Remember What It Feels Like
According to rabbinic legend a fetus knows the entire Torah when in the womb. When the fetus is born an angel kisses the baby on the lip, producing the recognized indentation, and the child then forgets everything. Now this child must spend a lifetime learning Torah. It is a curious legend. The rabbis imagined that the womb not only surrounds a child with compassion but instills knowledge.
And then when we emerge into the world, we forget everything.
Once on our own, our inclination is toward forgetfulness. We must spend a lifetime combatting it.
We are commanded over and over again to remember: zakhor. This commandment serves to counter our inclination. Moses admonishes the people: “Remember the long way that the Lord your God has made you travel in the wilderness these past forty years, that God might test you by hardships to learn what was in your hearts.” (Deuteronomy 8) We must remember our history, the successes and failures, but especially the trials.
Why? Because remembering our trials can kindle compassion.
Remembering is not instinctive. Memories must be taught. One can learn from others. But remembrance is best achieved by experience. Each of us remembers our personal joys and perhaps even more our pains. The great historian Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi argues that Judaism believes forgetfulness is terrifying. This is because when we forget we have a tendency to look away from the purpose of our remembrance. We remember our pain so that we might alleviate the suffering of others.
The Torah repeatedly commands, “Love the stranger, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 10). And elsewhere, “You shall not oppress the stranger, for you know the feelings of the stranger, having yourselves been strangers in the land of Egypt.” (Exodus 23)
Zakhor, remember, we are commanded. We must always remember the long way we have travelled and the many trials and pains we have endured. To forget these sufferings is to open the possibility that we might do to others what was, and is, done to us. We know the feelings of the stranger!
We are the Jewish people because we remember. Our future is dependent on hearing this command and regaining the terror of forgetting. Perhaps we will then once again reach out to others with the compassion that once surrounded us in the womb. And like that unborn nurtured child we will never again forget.