The Memories We Share

This past year our community was honored to welcome the renowned author Malcolm Gladwell for a lecture, a visit that afforded me the opportunity to acquaint and reacquaint myself with his prolific and always insightful writing. As we turn to the Yizkor service, I want to draw attention to one particular idea that Gladwell describes in his book The Tipping Point, called “transactive memory” – a term drawn from the work of University of Virginia psychologist Daniel Wegner.

We are well aware that in every age, none more than our own, memory is not only stored within each of us but is something that can be shared among people. On a mundane level, here at Park Avenue Synagogue we have something called a shared hard drive, an electronic storage place where documents and files are kept. It doesn’t belong to me, to the cantor, or to anyone in particular; it belongs to us all. We all access it, we all add to it, it is the shared memory of the professional team.

With every passing day, we become increasingly aware that there are growing pockets of memory which are housed not within us, but somewhere beyond the membrane of our being. There was a time that I could recall the phone numbers and addresses of all my friends. These days, because all that information is stored and easily accessible on my iPhone, I do not need to remember it and thus, not surprisingly, I do not. We only need to remember where to find the information, not so much the information itself. In our information age, an increasingly large amount of what we used to store in our own person is now housed in what we may call “offsite locations” – places not inside ourselves.

Wegner’s research goes on to explain that the external locations of our memory are not just in things – a rolodex, a USB stick, or an iPhone – but also in other people. With people we know well or with whom we have significant relationships, we create an “implicit joint memory system – a transactive memory system – which is based on an understanding about who is best suited to remember what kind of things.” When my phone stops working, for example, the memory of how to fix it is not stored in me, but in my teenage daughter, to whom I hand my phone. I have no idea how to suspend home delivery of the newspaper when we go away; Debbie knows how to do that and, for that matter, a million other things. By the same token, there is a smaller – significantly smaller – sphere of my memory, that someone – somewhere – relies on me to remember. (Gladwell, Tipping Point, p. 187ff.)

I am reminded of the story of the Goldsteins and the Cohens, who were sitting by the pool discussing a fabulous restaurant the Goldsteins had been to recently. Goldstein was regaling his friends about the service, the food – everything was spectacular. “Nu,” asked Cohen, “so what was the name of the place?” “Gee, I can’t remember,” Goldstein replied. “What do you call the long-stemmed flower people give to each other on special occasions? “You mean a rose?” responded Cohen. “That’s it!” Goldstein exclaimed. At which point he turns to his wife and asks, “Rose, what’s the name of that restaurant we went to the other night?”

Be it the names of restaurants, how to stop delivery of the newspaper, or other knowledge, there are million things for which we rely upon the memories of others – the shared memory that becomes the bond of a relationship. To use a sweet, but altogether relevant example, my trust and love and bond with Cantor Schwartz is based on many things, but a big part of our friendship – professionally and personally – is the fact that when it comes to the shul, we have a form of transactive memory. The way couples finish each other’s sentences, remember commitments, tell family stories – the measure of our intimacy with another is based, in no small part, on the degree to which our memory actually lives within the other person. The people with whom we share the most transactive memory are the people that, more often than not, we are closest to personally, professionally, and otherwise.

All of that makes it really, really hard when someone dies. The loss of a loved one – parent, child, sibling, spouse, intimate, or other relationship – is a devastating blow on so many levels. Our grief and sorrow at their passing, a life cut off and concluded, and the gaping hole left in our lives as we, the living, must engage with the act of living in the absence of that person whom we loved.

What Wegner’s study adds to our understanding of the nature of loss is that in the loss of our loved one, a part of us – literally, not just figuratively – also dies. Because we loved that person, that person was part of our external memory system; their experiences were our experiences and ours theirs. With the loss of a loved one, the shared hard drive, if you will, has crashed. All those things mundane and momentous – how we navigate this world, how we relate to other people, how we recall the past, and how we dream about the future – all that and so much more that was them, but was also us – all that is lost when a loved one dies. They and only they knew certain things about us and our history, things nobody else knew. Wegner explains that it is this loss of our “self” in losing a loved one that is, at least in some part, a source of the depression and cognitive dysfunction that people experience upon the death of a loved one. We are no longer, literally, wholly ourselves. In Wegner’s words, it is a feeling “akin to losing part of one’s own mind.”

