Key Educational Questions for this Section:

• Is the Jewish community a significant factor in our lives? Why? Why Not?
• How are Jews meant to relate to their own history? What can we learn from the rabbinic approach towards treating collective history as personal memory?
• How do we grow to the consciousness that we are part of the collective? How do we subjectively become part of the Jewish people?

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Text: Collective History and Memory

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In every generation, every person must see him (or her) self as if they themselves came out of Egypt.

Pesach Haggadah

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Explanation of text:

This familiar text appears in the Pesach Haggadah and provides one of the more extraordinary statements about historical memory that appears in the Jewish tradition. It can be suggested that although couched in the specific language of the Pesach story and Exodus, it in fact represents a far wider instruction on how to a Jew should approach his or her historical tradition.

The fact that a historical consciousness is seen universally as one important aspect of national identity is clear. But this piece here goes far beyond the usual idea that individuals should remember their history as part of belonging to a people or a nation. Here the idea is that there is an action which goes way beyond remembering that is needed by members of the Jewish People.

There is an aspect of existential internalization that is demanded: Jews are not told merely to know what happened in Egypt but are told to see themselves “as if they themselves” were part of that historical event. And building on top of this of course, the Seder Pesach is constructed to reinforce that element of personal identification. Memory is not enough – you have to feel that it is about you no less than it is about the specific participants of this historical (or pseudo-historical) event.

It is as if the Rabbis who constructed the Seder are saying – don’t just remember your history, but rather be your history, identify with your people’s experience and understand that your identity as a Jew living in whatever century (the 21^st) is tied up with the experiences of your people.

You cannot be a Jew without internalizing your people’s experiences as a part of who you yourself are. To be part of the Jewish people means to live that national experience, that collective heritage inside you. Part of you is so tied up with your collective experience that you have not got a full identity as a Jewish individual unless you have made this leap of imagination through an act of conscious will and arrived at a point of identification with the major stories and experiences of the Jewish People.

Their experience is part of who you are and you cannot define yourself as a Jew until you have affirmed that experience and done whatever you can to accept and embrace that aspect of yourself. Know your history, learn your history and live your history – and understand that this is not just a statement about this or that individual ancestor, it is a statement about your personal relationship with the collective of your people.

Collective history is to be converted into personal memory! It is no less true for converts whose families were not historically Jewish: they too have a part in the Jewish collective and their memory has to try and make that leap as well.

One Jewish activist, Zeev Maghen, summed up this point a number of years ago when he wrote the following:

You have special eyes, eyes that can see for miles and miles. lf you only will it – enough to work at it – you can extend your arms and touch the eons and the millennia, you can suck in the insights and bask in the glory and writhe in the pain and draw on the power emanating from every era and every episode and every experience of your indomitable, indestructible, obstinately everlasting people…

This is not an ability acquired solely through learning or reading … it is first and foremost a function of connection, of belonging, of powerful love. If you reach out and grasp your people’s hands – you were there. You participated in what they did, in all places, at all times, you fought their battles, felt their feelings and learned their lessons.

Zeev Maghen: Imagine 1998

Maghen, echoing the Rabbis is making a suggestion: history is there for you to be a part of. If you grasp it – through your imagination – and accept it, it will indeed be part of you.

But all of this raises another question: there are those who suggest that too close an association with our history can actually paralyze a people and prevent them from moving forward. You can become slaves to memory and try and duplicate the past.

Such an attitude can stop a people progressing. One person who raised this question was the Zionist activist and educator, Berl Katznelson who said the following in a speech in the pre state period:

Human beings are endowed with two faculties, memory and forgetfulness. We cannot live without both. Were only memory to exist, then we would be crushed under its burden. We would become slaves to our memories, to our ancestors…And were we ruled entirely by forgetfulness, what place would there be for culture [and] science?…

A renewing and creative generation does not throwthe cultural heritage of ages into the dustbin. It examines and scrutinizes, accepts and rejects. At times it may keep and add to an existing tradition.

At times it descends into ruined grottoes to excavate and remove the dust from that which had lain in forgetfulness, in order to resuscitate old traditions which have the power to stimulate the spirit of the generation of renewal…

Berl Katznelson

Perhaps a people can remember too much history?

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Extension Activities

Collective Memory & Haggadah

Collective Memory – Benefit or Burden?

Making Jewish History Personal

Key Educational Questions for this Section:

• Is the Jewish community a significant factor in our lives? Why? Why Not?
• How are Jews meant to relate to their own history? What can we learn from the rabbinic approach towards treating collective history as personal memory?
• How do we grow to the consciousness that we are part of the collective? How do we subjectively become part of the Jewish people?

