Elliot Cosgrove, PhD March 20, 2012
When the historian Peter Novick died last month, he bequeathed to the Jewish community a set of questions that will extend well beyond his years on this earth. In my years at the University of Chicago, I never studied formally with Dr. Novick, though I can clearly recall the controversy surrounding his 1999 book, The Holocaust in American Life. Novick, who was Jewish, contended that the Holocaust had come to play too large a role in American Jewish life. The Nazi genocide, horrific as it was, in its ubiquitous and sometimes vacuous invocation, had come to serve as “virtually the only common denominator of American Jewish identity.” Furthermore, Novick claimed that history was being used by contemporary Jewry, in America and in Israel, for reasons that had nothing to do with honoring memory, but rather as a means to justify political ends. In drawing analogies between 1933, 1938, 1944 and the Six Day War, the Yom Kippur War or I suppose, even our present moment, the promiscuous use of history was not only a false equivalence, not only a coarse rallying cry separate from the merits of the crisis at hand, but actually served to cheapen the atrocity itself. You can imagine the controversy stirred up by Novick’s book – from strong support to sharp criticism. The questions he raised remain to this day. Be it the Holocaust, or any historical event – is there a right and wrong, an ethics in invoking the past? Can too much historical consciousness be a bad thing? Where exactly is the line between the use and abuse of history?
Usually, when we talk about the abuse of history, we mean the opposite end of the spectrum – the lack of historical awareness. In her book Dangerous Games, the historian Margaret Macmillan relates the tale of the writer Susan Jacoby, who overheard two men speaking in a New York bar on the evening of September 11, 2001. “This is just like Pearl Harbor,” one said. “What is Pearl Harbor?” the other asked. The first man replied, “That was when the Vietnamese dropped bombs in a harbor, and it started the Vietnam War.” (p. 164) Certainly in this day and age, with a twenty-four hour news cycle and attention spans as shallow as the last tweet, our Etch-a-Sketch affliction is a collective case of attention deficit disorder. The Jewish community is no different. Our concerns for the Jewish future in many ways stem from our awareness of just how tenuous the thread is to the Jewish past, how disconnected this generation is from the generation that preceded it. We need not look far to see the second child of the Seder table, lacking a historical sensibility and no longer deserving a place at the table. There are dangers that come with too little history, and everything we do as educators, Jewish or otherwise, seeks to address this deficiency.
But this morning, I want to talk about a different kind of abuse of history – not too little, but too much. It is perhaps an unexpected topic given the imminent arrival of Passover, our festival of history par excellence. After all, the entire seder – the recitation of the Exodus narrative, the songs and rituals, everything – has the goal of relaying, retaining and preserving our history. The Haggadah exemplifies what the the French sociologist Maurice Halbwachs called “collective memory,” in that what a people remembers – whether it is the Alamo, the Maine, Pearl Harbor or the Exodus – informs a people’s sense of idendity and mission. For no people more than the Jews, and never more than on Passover, is history’s effect on group identity so evident.
And yet on this Shabbat HaGadol, I submit to you that the Passover Haggadah is instructive not just for the history it tells, but for how it tells it, not only for making that history important, but also for modeling safeguards against the abuse of that very history.
Consider the very first declaration at the seder table: “This is the bread of affliction that our ancestors ate…at present we eat it here, next year in Jerusalem.” From the very beginning, there is a sense of continuity and discontinuity established between the celebrant and the history being recited. As interested as the Haggadah is in recalling the past, it is equally interested in the muscle group needed to differentiate one moment from the next. And the question is not merely Ma Nishtana, why this night is different from other nights, but why this moment is distinct from other ones. Think about the oldest core text of the Haggadah (which, incidentally, most of us skip over): “Go forth and inquire what Laban intended to do to our father Jacob.” In the very next line, the text explains that while in every generation enemies have risen against us, the threat of Pharaoh and the threat of Laban were of altogether different magnitudes. No one moment ever exactly mirrors another. Of course the whole point of the Haggadah is to create an sense of unbroken continuity from one generation to the next, but if you read the text very carefully, you will see that never ever does time collapse on itself. The present celebrant is always aware of his or her existence between a past exodus and a future redemption. Every Jew must see him or herself ke’ilu, “as if,” s/he came out of Egypt. Ke’ilu, “as if,” not exactly like. Why? Because we didn’t actually go through it ourselves. We draw on that history and identify with it, but also embrace the fact that we are not that history. In fact, it is arguably this distancing, this awareness that “that was then and this is now” which is the whole point. The ability to refract the lessons of a past experience onto our present condition, but not conflate the two, that is the pedagogic lesson of the entire Passover exercise.
The Haggadah is instructive because it reminds us that as important as history may be, so too is the ability to recognize the differences between our own moment and that past. Far too often the past is used by the present in ways that obfuscate our present concerns. I am reminded of the old story of Abe and Sadie who go into couples therapy and Abe complains that whenever they argue, Sadie becomes historical. The therapist interrupts, “You mean hysterical.” “No,” says Abe, “historical – she’s always digging up the past.” This is exactly what we risk doing as Jews – worrying about a lack of history but actually suffering from some sort of historical stress disorder whereby the past becomes a stick to drive present agenda. Telling a young Jew that she or he must remain Jewish so as not give Hitler a posthumous victory will, at best, draw a blank stare and at worst, cause that Jew to turn away from this people mired in the past. Setting present policy, here in America or in Israel, on nothing more than a mantra of “never again” lacks intellectual, moral and tactical integrity. As much as we may wish it to be otherwise, one generation cannot hold another generation accountable for lacking a historical sensitivity that can only be acquired by having lived through the events of an era during which they were not yet born. Some people remember Kennedy being shot, some people don’t. Some people lived through the Six Day War; other’s didn’t. None of us choose to be born into the era in which live. It just works out that way and our sensibilities differ accordingly. The Haggadah insists that each generation forge a link one to the other and learn from a shared past, but it does not ask that we elide our generational differences. There is a point when fetishizing the past, be it a glorious golden age or a tragic calamity, borders on idolatry; we ignore the inexorable tug of the future at our peril. Any forward-looking agenda for the Jewish world needs to do what the creators of the Haggadah understood long ago, namely, to recognize that our moment is both connected to and different from the one before and, for that matter, the one to come. It is in that connection and difference that the secret to Jewish continuity lies.
With Passover just around the corner, there is no time like the present to think about the Jewish past. History, suggests Macmillan, if it is used with care, is important in that it provides context for our present, gives us alternatives to consider and most importantly, warns us of what might go wrong. But history does not provide answers; it can only help us form the questions we need to ask. As the British historian John Arnold wrote, “Visiting the past is something like visiting a foreign country: they do some of the things the same and some things differently, but above all else they make us more aware of what we call home.”
Far too often we understand history, to use E.H. Gombrich’s image, like a person standing between two mirrors, with the result that we see a great long line of mirrors, each one showing an image identical to the one before. Such a house of mirrors does a disservice to us, our past and our future. History is better described as a moving stream into which we can never step twice (Heraclitus) or as Mark Twain reportedly said, “History does not repeat itself, at most it rhymes.” This year, remember, the measure of a good seder is not just what we remember, but what we learn, the degree to which we engage with the past for the purpose of bringing our present into sharper focus. We ask question after question after question, questions about the past, questions that shed light on the present, questions that will help us find a brighter future.