Last nights sermon. Hope you enjoy: If you had the ability to remember every detail of your life, would you want to? Buried deep within the annals of psychological lore is the story of A.J. A.J famously suffered from an incredibly rare syndrome, known as hyperthymesia, where subjects remember vividly nearly every moment of one’s life in extreme clarity and are unable to forget even the most mundane details. They can tell you where they were on a given date, what they did, and how they felt. One might think that this form of memory is amazing. Wouldn’t we all love to recall the exact nature of a lecture from college or the precise word our husband used while proposing. Or more simply wouldn’t we never want to lose our keys? But in fact, A.J. lived in misery. Her memory was “non-stop, uncontrollable, and totally exhausting.” People with hyperthymesia, like A.J. are haunted by associations. They arrive at a place or see a picture and are catapulted into a vivid mental retelling of all events that happened there. Socially, they can never let a past slight go. While for most of us, each moment of pain fades over time, those who suffer from this ailment feel as equally hurt five or ten years after an incident as they did on the day it occurred. And it’s for this reason that people with hyperthymesia struggle to keep up deep interpersonal relationships. The suffering associated with hyperthymesia teaches us that one of the engines of our human ability to persevere and move forward is actually our ability to forget. Would you ever enter into a relationship again, if you could truly remember the pain of breaking up? Would you have a child again if you could actually relive the pain of childbirth? What about forgiveness? Could you bring yourself to forgive a slight over time if the pain of that slight never faded away? Yet today, it is harder than ever to forget. Facebook and Twitter allow us immediate and precise access to our musings from five years ago. Angry comments we wrote on another’s blog remains published in perpetuity. I can go onto my banking website, and see every financial mistake since the records went electronic. Today, our storage capacity and the speed of information means that even the most mundane parts of our lives can be logged forever and will not be lost. And because of that, remembering is actually becoming easier than forgetting. Think how much simpler it is to upload the full contents of a camera phone to your computer than to go picture by picture deciding which to keep and which to discard. But this type of memory comes at a price. There’s a haunting scene in Dave Egger’s futuristic book, the Circle, where a minor character name Annie is chosen for an experiment call PastPerfect. Through facial recognition of every picture ever taken, she can get a realistic timeline of her family’s history and learn who and what her ancestors were actually about. Though Annie had been told the story that her family came over on the Mayflower and were upstanding citizens of America she soon learned something very different. Her British ancestors owned Irish slaves, her early American ancestors owned slaves in the American South, even her parents had a shady past. The news is too much for Annie to bear. Her forgotten past has been reborn. She becomes catatonic and is ruined by the truth. Egger’s story is a fitting warning for a process that has already begun. Each year, we move more and more away from forgetting at our peril. How can we truly forgive someone when every time we view their pictures on Facebook page we see the wedding we were not invited to? How can we move on from a dispute, when searching for an email from a work colleague we come across a five-year-old angry email they fired off to us in the heat of the moment. Having the freedom to forget is important Viktor Mayer-Schonberger notes, in his book Delete: the Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age because It lets us act and think in the present rather than be tethered to an ever-more-comprehensive past. The beauty of the human mind and human forgetting is that, as we forget, were able to generalize, to abstract, to see the forest rather than the individual tree. Yet, as important as it is to forget, it often seems that the Jewish tradition says the opposite. For deep within the fabric of our collective consciousness is the mandate to remember. The Bible tells us to always remember the wondrous works of creation. We told to never to forget our slavery in Egypt. We are reminded time and again to remember our covenant with God, sealed at Sinai. We are told never to forget the enemies that assailed us, even as we are commanded to blot out their name. While in exile after the destruction of the first Temple, our ancestors penned the word “If I forget thee, O Jerusalem, let my right hand whither.” And of course we are implored never to forget the Holocaust and the evil of Hitler. Even the fear of forgetting the simple lessons we learn in school are sources of consternation. Our ancient sage Rabbi Meir once claimed that anyone who forgets one matter from his studies, it is as if he has forfeited his life. How then, do we reconcile the Jewish mandate to remember with the obvious benefits that come with being able to forget? How would our tradition view the latest advances in technology or plight of those with hyperthymesia like A.J. The answer, I believe, is that Judaism takes a balanced approach with memory. For within our tradition, alongside the mandate to remember there has always been a premium placed on the ability to forget. In fact the very first act we engage in as humans, is the act of forgetting. There is a famous story in our tradition that while in the womb a child is omniscient. He or she knows all the secrets of the world and can see from one end of the universe to the other. Then, right before birth an angel comes and touches them below the nose and above their lips, leaving an indentation and causing them to forget everything they knew before. The process of growing up and attaining wisdom is actually the process of re-learning. We’ve entered the world in the most human way possible. We have practiced the art