Jewish Memory in the Post-Holocaust Era

There are few concepts so intimately linked in Jewish life as memory, tradition and the covenant. Contemporary Jewish scholars have spent much of their energy thinking through this connection in the post-Holocaust era.

Yet those who have reflected on the Holocaust and its meaning find memory, tradition and the covenant problematic. How do we remember after the Holocaust? In whose name do we remember? Is there a continuity of tradition before and after the Holocaust? Or does the Holocaust fragment memory and tradition? If memory and tradition are in dispute, what can be said about the covenant? Is the covenant itself in fragments? Because of this fragmentation, many who reflect on the Holocaust find their task to be rethinking these three conceptual centers of Jewish history.

At the same moment that this rethinking is taking place, a new center of Jewish life has formed as a response to the Holocaust. Israel as a nation-state declared its independence only three years after the liberation of the death camps. In the wake of the 1967 Arab–Israeli War, many Jewish thinkers and activists declared Israel to be the answer to the fragmentation.

The ensuing decades have cast shadows on that judgement as the policies of Israel, especially in relation to Palestinians, have caused divisions within the Jewish community. Some of these divisions have promoted deep fault lines in Jewish affiliation and commitment. In these fault lines the issue is Israeli policies; the reference point is often the Holocaust. The twinning of the Holocaust and Israel has added another dimension to Jewish discussion that is both external and intimate – the Palestinians. It is my view that Jews, Judaism and Jewish life at the dawn of the twenty-first century come after the Holocaust and Israel, and that the outsider/insider dimension of Palestinians, though controversial and unannounced, is central to the fragmentation of Jewish life. It may also be the key to its renewed viability.

By surveying several post-Holocaust Jewish attempts to name the fragmentation and search for renewed viability, we can at least approach the task of the next generation. That task is to remember the dead as a form of fidelity to Jewish history and life.

Post-Holocaust life is deeply problematic for Jews. Simple responses and arguments, especially through anger and challenges to loyalty, only make more difficult the formation of Jewish identity in the coming decades. These are not simple problems and they can only be worked out over time. The fiftieth-anniversary markers of the Holocaust and Israel are behind us. What lies ahead is the next fifty years, where many of these questions will be answered or at least responded to. Is there now, then, a future for Jews and Judaism? Will the covenant, so central to Jewish history and argued about in the last fifty years, be relevant to those who come after the Holocaust and Israel?

Memory, destruction and resistance

Memory is for the past, but its recovery takes place always in the present. Both point toward the future where justice, once denied, will be embraced. This pattern began in the Exodus where God, remembering injustice and the promise of the covenant, forged a future of justice anchored in remembrance. The link between memory and justice has always been central in Jewish life, though the Holocaust has made it less clear, perhaps creating an unbridgeable chasm.

Still Jewish thinkers persist. One such person is Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi, the Salo Baron Professor of Jewish History, Culture and Society at Columbia University in New York. In 1977, while on sabbatical in Jerusalem, he delivered a lecture at the Institute of Jewish Studies at Hebrew University on Jewish historiography in the sixteenth century. Though the topic was specific to that time period, it encouraged him to develop a series of lectures on the subject of Jewish memory and its defining role in Jewish life.

Yerushalmi finds the core of Jewish survival and identity in the bible, where a type of historical and mythical remembrance is called for by God. Exhortations to remember are numerous and are seen as a religious imperative for the entire people. Reaching a crescendo in Deuteronomy and the prophets, these books recall the wonders that God has done for the people of Israel and call Israel to remember what their enemies have done against them. The defining moment of remembrance in Jewish history is found in the bible as well: 'Remember that you were a slave in Egypt. ...'

Memory, of course, is problematic; memory can be a force for justice but it can also be deceptive, even treacherous. The obligation of Israel to remember is selective, tied to God's acts of intervention in history and Israel's positive and negative responses to them. Remembrance is found within ritual and recital, and thus the narrative of Israel is both liturgical and historical. Though the mission of Israel is tied to God, it is traced through history; the covenant is a bridge between God and history embodied in Israel itself. Remembrance is central to the covenant and the security of the relationship between God and Israel.

If memory is central, the failure to remember is disastrous. More than a momentary lapse of attention or an excusable human failing, the lack of memory is fraught with tremendous anxiety, as it threatens to sever the relationship which is so important to Israel and the world. Yerushalmi points out a peculiar and revolutionary aspect of this remembrance in that God is also enjoined to remember. For like Israel, God is bound in the covenant. The remembrance found in ritual and recital is also a way of reminding God of the commitment that is jointly shared and is to be found and demonstrated in history. Memory can thus be a hymn of praise, but can become a query, even an accusation, when the promises of God are found to be wanting.

Memory has rooted the Jewish people throughout history, especially in the years of exile and suffering, but the role of memory in contemporary Jewish life is deeply problematic. The dangers of memory, with its focus on exclusivity and chosenness, have traditionally coexisted with its possibilities, a sense of relationship with God and God's protection within suffering. However, contemporary Jewish life – especially after emancipation in Europe, the Holocaust and the birth of Israel – has taken on a bifurcated reality.

The result of emancipation in Europe and the U.S. and national sovereignty in Israel is that Jews have fully re-entered the mainstream of history, and yet, as Yerushalmi notes, 'their perception of how they got there and where they are is most often more mythical than real'. If myth and memory provide the foundation for action, there are myths which are worthy of preservation and reinterpretation and those which 'lead us astray' and must be redefined. Still others are dangerous, and these must be exposed and jettisoned.

Yerushalmi ends...