The Art of Remembering
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The Art of Remembering By: Shira Schechter
At precisely 11:00 a.m., Israel stops. Cars pull to the shoulder of the highway. Pedestrians freeze. A nation stands still, held in place by a two-minute wail that cuts through the noise of ordinary life. On Yom HaZikaron, Israel’s Memorial Day, we do not simply pause to mourn. We remember — deliberately, actively, as an act of will.
That instinct runs deep. The Torah does not leave memory to chance.
We are commanded to remember six things.
“Remember the Sabbath day, to keep it holy” (Exodus 20:8).
“Remember the day you stood before the Lord your God at Horeb” (Deuteronomy 4:10).
“Remember what God did to Miriam on the way” (Deuteronomy 24:9).
“Remember what Amalek did to you on the way as you were coming out of Egypt” (Deuteronomy 25:17).
“Remember that you were a slave in Egypt” (Deuteronomy 16:3). And perhaps the most humbling of all:
“Remember, do not forget, how you provoked the Lord your God in the wilderness” (Deuteronomy 9:7) — the command to remember the sin of the Golden Calf.
Six commands to remember. Four fill us with grace — the Sabbath, the giving of Torah, the lesson of guarding our speech, the liberation from slavery. The fifth is a burden: Amalek’s unprovoked cruelty, which we are forbidden to let fade. But the sixth is the most humbling of all — the command to remember the Golden Calf. Not what was done to us. What we did. At the very foot of Sinai, forty days after hearing God’s voice, we built an idol. The Torah insists we never forget that either.
Moses, in his final song to the Jewish people, issues a broader charge:
Look back. Draw from the deep well of history. Do not sever yourself from what came before. By commanding us to remember, the Torah is being honest about something most of us already know. Remembering is not a given. Human beings forget — and that is not entirely a flaw.
If we truly remembered everything — every slight, every pain, every loss, every moment of every day of our lives — the weight would crush us. Forgetfulness is not a defect. It is release. It is what allows us to live forward rather than drown in the accumulated grief of the past.
The Dubno Maggid, the celebrated 18th-century preacher Rabbi Jacob Kranz, teaches through a parable that God gave us the gift of forgetfulness precisely so that we could shed the pain and tribulation that hold us back, and live a normal life. Forgetfulness, on this account, is an act of divine kindness.
The classic medieval work of Jewish ethics known as the Orchos Tzaddikim adds another dimension: ‘forget, it teaches, all the good deeds you have performed. Otherwise, you will be filled with your own sense of righteousness and piety, and pride will crowd out the very humility that those deeds were meant to cultivate.’
Forgetting, in other words, can be a spiritual act.
Consider Joseph, who named his firstborn son Manasseh — from the root nashani, “for God has caused me to forget all my hardship and all of my father’s household” (Genesis 41:51).
Rabbi Eliyahu Safran points out that Joseph was not erasing his past. He was refusing to be chained to it. He let go of the misery and anxiety of his earlier years so that he could build something new, in a foreign land, from nothing.
That is what nashani means. Not amnesia — but release. The sting fades even as the memory remains. But here is where the Torah issues its sharpest warning.
In the very same song, just eleven verses after commanding us to remember, Moses prophesies what will go wrong: “You ignored the Rock Who gave birth to you, and forgot God Who brought you forth” (Deuteronomy 32:18). The Dubno Maggid frames the tragedy precisely: ‘God gave you forgetfulness so you could be free of the suffering that holds you back. And then you turned around and used it to forget God Himself? That is not forgetfulness as gift. That is forgetfulness as betrayal.’
The question, then, is never whether to remember or forget.
The question is what to remember and what to forget.
Forget the slights. Forget your own righteousness. Forget yesterday’s pain when it prevents you from building tomorrow. But do not forget Sinai. Do not forget the Sabbath. Do not forget what Miriam’s punishment taught about the power of words. Do not forget Egypt — what it meant to be slaves, and what it cost to be free. And do not forget the Golden Calf.
That command is the most uncomfortable of all, because it asks us to carry the memory of our own capacity for betrayal. It is a reminder that the enemy is not always outside the camp.
And do not — ever — forget Amalek.
“Amalek does not fear God,” the Torah tells us (Deuteronomy 25:18). Amalek strikes the stragglers, the weak, those at the rear. But Amalek is never satisfied. As Pastor Martin Niemöller wrote in the shadow of the Holocaust:
“First, they came for the Socialists, then the Trade Unionists, then the Jews — and by the time they came for everyone else, there was no one left to speak. Amalek eventually comes for everyone”.
We forget Amalek at our peril — and Scripture gives us a devastating example of what that forgetting looks like in practice. Rabbi Neil Winkler points out that when King Saul faced his most defining moment, charged by God with the ultimate act of zachor against Amalek, he failed. He forgot his mission. He forgot his destiny. He forgot why he had been appointed king. It was the same forgetting that had plagued the generations of the Judges before him — that endless cycle, as Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch described it, of faithfulness and defection, defection and faithfulness, a nation that “again and again forgot its particularity, the specialty of its mission and of its destiny.” Saul was supposed to end that era. Instead, at the crucial moment, he repeated it.
A nation that forgets its past forfeits its future.
In 1942, as the Nazis were annihilating European Jewry, the celebrated Hebrew writer Haim Hazaz published a short story called “The Sermon.” Its central character, Yudka, a kibbutz member, stands up one evening and delivers what became one of the most famous speeches in Israeli literature. He is opposed to Jewish history, he declares. It is nothing but oppression, persecution, and martyrdom. He would forbid teaching it to children entirely. The words are understandable — in 1942, they are almost forgivable.
But they are wrong. Our history did not begin in 1948, or with Herzl, or with the Talmud. It began with creation itself, with a God who chose a people, gave them a land, and entrusted them with a mission. To cut children off from that story is not to protect them. It is to leave them rootless, defenseless, and ultimately lost.
We know this not only from history but from the last two and a half years of our own lives. On October 7, 2023, Amalek struck the hindmost — the young people at a music festival, the families asleep in their kibbutz homes, the communities along the Gaza border who never saw it coming. Nearly 1,200 people were massacred in a single morning. Over 1,150 soldiers, police officers, and security personnel have fallen fighting to ensure it never happens again. Amalek struck first. Israel answered.
Today, as the siren sounds across Israel, we are not simply grieving. We are making a choice — the same choice the Torah has been asking us to make for three thousand years. We are choosing active memory over passive forgetting. We are refusing to let the names of our fallen fade into the background noise of ordinary life.
The soldiers and terror victims we remember today did not die in some abstract cause. They died so that the Jewish people could remain in their land, standing upright, sovereign, and free. The least we owe them is this: to remember — deliberately, actively, as an act of will.
Remember the days of old. And never stop.