In Judaism, memory is a collective mandate, both in terms of what is recalled
and how it is recalled. From the Deuteronomic injunctions to "remember the days
of old" (32:7) and to "remember what Amalek did to you" (25:17) to the persistent
theme of remembering "that you were slaves in Egypt," the content of Jewish
memory has been the collective saga as first recorded in Scripture and as later
recalled in collective, ritual settings.
Central to the meaning of the biblical past is the covenant, Israel's guarantee
that history will follow a divine plan. Thus, the tremors that register most
clearly are the breaches of covenant that Israel has been guilty of: "Remember,
never forget, how you provoked the Lord your God to anger in the wilderness"
(Deut. 9:7). The destruction of the Temple in Jerusalem, the exile from the
land, and natural and national catastrophes are all seen as the consequence
of God's retribution for the backsliding of his chosen people.
After
the destruction of Solomon's Temple in 586 BCE, the biblical Book of Lamentations
and prophetic consolations provided new forms of collective memory: individual
and choral voices for ritual mourning and apocalyptic interpretations
of exile and suffering (a visionary impulse carried further by Jewish
apocalyptic writers in Palestine from about 200 BCE to 100 CE.).
With the destruction of Herod's Temple in 70 CE and the subsequent failure
of the Bar Kokhba revolt, the rabbis of Jabneh and Usha (the tannaim)
triumphed as the sole arbiters of Jewish memory. Most of the apocalyptic writings
were excluded from the biblical canon. Even the straightforward chronicles of
the Maccabees were consigned to oblivion. Instead the rabbis proclaim Scripture
as the blueprint of history — past, present and
future.
Through public fasts that celebrated God's historical intervention in nature;
through public sermons that sought to link Scripture with the concrete life
of everyday; through the creation of public rituals to commemorate the salvation
and destruction of the biblical past, the rabbis were able to canonize, codify,
and ritualize historical memory for all generations to come.
The rabbinic approach was to implode history, to cut it down to manageable
size. Events were disassembled and reassembled according to biblical archetypes:
the Flood, Sodom and Gemorrah, the Akedah (binding of Isaac), the Exodus,
Sinai, the breaking of the tablets, the destruction of the Temple, the Exile,
the restoration of Zion.
The rabbis selected, combined and arranged events to fit them on a continuum.
Thus, the separate destructions of both Temples (586 BCE and 70 CE) were telescoped
together, combined with other calamities which were linked to the same days....
In
the Middle Ages, it was liturgy that became the central repository of group
memory. A number of historical chronicles were written in the wake of the Crusades,
and the Expulsion from Spain was the major catalyst for the first serious attempts
at postbiblical Jewish historiography, yet both national calamities were commemorated
mainly in synagogue ritual: in memorial prayers for the dead, in penitential
poems, in additions to the liturgy for the ninth of Av.
Fasting and feasting remained the essential ways of recalling local events
of special significance such as expulsions, plagues, or deliverance from danger....
What was remembered and recorded was not the factual data, but the meaning
of the desecration. This meaning was shaped and expressed by analogies with
earlier archetypes - such as kiddush ha-Shem (the public act of sanctifying
God's name in times of persecution), the Akedah (binding of Isaac) and
the Temple sacrifice.
With the spread of Kabbalah in the seventeenth century and its enormous impact
on Hasidism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the spiritualization
of history and the search for archetypal structures were revived, just when
the modern, critical study of history began to take hold among western European
Jews.
Scholars are divided as to the continued viability of Jewish group memory in
the modern era. Some, pointing to the fragmentation of art and consciousness
in the high culture of western Europe, conclude that group memory suffered an
irreversible blow with emancipation. Others, drawing on the folklore, literature,
art and politics of Jewish eastern Europe, argue that group memory was transformed
and revitalized in secular mode.
The anti-traditionalist revolt, launched in eastern Europe by such intellectuals
as S.Y. Abramowitsch (Mendele Mokher Seforim) and Hayyim Nahman Bialik, rejected
the theological premise of history, but continued nonetheless to disassemble
the czarist pogroms, the expulsions, and the mass exodus in terms of the ancient
archetypes....
In
the postwar era, to the extent that Jews have regrouped in large numbers, they
have reshaped contemporary events into new archetypal patterns: hurban
(destruction) has giving way to Shoah (Holocaust); the rebirth of the
State of Israel has provided a concretized image of the ingathering of the exile
and of the return to Zion.
More recently, the national reawakening of Soviet Jews is viewed as a latter-day
exodus. Each of these three archetypes is celebrated with new communal rituals
(public gatherings, parades, demonstrations), while the literary sources read
at such occasions begin to take on liturgical significance.... The use of visual
iconography in painting, sculpture and photography
is a new vehicle of group memory in modern times.
Images of exile and martyrdom, revolt and rebirth, have made the archetypes
accessible to an audience increasingly cut off from written Jewish sources.
And so while the link
between memory and covenant has been irrevocably broken, while individual
actions are now celebrated along with those of the collective, while old
archetypes are displaced by new ones, and while visual images supplant
the written word, it would seem that group memory and archetypal thinking
are still a viable form of Jewish self-expression.
AV
Table of Contents
|