All of which is to say what you already know if you are sitting here at this time: Yizkor is really, really important. Significantly, the word yizkor is not a noun. It is a verb denoting the act of remembering, of retrieving memory. As God remembers us on this day, so we remember our loved ones; we mourn their passing, we honor their lives,, and in our sorrow, we seek comfort in the blessing of tradition and community.

And yet embedded in the act of yizkor, the act of remembering, there is perhaps another expectation, another dimension to our retrieval of memory that we can consider today. If indeed, in the passing of our loved one, a piece of ourselves also died, then this yizkor hour becomes the time when we meditate on that missing piece. Today we miss the things our loved one knew how to do and the times when they did them, because those things, they were part of us. The wisdom they possessed, the habits they had, the songs they sang, and the foods they cooked. The holidays are an especially difficult and especially important time to remember our loved ones because it is during these sacred hours and in this sacred space that so much of our intergenerational memory is found. The act of yizkor can not bring a loved one back, nor can it make us whole once more; our loved one’s mortality is an unavoidable fact. And yet the gift of memory is ours should we choose to accept it. We can use these moments to meditate on the blessings of those whom we recall today. We can, even if only for a fleeting moment, bring about their presence in their absence.

And yet, the power of Yizkor goes even deeper. If it is indeed the case that when our loved one passed, a piece of us died with them, then it means that the converse is also true: an aspect of our loved one still lives within us today. To state the obvious: we the living are still here. Our loved one, who is living no longer, was our loved one because there was an aspect of his or her being that existed within us. We are not just keepers of a memory that a certain person lived, but, for as long as we live, we are the actual sites, the locations in which aspects of our loved one continue. Yizkor is meant to be a prompt to alert us to the obligations we have as guardians of the memory of our loved ones. What does it mean, in practical terms, to say that a mother, a father, a brother, a sister, a child, or a spouse lives on through us? How do we express our responsibility; how do we express our opportunity to perpetuate the values, the high ideals, the traditions, and the values by which our loved one lived? We know from the words of the mahzor that our loved ones can, if we choose, stay alive in our own actions, an aspect of them alive through us. Yizkor is our time not just to remember; Yizkor is our time to commit to action, to map out the year ahead, to make resolutions and to make our lives living and dynamic monuments to all those whom we recall today.

Finally, if we take the notion of transactive memory to heart, then we must allow for and absorb the fact that just as an aspect of our loved ones lives on in us, so too, an aspect of each of us may be found, at this time, at any given time, in the hearts, lives, and souls of those who will outlive us. Someday, perhaps sooner than we would think and most certainly sooner than we would like, someone please God, will be reciting Yizkor prayers for us. So I ask you: In the limited time we have been given on this earth, in the relationships that define your existence, with those people with whom you share your being – are you satisfied? One of the most painful aspects of Yizkor is the inevitable feeling of the things we should have and could have said to our loved ones before they passed, but – for whatever reason – did not. Yizkor is our wake-up call that while we cannot change the past, we can change the future. We can commit to living loving, value-filled lives of meaning. We can, if we so choose, make the changes that need to be made and have those important conversations with our loved ones. We can create shared memory bank after memory bank with those dear to us, so when it is time for us to be remembered, not only will our legacies live on beyond our years, but they will be remembered lovingly, fondly, and perhaps even beyond the horizon of what we can see today.

Friends, the redemptive moments for our people, we know, are preceded by the act of remembering. When God remembers the Israelites in Egypt, when the cupbearer remembers Joseph in the prison, when the King remembers Mordechai in the Purim story. It is in such acts of remembering that our redemption is to be found, when our past meets our present and our charge for the future becomes clear. Here and now, this time can be such a moment if you let it. May we draw on this gift of memory, recalling our loved ones faithfully and lovingly, find comfort in their presence and the presence of each other, and commit to living lives worthy of being remembered.