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Text: Martin Buber – The “I” and the “We”

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In this text Martin Buber talks about the feeling of collective belonging that we feel across time and space, that connects us to our past, present and future.

The child, discovering his or her identity, comes to know that he or she is limited in space: the adult, that he or she is unlimited in time. As we discover our identity, our desire for eternity guides our range of vision beyond the span of our own life.

Stirred by the awesomeness of eternity, we feel within ourselves the existence of something enduring. We experience it still more keenly, when we envision the line of mothers and father that have led up to us…The People are for us a community of people who were, are and will be – a community of the dead, the living and the yet unborn – who, together constitute a unity.

It is this unity that to young people is the foundation of their identity, this identity which is fitted as a link into the great chain. Whatever all the people in this chain have created and will create, they conceive to be the work of their own particular being.

Whatever they have experienced and will experience the individual conceives to be his or her own destiny. The past of the People is her or his personal memory, the future of the People his or her personal task. The way of the People is the basis of our understanding of ourself.

When out of our deepest self-knowledge we have thus affirmed ourselves, when we have said “yes” to ourselves and to our whole Jewish existence, then our feelings will no longer be the feelings of individuals. Every one of us will feel that we are the people, for we will feel the People within ourselves.

Martin Buber, Judaism and the Jews, 1909

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Explanation of Text:

This key text of Martin Buber comes from a lecture that he gave in 1909, one of a series that he gave in the pre-WW1 years to the Jews of central Europe, expounding a philosophy of Judaism that he believed was something that the Jews of Germany had to embrace.

He believes that much of the community was losing its identity and increasingly defining the essential part of its identity as German or European, ignoring, largely through ignorance, the Jewish part of their identity. It was this problem that these essays largely came to address.

In this exposition of identity, he suggests that as one passes from childhood into adulthood, a person becomes aware of the dimension of past time (and ultimately future time) and begins to ask themselves questions relating to their place in time.

At that point the question of the link between personal identity (“Who am I”) and collective identity (“Who are we?”) begins to awaken and individuals feel the need to situate themselves in a larger identity which surrounds the individual identity and gives it additional meaning.

A feeling develops for individuals of the need to situate themselves in a larger context, what Buber might call a “context of unity” which helps answer the “Who am I?” question in a larger context. It is this ability of the individual to situate him or herself in a larger context of time that grounds the individual and provides a larger and richer context for the understanding of self.

At such a point of self-awareness an individual begins to identify with the collective, which he or she has identified as something to which he or she belongs. After that comes the stage of affirmation in which that individual accepts and identifies with the story of the collective and identifies with the story, the aims and the destiny of that collective.

When this process happens Buber would say, a person has reached a mature stage of identity where, without letting go of the personal identity that characterized them at a younger age/stage, they have added a wider dimension to their own identity, the personal and the collective aspects of their identity blending together to form a richer and more meaningful mixture.

For the audience that he was addressing, Jews well integrated into the culture of the world surrounding them, Buber insists that there is a choice to be made. No longer is every person that goes through this process naturally going to accept the Jewish collective as their primary collective.

That stage of organic entry into the Jewish community as the only possible collective that Jews might meaningfully be part of is no longer possible for those who want to be part of the world around them rather than turning their back on it in a Haredi-like rejection of the outside world. In a world where Jews are part of two cultures, the Jewish culture and the outside culture, Buber believes that Jews must choose where their essential identity base lies and graft the other identity onto that basis.

His lectures from this period are very much a call to the Jews of Central Europe to make their essential choice for an identity based on affirmation of their place in the Jewish collective, a collective which he sees as much older and rooted for Jews than the other possible base identities that they might choose.

Of course, in order to make that choice, young Jews must be presented with a version of Judaism that is capable of speaking to their deepest impulses and most profound needs. Buber sees his talks as an opening up of a whole new educational and cultural process for young Jews to follow in order that they will make the choice for identification with the Jewish collective that he sees that they should make.
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Extension Activities

Jewish identity beyond the individual: Buber’s view

Creating your Jewish identity timeline

Key Educational Questions for this Section:

• Is the Jewish community a significant factor in our lives? Why? Why Not?
• How are Jews meant to relate to their own history? What can we learn from the rabbinic approach towards treating collective history as personal memory?
• How do we grow to the consciousness that we are part of the collective? How do we subjectively become part of the Jewish people?

