The Joseph Generation

Some time ago, I had the pleasure of being escorted to shul by my daughter. There is no greater pleasure in my life than to walk to synagogue with one of my kids. As we walked hand-in-hand, I was struck by the power of our time together and the memories it evoked. I turned to her and said, “You know what, here we are walking to shul together, and when I was a little boy, I remember walking to shul with your grandpa, my daddy. You want to know what is even more interesting, when Grandpa was a little boy, he used to walk to shul with his daddy.” As soon as I’d said it, I was totally confident that she was totally uninterested in what I found to be so fascinating, but she gave me a response that was as pure and delightful as it was unexpected. She looked at me and asked, “Daddy, did Moses walk to shul with his children?” It was a wonderful question and I was touched by it, so much so, that I simply responded, “Yes, Moses walked to shul with his children.”

What are the Jewish memories that you carry around? The activities, the rituals, the walks to shul, the teachers, the music, the trips, the tastes and smells that make up your Jewish past? Is there a tablecloth you use from a previous generation? A recipe, a tallis, a Kiddush cup that has been passed down? When I begin to deliver a sermon, I often think of Mr. Gendon, the man who I sat next to in shul growing up who used to hand me a peppermint candy whenever the rabbi began to speak. Maybe for you it is a blessing at the Friday night table, or a prayer when you went to sleep at night, or a bad joke that an uncle said year in and year out at the Passover Seder. You may be new to Judaism and your memories more recent, like the moment when you immersed in the mikveh, emerging a member of the Jewish people. We all have these memories, new or old. They are the fabric of who we are as Jews. Consciously or unconsciously, it is Jewish memory that drives our Jewish identity. In some cases, if we dig deep enough, our memories go back to way before we were born, sometimes even as far as Moses.

This week, the Jewish world lost one of its greatest scholars. Professor Yosef Yerushalmi, the Salo Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture, and Society at Columbia University, passed away at the age of 77. A historian of the first rank, Yerushalmi addressed every area from the Spanish expulsion and modern German Jewry to Freud’s relationship with his Judaism. With the sad news of his passing, and to honor his life, I want to speak this morning about what is probably his most famous book, a short but provocative volume entitled Zakhor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory. Published just over 25 years ago, Zakhor continues to generate discussion today. It is a slim volume, just 100 pages, and is striking both for its insights and readability. If you are going somewhere over winter break, then I suggest you pick up a copy for your holiday reading.

The thesis of the book is straightforward. Yerushalmi argues that “History” and “Memory” are two entirely different projects. History is the account of past events, personalities, and institutions. To the extent that that he or she is able, the historian seeks to separate fact from fiction and to reconstruct and record objectively “what actually happened.” History is the effort to describe and explain the past.

For Jews, however, our natural reflex, our “go-to place” is not history, but memory. According to Yerushalmi, and this point is debated among scholars, Jewish history as a discipline is a relatively new phenomenon. History is not indigenous to our people; in fact, Jews only learned how to do history from their non-Jewish counterparts. Memory, on the other hand, is part of our people’s DNA. The Hebrew word for “memory” or “to remember,” zakhor, appears in the Bible no less than 169 times. Over and over again, Israel is commanded to remember and not forget; remember the promise to Abraham, remember that we were once slaves in Egypt, remember the Sabbath day, remember what Amalek did to us. The command to remember is absolute, persistent, and extends well beyond the Bible. Think of the rituals and recitals of the Passover Haggadah: “My father was a wandering Aramean,” and Dayenu – an account of everything God did for us. These are ritualized exercises aimed at the formation of collective memory. (Zakhor, p. 5ff)

Yerushalmi explains that memory, unlike history, is far more than an account of the past. History requires detachment; memory has immediacy. Memory means that you see yourself as part of a link in a chain, extending to the past, but also into your future. The story you are telling is not just any story, but your story. When we say at the Passover seder that we see ourselves as if we went out of Egypt, or on Shavuot that each of us was present at the giving of the Torah at Mount Sinai, these are not historical claims but claims of memory. Over this festival of Hanukkah, we thank God for miracles and deliverance bayamim ha-hem, ba-zman ha-zeh, “in the past and in the present.” What we are saying is that the same God who was present for the Maccabees is the God to whom we turn today. We can debate the particulars of history, but our vitality as a people is found in memory. We are a people of Zakhor.

While there is a lot more to say about the book, I do want you to read it, so I will leave it at that. This morning I want to suggest to you that while Yerushalmi’s book is a fine piece of scholarship worthy on its own merits, 25-plus years later, on this week of his passing, it reads like a prophetic comment on the Jewish community of today. If I had to diagnose the greatest challenge to contemporary Jewry, I would say it is that our reserves of Jewish memory are running dangerously low. We, who live in an information age, with more knowledge and more access to our past than any other generation, are paradoxically less and less connected to it. We may know history, but when it comes to Jewish memory, our bond with our past has grown increasingly tenuous.