of forgetting. Yet, forgetting does not just end at childbirth. Forgetting is and remains a part of living a whole Jewish life. Take learning for example. Our tradition teaches that “one cannot learn anything, until he has first stumbled over it.” The frustration of losing a piece of information becomes the glue that makes it stick. Here, forgetting is the engine that makes for learning. Today, smart phones take that away from us. We will never be wrong, and therefore never learn from our mistakes, if the truth is only a click away. Our Rabbis understood another value of forgetting (Brachot 13a). They tell a parable about a person traveling on a road when ge is attacked by a wolf and saved from it. Soon after, he is attacked by a lion and escapes. Finally a snake confronts him and he is saved from it. But before he goes home he forgets about the first two attacks and only tells the incident of the snake. So it is with Israel, say our Rabbis, later tribulations cause the earlier ones to be forgotten. The meaning of the parable is profound. The man on the road needed the ability to forget the wolf and lion, so he could muster the courage to travel again. If he truly remembered the danger of travel he would never have left his home. So too, the Jewish people must forget aspects of their history, for if they don’t they will be too afraid to step foot into the future. Here, forgetting is the engine of confidence and perseverance. And at this time of year, forgetting is especially important. Forgetting is a crucial facet of forgiving ourselves and others. Two thousand years ago a question was posed: if one commits a sin during the year and he confess and is forgiven on Yom Kippur, should he continue to confess each and every year or is once enough? (Yoma 86b) In other words, if I steal, cheat, or lie, but fully repent for that sin, am I done? Should Yom Kippur be about the sins of the previous year or the sins of the previous years? Although some voices claimed you should always confess, the majority of Rabbis disagreed. There is no need to confess again. Once we have atoned for a sin, we need to be able to put it behind us. To move forward, inherently means we need at least the option to forget the events of the past whose guilt and shame would cripple us. They are so adamant in the need to provide space for forgetting that they liken someone who confesses to past misdeeds on Yom Kippur to a dog that goes back to eat its filth. Part of what makes us succeed is telling the story that we are good people. Building our sins each year like a snowball has the opposite effect, causing us each year to see ourselves as less good and worthy of love with each passing day. Here, forgetting is the engine of self-forgiveness. All of this is building to the act of divine forgetting. According to our tradition, the way God forgives is through forgetting. In the book of Psalms we ask God to “wash [us] that [we] may become whiter than snow” (Ps. 51:7). Jeremiah says of God “I will forgive their wrongdoings and remember their sin no more” (Jer. 31:34). The prevailing metaphor of the High Holy Days season includes God recording and recounting our deeds in a book, then sealing it shut. Imagine then, that God takes that book, now sealed forever, and places it on a shelf to collect dust alongside a bookshelf of history’s greatest deeds and misdeeds . It will never be opened again. Forgiven, God forgets about it and its contents. We are a people who pray to the most forgetful of beings, and we are better for it. And if living an ethical life means to walk in God’s ways, to emulate God’s attributes, maybe we need to learn to forget as well. So which is it? As people in this world, as friends, family, and as Jews when should we seek to remember and when should we allow ourselves to forget? How do we make a distinction between the need to remember momentous communal events such as the holocaust or personal events like the day our first child was born and the obvious advantages that come with forgetting, like the ability to learn from mistakes, the ease of forgiveness, and the focus on context? The answer I believe has to do with the effect that remembering has on us. When remembering brings us closer to our history, when it informs our present, when it connects us to our peers, remembering is healthy. But when it cripples us, engenders resentment anger, and fear, and sacrifices the present for the past, we need to allow ourselves to forget. True, it’s impossible to force oneself to forget anything. If I tell you not to think about what you had for breakfast, how many of you just thought about exactly that? Yet, research has shown that there are two primary drivers to memory, the intensity of experience and the frequency of memory. We can’t change the intensity of experience. We can’t make the holocaust or 9/11 any less painful. We can’t make a breakups or a sickness any less acute. That’s why we will always remember them. Big experiences sear themselves in our memory. But we can change the frequency of memory. Studies have shown that telling the same tale or revisiting the same information again and again over a long period of time, is what makes us remember. To combat this we can delete old pictures that stir our vitriol. We can stop ourselves from telling stories that don’t allow us to forgive. We can stop ritualizing our pathologies. We can’t always will ourselves to forget, but we can surely build protections that allow us to remember less often when remembering will be harmful to us. We may not have the recall of hyperthymesiacs like A.J. We may not always employ the latest technology that keeps us from forgetting but we can still be stifled by our good memories. On this Rosh Hashanah, called by our tradition, Yom Hazikaron, the day or remembrance, I want to challenge each of us to embrace the practice of forgetting. Remember what you should. Remember what you must. But allow yourself to let go of what you need. We Jews have an ethical imperative to remember, but sometimes the most ethical thing you can do is to let yourself forget.
Posted on: Thu, 25 Sep 2014 16:35:00 +0000
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