Generation by generation, each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt, as it is said: “This is because of what the Lord did for me when I came out of Egypt.” (Mishna Pesaḥim 10:5)
All Jews who are at all conscious of their identity as Jews,” wrote the late Sir Isaiah Berlin, “are steeped in history.” He continued:
They have longer memories, they are aware of a longer continuity as a community than any other which has survived…. Whatever other factors may have entered into the unique amalgam which, if not always Jews themselves, at any rate the rest of the world instantly recognizes as the Jewish people, historical consciousness – sense of continuity with the past – is among the most powerful. (“Benjamin Disraeli, Karl Marx and the Search for Identity”)
Once, at a dinner, I found myself sitting next to a famous opera singer. “What I envy you for [he meant Jews],” he said, “is your gift of history. I know nothing about my great-grandparents, but you have a history that goes all the way back.” So strong is this sense that Benjamin Disraeli (born a Jew, but baptized by his father as a child) referred to it in one of his most famous replies in Parliament. In 1835, the Irish Catholic politician Daniel O’Connell made a slighting reference to Disraeli’s Jewish ancestry. Disraeli replied, “Yes, I am a Jew, and when the ancestors of the right honorable gentleman were brutal savages in an unknown island, mine were priests in the temple of Solomon.”
Where does it come from, this Jewish consciousness of the past? The prophets of Israel were the first people to see God in history. The ancient world – the world of myth – saw the presence of the gods in nature, in the unchanging rhythm of the seasons and the fearful dislocations of flood, famine, and storm. The revolution of ancient Israel was to see God not in nature but above it, utterly transcendent, yet revealing Himself to mankind in the form of a call to build a different kind of society than any that had existed hitherto.
Monotheism was not the only great Israelite discovery. More significant still was the realization that God is not only the Creator but also the Redeemer. As Judah Halevi pointed out in the Kuzari, the Ten Commandments begin not with the words “I am the Lord your God who created heaven and earth,” but with “I am the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt” (Ex. 20:2). He is to be found not only in what Wordsworth described as that “sense sublime” of “something far more deeply interfused, whose dwelling is the light of setting suns, and the round ocean and the living air,” but in the great events of history, above all the liberation of a small slave people from the grip of the greatest empire of the ancient world, the Egypt of the pharaohs.
From earliest times, Israel knew that something unprecedented had happened whose significance would reverberate far beyond its own time. Speaking to the generation that would soon cross the Jordan and enter the Promised Land, Moses reminded them of the unique experience they had undergone:
Ask now about the former days, long before your time, from the day God created man on earth; ask from one end of the heavens to the other. Has anything so great as this ever happened, or has anything like it ever been heard of?…Has any god ever tried to take for himself one nation out of another nation, by testings, by miraculous signs and wonders and wars, by a mighty hand and an outstretched arm, or by great and awesome deeds, like all the things the Lord your God did for you in Egypt before your very eyes? (Deut. 4:32, 34)
Israel knew God not by contemplating the sun and the stars but directly through its own past. Where other faiths, ancient and modern, saw religion as the flight from history into a world without time, Judaism saw time itself as the arena where God and mankind met. Three-quarters of the Hebrew Bible is made up of historical narratives. Jews were the first to make the momentous claim that history has meaning. It is not merely a sequence of disconnected events, but the long story of humanity’s response to, or rebellion against, the voice of God as it echoes in the conscience of mankind.
It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that biblical Hebrew has no word for history. Modern Hebrew had to borrow a word: historia. The key word of the Hebrew Bible is not history but memory. Zakhor, the command to remember, occurs time and again in the Torah:
Remember what Amalek did to you. (ibid. 25:17)
And with equal insistence, there is the command not to forget:
Beware lest you forget the Lord your God…lest you lift up your hearts and forget the Lord your God who brought you out of the land of Egypt…. And it shall come to pass if you indeed forget the Lord your God…I bear witness against you this day that you shall utterly perish. (Deut. 8:11–19)
The word zakhor in one or other of its forms occurs no fewer than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. As Yosef Ḥayim Yerushalmi notes, “Only in Israel and nowhere else is the injunction to remember felt as a religious imperative to an entire people” (Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory). This was Moses’ injunction to future generations: “Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely lest you forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live; teach them to your children and to their children” (Deut. 4:9). Jews were to become a people of memory.
The word zakhar, meaning “male,” comes from the same root as zakhor, “remember,” suggesting that there are two dimensions of Jewish identity – biological, conferred by the mother, and cultural, conferred by the father in his role as storyteller, guardian of a people’s past, which he is charged with handing on to his children. There is an identity we acquire at birth. We are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. We are part of the covenantal family. That is the maternal gift. But there is another identity, going back not to the patriarchs and matriarchs but to the revelation at Mount Sinai, whose content we only gradually learn and internalize. That is the function traditionally ascribed to fathers, who are charged with giving children the identity that comes through memory.
The Hebrew verb zakhor signifies more than a consciousness of the past. My predecessor, Lord Jakobovits, pointed out that the word yizkor, the name given to the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, is associated in the Torah with the future. “God remembered Noah” and brought him out on dry land. “God remembered Abraham” and rescued his nephew Lot from the destruction of the cities of the plain. “God remembered Rachel” and gave her a child. We remember for the sake of the future, and for life.
There is a profound difference between history and memory. History is his story – an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story – something that happened to me and is part of who I am. History is information. Memory, by contrast, is part of identity. I can study the history of other peoples, cultures, and civilizations. They deepen my knowledge and broaden my horizons. But they do not make a claim on me. They are the past as past. Memory is the past as present, as it lives on in me. Without memory there can be no identity. Alzheimer’s disease, the progressive atrophying of memory function, is also the disintegration of personality. As with individuals, so with a nation: it has a continuing identity to the extent that it can remember where it came from and who its ancestors were.