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Key Educational Questions for this Section:

• Is the Jewish community a significant factor in our lives? Why? Why Not?
• How do we grow to the consciousness that we are part of the collective? How do we subjectively become part of the Jewish people?
• What does the ‘covenant of destiny’ mean for our time?  How can we take part in shaping it

Text: The Jews, Yehuda Amichai

The Jews are like photos in a display window,

All of them together, short and tall, alive and dead,

Brides and grooms, bar mitzvah boys and babies.

Some are restored from old yellowed photographs.

Sometimes people come and break the windows

And burn the pictures.  And then they start

Photographing and developing all over again

And displaying them again, sad and smiling…

A Jewish man remembers the sukkah in his grandfather’s home.
And the sukkah remembers for him
The wandering in the desert that remembers
The grace of youth and the Tablets of the Ten Commandments
And the gold of the Golden Calf and the thirst and the hunger
That remembers Egypt…

A Jewish man remembers the sukkah in his grandfather’s home.
And the sukkah remembers for him
The wandering in the desert that remembers
The grace of youth and the Tablets of the Ten Commandments
And the gold of the Golden Calf and the thirst and the hunger
That remembers Egypt…

Some time ago, I met a beautiful woman
Whose grandfather performed my circumcision
Long before she was born.  I told her,
You don’t know me and I don’t know you
But we are the Jewish people,
Your dead grandfather and I the circumcised and you the beautiful granddaughter with golden hair: We are the Jewish people.

And what about God? Once we sang
“There is no God like ours,” now we sing, “There is no God of ours”
But we sing. We still sing.

for full text see Makom Israel.

Explanation of Text:

Amichai’s poem – the Jews holds within it two seemingly separate stories or narratives; one talks about the Jews and the other about God. The two stories merge (or one can say collide) in the last verse:

And what about God? Once we sang “There is no God like ours”, now we sing “There is no God of ours”

But we sing. We still sing.

What according to Amichai enables the Jews to still sing if there is no God in their lives? Throughout the poem Amichai grapples with what makes the Jews a people and as such, a unique one. He begins with their deep sense of history as expressed in passion for old photographs and paintings. Amichai highlights the fact that the Jews are constantly documenting and recording their history and despite hostilities and catastrophes “start photographing and developing all over again”.

This process creates a deep sense of solidarity between Jewish generations to the point that makes Amichai call them “an eternal forest preserve… and even the dead cannot lie down. They stand upright on the living, and you cannot tell them apart”. Soloveitchik called this a covenant of fate between Jews whose past connects them at the core.

But the collective memory is not just a chronological history of individual jews. The Sukkah as an example of a Jewish holiday becomes a current “platform” for reminding the Jews every year of the formative Jewish past (“the wandering in the desert”) and the great ethical Jewish achievements (the Ten commandments). Amichai here, without using that terminology reflects on the civilizational dimension of Judaism. The joint past that molded the Jewish People to the point that Amicai labels them “a geological people” (signifying the depth of its identity) provides the basis for its continuity even without God’s help.

Towards the end of the poem Amichai shifts the focus to current Jews. It is interesting to note that we know very little about the three individuals he uses as to exemplify “the Jewish People”, and their connections. We can assume the grandfather was a “Mohel” but Amichai rejected formal religion and the young woman is not portrayed as a religious woman. What amichai seems to be telling us is that the secret of Jewish continuity relies on the deep sense of Peoplehood engraved in Jews. To him this sense is strong enough to enable Jews to “continue to sing”.

Extension Activities

‘The Jews’ by Yehuda Amichai

Covenental Belonging

Key Educational Questions for this Section:

• Is the Jewish community a significant factor in our lives? Why? Why Not?
• How do we grow to the consciousness that we are part of the collective? How do we subjectively become part of the Jewish people?
• What does the ‘covenant of destiny’ mean for our time?  How can we take part in shaping it

Text: Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson

…the nation: it is an imagined political community – and imagined as both inherently limited and sovereign… It is imagined because the members of even the smallest nation will never know most of their fellow-members, meet them, or even hear of them, yet in the minds of each lives the image of their communion… it is imagined as a community, because … the nation is always conceived as a deep, horizontal comradeship. (Imagined Communities, Benedict Anderson, 2006)

Explanation of Text:

In his breakthrough formulation of Nationalism Benedict Anderson, in Imagined Communities, offers a new paradigm for capturing collective identities, which helps us understand Jewish collectivity as well. He notes that although the members of the group will never know, meet or hear from most of their fellow-members they still envision in their minds an “image of their communion” and they share a “deep, horizontal comradeship”.  In other words, that sense of connection to people, which in the case of the Jewish People resides all over the world is by definition imagined.

