Elul Day 23

Dear Elul Writers,

Not so long ago, I was in a conversation with my 15 year-old and his cousin, who was also only a year or so out from her bat mitzvah. Somehow the conversation turned to Torah and I asked them if they felt like with the help of the app, Pocket Torah, they could use their skills to chant any parashah? They both looked at each other and then sort of looked down. I asked them what the issue was, and they both admitted to having deleted the app from their phones. Without consulting each other, they simultaneously said that Pocket Torah was taking up too much memory on their phones.

In the moment, I was more than a little amused; two Jewish kids, having felt the burden of carrying tradition around in their pockets, decided that maybe they could lighten their load. In a digital world where short-form rules the day, five ancient, mysterious books didn’t stand a chance. The question that arose for me after that conversation was, how much memory are we, each of us, willing to devote to our Judaism? If, like a smartphone, we have a finite amount of room to store information, we are all forced to determine which narratives, which teachings and which histories we carry with us. We may be limited in how much we can remember, but memory is clearly an essential element of our tradition. There is a sweet quote from Jonathan Safran Foer on the nature of collective memory that I have often returned to. He writes:

Jews have six senses, touch, taste, sight, smell, hearing … memory. For Jews memory is no less primary than the prick of a pin, or its silver glimmer, or the taste of the blood it pulls from the finger. The Jew is pricked by a pin and remembers other pins. It is only by tracing the pinprick back to other pinpricks – when his mother tried to fix his sleeve while his arm was still in it, when his grandfather’s fingers fell asleep from stroking his great-grandfather’s damp forehead, when Abraham tested the knife point to be sure Isaac would feel no pain – that the Jew is able to know why it hurts. When a Jew encounters a pin, he asks: What does it remember like?”

Prompt

One of the many names for Rosh Hashanah is Yom Hazikaron, a Day of Remembrance. Implied in this name is the fact there is a good bit of remembering that is needed as we head towards the new year; without it, how can we chart our path forward? Is there a memory that you want to call to mind, consider, and carry with you into the year to come? How might you productively connect your inherited memories to the world as we are experiencing it now? Are there any memories that you have been holding, personal or collective, that you would like to let go of or, at least, move to the cloud? Here’s hoping that even with memories that are teetering on being too full, we can still find ways of functioning (at least until the new model drops).

Bivracha,
Jordan