Yet there is a paradox in the idea of collective memory. How can I remember what did not happen to me – an event that took place long before I was born? The answer given by the seder service on Pesaḥ is: through reenactment, by living again the events of ancient times as if they were happening now. That is the significance of the statement of the sages that on Pesaḥ, “Generation by generation, each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt.” At the beginning of the seder, by lifting the matza and declaring, “This is the bread of oppression our fathers ate in the land of Egypt,” we make the leap across time and turn “then” into “now.” “It is because of what the Lord did for me when I went out of Egypt” (Ex. 13:8). In these words tradition heard the continuous present, the past that lives on, the event that speaks to me in the first person singular.
There is something quite distinctive about the biblical approach to time. The historical books of the Bible are the first of their kind by several centuries, long before the Greek writer Herodotus (fifth century bce), known as “the father of history.” Yet the biblical narrative is never mere history, a recording of what happened because it happened, whether to entertain or to instruct. Nor is it myth, a prescientific attempt to explain why the world is as it is. It is nothing less than the sustained attempt to see events through the prism of faith, as the ongoing interaction between heaven and earth, command and response, the divine word and the human success or failure in hearing and acting on the word. It is saturated by the idea of covenant as the partnership initiated by God and entered into by mankind, making them partners in the work of redemption.
There is nothing preordained in this narrative. By giving humanity free will, God has made human beings His coauthors in writing the script of history. Yet it is not open-ended either, “a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” History, as understood by the Torah, is the story of how human beings, led only by the sound of a voice, a call, began the long journey, not yet complete, to a Promised Land and a messianic age where people construct a society that honors the image of God in others, sanctifying life, building families of love and trust, shaping communities by the principles of justice and compassion, and living at peace with their neighbors. No religion has conferred on mankind a greater responsibility. We are not, in this narrative, condemned to fail because of hubris or “original sin.” We are not confined to pure submission to the will of God. Instead, God has entrusted His great creation to our safekeeping, and though the Hebrew Bible tells us that Israel failed often, it also tells us that God has never lost faith in us, though we may sometimes lose our faith in Him.
The concept of covenant is intimately related to time. “I have chosen him,” says the God of Abraham, “so that he may instruct his children and his household after him to keep to the way of the Lord, by doing what is right and just” (Gen. 18:19). The achievement of a free and just society is the work not of a moment but of many generations. Israel must experience exile before it can fully understand the concept of home. It must undergo slavery if it is to long with all its being for freedom. It must walk through the valley of the shadow of death to know in its bones the sanctity of life. That is why covenant is essentially linked to education and memory, for the journey is long – longer than many lifetimes – and only when each generation hands on to the next what it has heard and learned and prayed for does the journey continue; and only if the journey continues is history redeemed. History has meaning only for those who believe it has meaning. Without that, it is what Harold MacMillan called “events, dear boy, events.”
In his book Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, Yosef Ḥayim Yerushalmi makes the fascinating observation that, having seen God in history and written an entire library of historical works, the Jewish people suddenly stopped writing history at the time of the destruction of the Second Temple. The last great Jewish historian was Josephus, who wrote his works in the first century of the Common Era. From then on, throughout the rabbinic literature of the mishnaic, talmudic, and medieval periods, there is virtually no historical writing, with the exception of the sixteenth century, when, in response to the Spanish expulsion, several works appeared, trying to make sense of the tragic fate of Jews in the Diaspora.
The great renaissance of historical writing occurred in the early nineteenth century, when the Society for the Science of Judaism was formed in Germany and the great works of Zunz, Graetz, and others began to appear. What Yerushalmi notes is that this new scholarly enterprise was born not in a sense of identification with the past, but precisely out of a sense of alienation. In the eyes of its founders, Judaism was a spent force, a relic of the past that had no future in post-Enlightenment Europe. All that remained, in Steinschneider’s words, was “to give it a decent burial.” It is said that Zunz, introduced in his old age to a Hebrew poet visiting from Russia, asked him, “Tell me, when did you live?” History is the dead past that only memory can revive.
It was Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch who delivered the most cogent critique of history as a substitute for memory:
Moses and Hesiod, David and Sappho, Deborah and Tyrtaeus, Isaiah and Homer, Delphi and Jerusalem, Pythian tripod and Cherubim – sanctuary, prophets and oracles, psalms and elegy – for us they all lie peacefully in one box, they all rest peacefully in one grave, they all have one and the same human origin, they all have one and the same significance, human, transitory and belonging to the past…. We let the old Jews fast on Tisha B’Av, we let them say Seliḥot and weep over Kinot. But in return we know far better than they do in which century these “poets” flourished, in what meter these “poets” composed…. Do these departed spirits rejoice in the literary gratitude of our present generation? Whom do they recognize as their true heirs? Those who repeated their prayers, but forgot their names, or those who forgot their prayers but remembered their names? (“Av I”)
To be a Jew is to know that over and above history is the task of memory. As Jacob Neusner eloquently wrote: “Civilization hangs suspended, from generation to generation, by the gossamer strand of memory. If only one cohort of mothers and fathers fails to convey to its children what it has learned from its parents, then the great chain of learning and wisdom snaps. If the guardians of human knowledge stumble only one time, in their fall collapses the whole edifice of knowledge and understanding” (Neusner on Judaism: Religion and Theology). More than any other faith, Judaism made this a matter of religious obligation. Pesaḥ is where the past does not die but lives, in the chapter we write in our own lives and in the story we tell our children.