But one shouldn’t confuse imagined with imaginary. The power of these imagined structures is very real and goes a long way. Anderson bitterly remarks that “Ultimately it is this fraternity that makes it possible  over the past two centuries, for so many millions of people, not so much to kill, as willingly to die for such limited imaginings”. In the case of the Jews this imagined community of the Jewish People sustained both the people and their civilization for the last 3,000 years.

It is important to understand that imagined communities are are not static eternal entities. They depend on collective interpretation, and the meaning of the community will change as the world changes. This is especially important to remember in the case of the Jewish people. Even though it is an imagined community its future will be defined by its future relevance to individual Jews and their level of involvement in its future development.

Key Educational Questions for this Section:

• Is the Jewish community a significant factor in our lives? Why? Why Not?
• How do we grow to the consciousness that we are part of the collective? How do we subjectively become part of the Jewish people?
• What does the ‘covenant of destiny’ mean for our time?  How can we take part in shaping it

In his classic work, Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik puts forward compelling case for two kinds of covenants that Jews and the Jewish people are bound by – a covenant of fate and a covenant of destiny.

Text: Kol Dodi Dofek (The Voice of My Beloved Knocks), Rabbi Joseph B. Soloveitchik

Covenant of Fate

We have stated that it is the consciousness of the fate imposed upon the people against their will and of their terrible isolation that is the source of the people’s unity, of their togetherness. It is precisely this consciousness as the source of the people’s togetherness that gives rise to the attribute of hesed, which summons and stirs the community of fate to achieve a positive mode of togetherness through ongoing, joint participation in its own historical circumstances, in its suffering, conscience, and acts of mutual aid…

“The lonely Jew finds consolation in breaking down the existential barriers of egoism and alienation, joining himself to his fellow and actively connecting himself with the community. The oppressive sense of fate undergoes a positive transformation when individual-personal existences blend together to form a new unit–a people. The obligation to love one another stems from the consciousness of this people of fate, this lonely people that inquires into the meaning of its own uniqueness. It is this obligation of love that stands at the very heart of the covenant made in Egypt.

Covenant of Destiny

What is the nature of the covenant of destiny? Destiny in the life of a people, as in the life of an individual, signifies a deliberate and conscious existence that the people has chosen out of its own free will and in which it finds the full realization of its historical being… The people is embedded in its destiny as a result of its longing for a refined, substantive, and purposeful existence. Destiny is the flowing spring of the people’s unique exaltation: it is the unceasing stream of supernal influence that will never dry as long as the people charts its path in accordance with the divine Law. A life of destiny is a life with direction: it is the fruit of cognitive readiness and free choice.

Explanation of Text:

In the very famous address Kol Dodi Dofek (The Voice of My Beloved Knocks) Rav Soloveitchik drew a distinction between two forms of covenant that apply for the Jews as a people. “The Covenant of Fate” (brit goral), and “The Covenant of Destiny” (brit Yeud). The covenant of fate is the outcome of a shared fate the Jews experienced throughout history that created in them a sense of empathy, love and dedication to their fellow Jews. While most of their sufferings were imposed on them by outside forces which they did not have control of, the decision to turn them into a commitment to care for an aid other Jews becomes an act of Hesed and an expression of “positive togetherness”.

In a sense the individual Jew finds comfort from the difficult circumstances by joining the community and people. Through the act of joining a larger collective the individual Jew transforms the oppressive side of fate into a positive context. His life receives new meaning through the commitment to his people. This consciousness of the collective shared fate turns into a love and commitment to fellow Jews who suffered as well, and in the process makes Jews part of something bigger than just their personal fate. It also places the commitment to love at the heart of the Jewish collective enterprise.

A covenant of destiny is different first and foremost because it is an outcome of free choice made by a collective. It is not an outcome of outside oppressive forces but is dependent of the free will of the People to come together around a set of values and beliefs. According to Soloveitchik a destiny chosen by a people both charts its vision and purpose but is also the expression of “its longing for a refined, substantive, and purposeful existence”. In that sense it both provides the energy and rationale of the collective and is an expression of its will to live a meaningful life and impact the world.

For Soloveitchik the progression from a covenant of fate to a covenant of destiny is a positive progression because it represents “a holy nation that has no fear of fate and is not compelled to live against its will”.  As he frames it: “It believes in its own destiny, and it dedicates itself, out of its own free will, to the realization of that destiny”.  Soloveitchik describes the change with the following words: ”The ‘am hesed, the people of lovingkindness, was raised on high and became a goy kadosh, a holy nation. Holiness, which expresses itself in the form of an authentic mode of being, is the very foundation of the shared destiny of a nation.” In other words the challenge of the Jewish people today is to develop and follow and authentic Jewish mode of being that will be substantial and meaningful to the Jewish present and future.