Beit Midrash was flipped upside down as we welcomed new guests, learned from new teachers, and considered what our responsibility is towards one another from a moral, spiritual, and legal perspective. 

Each morning, I began the day learning about the biblical commandment of “Do not place a stumbling block before the blind” (Leviticus 19:14)/ “לפני עור לא תתן מכשל”(ויקרא יט:יד). In Daniel Reifman’s class, we learned that the “stumbling block” serves as a metaphor for facilitating or enabling the wrong behaviour of your fellow, and might even imply a prohibition against inhibiting someone’s ability to do what is right and good, to be the best version of themselves, and to ascent to spiritual heights. We focused on this verse and studied both modern and rabbinic cases in which this verse was used to make a legal and moral decision regarding one’s liability over another’s behaviour. Ultimately, we learned that this verse commands us that we must not only be considerate and inclusive of those in our community, but we are in fact responsible for each other’s spiritual and religious behaviour, and necessarily each other’s spiritual well-being. 

In Zvi Hirschfield’s class on the Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas, we learned that our covenant between God is not singular and unique. Rather, we each have two million covenants, representative of the two million Children of Israel who were present to receive the Torah brought down from the heavens by Moses at Har Sinai. The moment of receiving the covenant at Mount Sinai after the Exodus from Egypt necessarily placed Jewish people in relationship with each other through our obligation to mitzvot (commandments), many of which must be done in community. According to Levinas, seeing the other, being in conversation with the other, and taking responsibility for each other’s behaviour as if it is our own is a necessary part of our relationship with God and the very existence of our selfhood. 

This week in synagogue, we will read Parshat Bo, in which the last of the plagues will fall upon the Egyptian people and Pharoah’s heart will be softened just long enough for Bnai Yisrael to actualize Yetziat Mitzraim, their Exodus from Egypt. Toward the end of our Parsha, we will begin Chapter 13 of the book of Exodus, in which we are commanded to remember Yetziat Mitzraim. The commandment to remember (zachor/זכור) the Exodus from Egypt is enacted in our recitation of the six remembrances at the end of our daily morning prayer service. Included in this list is also the commandment to remember Shabbat, among other moments of significance in the Jewish story. 

Our tefillin (phylacteries) also serve as a fulfillment of the obligation to remember Yetziat Mitzraim. As I’ve mentioned in a previous blog post, the tefillin serve as a microcosm for the values that we wish to infuse into the world, guiding both our behaviour and our cognition.The first two sections of our tefillin shel rosh, which sit upon our heads and serve to guide our thoughts, carry excerpts from the end of this week’s parsha. One of the psukim contained in the tefillin shel rosh and in Parshat Bo directly links the commandment to wrap tefillin with the commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt. “And it shall be a sign upon your arm, and an ornament between your eyes, for with a strong hand Hashem removed us from Egypt” (Exodus 13:16). 

The obligation to remember Yetziat Mitzraim is not only a device for Jewish literacy, but is a spiritual and intellectual practice with the capacity to enhance our ability to be in community with one another. The daily practice of remembering our freedom from enslavement is not only meant to warrant against the danger of forgetting our shared past, but is a religious obligation which continues to shape our consciousness and our present realities, and will affect our future. 

It is true that our memories shape and dictate our current realities, but the effect is multi-directional. We recall our past only through our present lived experience. As such, our memories not only shape but are shaped by our current experiences. The active process of invoking the past in the context of our own current realities, thereby effecting and shaping our futures, is essentially what it means to be a Jewish people that is free. We have the freedom and responsibility to choose what we allow to manifest in our communities and in the world. Not only do we honour the commandment to remember the Exodus from Egypt every morning in prayer through our liturgy and our ritual items, but in doing so we experience what it means to actively shape our collective memory and therefore our actions toward the values of taking responsibility for the physical and spiritual freedom and wellbeing of our fellows. 

On Thursday morning, I attended Pardes’ Mechitzah Minyan Shacharit (morning prayer service) to support my friends as they read from the Torah for the first time in a long time. I felt uncomfortable about donning tallit and tefillin in a minyan in which women wearing these ritual items is not necessarily the norm, but was encouraged by my peers and faculty that Pardes is a place that values pluralism, and that I should feel comfortable to remain true to my daily practice in this particular prayer space. 

It was wonderful to realize that as we communally fulfilled the commandment to remember Yetziat Mitzraim through our prayer, the minyan lived out what it means to actively and consciously remember by making space for me to actualize my own ritual and spiritual well-being through my practice of wrapping tefillin, the very commandment that is inextricably linked to the commandment to remember our freedom from slavery in Egypt. At Pardes, we fulfil the commandment to remember Yetziat Mitzraim by taking responsibility for each other’s spiritual growth, learning, and well-being in our prayer spaces, in our relationships, and in our Beit Midrash- despite and in light of our diversity. This type of shared responsibility for and encounter with the other in our midst serves as a model for Jewish communal life, and is what both Levinas and Leviticus would see as the ultimate act of connection with the divine. 

Being liberated is not only about our physical liberation from Egypt, but a process which we must remember and invoke actively and consciously every day in order to live the value of shared responsibility within the walls of our communities. This past week at Pardes and this week’s Parsha have reminded me that we have the power, privilege, and responsibility to both recall the greatest story of freedom from our collective memory, and to create the reality of a community that is responsible for each other’s freedom and well-being.  

Wishing you a Shabbat Shalom, 
Lara