You need look no further than the hero of our Torah reading, Joseph, to understand our present predicament. Joseph’s distinction, among others, is that unlike Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob, he is the first Jew who has to create Jewish identity on his own terms, removed from a one-on-one dialogue with God. Without this connection, his vision is skewed entirely in one direction, towards the future. Think about how our parasha begins. Joseph is full of dreams, eagerly anticipating his destiny; however, his sense of self is painfully one-dimensional. For Joseph, “any dream will do,” but don’t call on him to remember. He has absolutely no awareness of his past. There is no indication whatsoever that Joseph knew of his predecessors. It is not so much that Joseph lost his memory; he had no memory to begin with. He is a tabula rasa, born with no innate or built-in Jewish content. It is what makes him so intriguing, it is what makes him so reckless, and it is what makes him so relevant for us today.

We are, it would seem, “the Joseph generation,” the regrettable fulfillment of Yerushalmi’s observations. It would take a sociologist far more learned than I to explain why this rupture or lapse in memory has occurred, but we can observe its effects everywhere. When Israelis define themselves as Israelis first and Jews second, it means that their identities don’t extend to Abraham, but only to Ben Gurion or, if we are lucky, Herzl. So too, as many observers of Orthodoxy have noted, the recent shift to the right in Orthodoxy is also attributable to a lack of memory. When one learns how to be Jewish not from parents, but by way of right-wing publications filled with stringent lists of “do’s and don’t’s,” it is inevitable that Orthodoxy will become more “by the book,” and less open to give and take. The same is true in matters of philanthropy. When the UJA’s and JTS’s of the world face a diminishing pool of contributors, it means, among other things, that fewer Jews feel an instinctual solidarity and connection with the institutions that have made North American Jewry what it is.

While I can point to the effects of living in “the Joseph generation” around the Jewish world, I see its effects every day here in our community. When our children understand their connection to Israel by way of CNN and not as part of their DNA, then our Zionism is only as strong as the last news-cycle. If we say the words “Never Again” with the Shoah a point of historical reference and not a deeply felt emotional connection, a permanent scar on the Jewish soul, the words risk becoming trite and trivial. The same is true of Jewish observance. We can talk all we want about theology and mitzvot, but without memories, theology becomes an empty exercise. Jewish education is more complex than a Rorschach test. You can’t flash a text or ritual in front of someone and expect them to respond meaningfully. If we do not give our children points of reference for observance in their kishkes, in other words, memories, they are starting from scratch, and to start from the very beginning, actually, is a very difficult place to start.

Let me be clear, I am not asking any of us to wax nostalgic about the past. Solomon Schechter once wrote that “every generation must write its own love letters.” We can’t be satisfied reading those of previous generations. We are not museum curators; we are stakeholders in the Jewish future. What I am asking you to consider is that the most powerful Jewish muscle we have is our Jewish memory. It is our core strength and from it, everything else emerges. As parents and grandparents committed to Jewish education, the most important gift you can give your children is a steady stream of Jewish memories. You light candles at a Friday night table, not as a workshop in theology, but because you are impressing on your children the power of Shabbat. You don’t take or send your children to Israel to make them experts in the geopolitics of the Middle East; they need to go now so when they grow up, they will have a reflexive attachment to the land of our people. The child whom you drag to a UJA “phonathon,” will not remember years from now, I guarantee, the specifics of the day, but they will remember where your priorities were. When you take your children to shul and sit here next to them, it is an
investment that will yield dividends for years to come. Our
primary educational task in a “Joseph Generation” is to engender a feeling that Jewish commitments begin long before we are born and extend long after we are here on this earth. It sounds strange to say, but it is true: the key to building a Jewish future is the formation of Jewish memory.

Being a dreamer and having memories are not mutually exclusive, in fact they are interdependent. Martin Buber, the most passionate spokesman for Jewish renewal in the 20th century, explained that renewal “must originate in the deeper regions of the people’s spirit.” As sure as I am that memory without innovation is exhausted nostalgia, I am doubly sure that innovation without memory is superficial faddishness. Real Jewish renewal only happens when you are able to turn to the riches of tradition, the accomplishments of the past, and ask the necessary and relevant and pressing questions for this generation and the generations to come. It should not be lost on us that the central pivot, the redemptive turning point of the Joseph story will come next week when Joseph does what he was unable to do in the first half of his life – he remembers: Vayizkor Yosef et ha-halamot asher halam, “And Joseph remembered the dreams that he dreamt.” (Gen 42:9) The challenge and opportunity of our moment is to be able to do the same, to know that in order to go forward as Jews we must always remember our past. If we want a vital future, we need to understand that the essential task of Jewish education in our schools, shuls, and especially in our homes must be the formation of Jewish memory. If we want to dream, then, like Joseph, we must first learn to remember.

Since that walk to shul with my daughter, I have often wished that I had given her a slightly amplified answer. I now realize my daughter wasn’t seeking history, she was seeking memory. So my answer for my daughter, my answer for the “Joseph Generation,” my answer for my congregation, is: “Yes, Moses did walk his children to shul, and when we walk to shul together, Moses and Abraham and Sarah and Rebecca and even Joseph are still walking their children to shul. Right here, right now, they are escorting us; and in years to come, when you take your children to shul, they will be still be walking right there next to you.”