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Yesterday I learned how to conjugate the future tense form of the verb, zachor, “to remember” in Hebrew. I’ve only been studying Biblical Hebrew for six months, but it’s a word I’ve known for many years. The word “remember” appears in the Torah 169 times in various forms, and Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel pointed out that “We are not commanded to believe, we are commanded to remember.” Jews “Remember the Sabbath day and keep it holy.” We “remember we were strangers in the land of Egypt” twice daily in prayer, and by telling the story at Passover each year. We remember those who have died through extensive mourning rituals. I also learned how to conjugate the future tense of the verb shachach, to forget, in this morning’s Hebrew lesson, but this word was new to me. Forgetting, it seems, was less central to my Jewish learning. Or, perhaps, I forgot to remember it.
After my Hebrew class, I went to Hillel at the University of Washington for an event called “Kugel and Connections,” a program co-hosted by their young adult group, Jconnect, and the Holocaust Center for Humanity. This annual event is a way of bringing memory into the present, as it brings Jewish young adults and Holocaust survivors together over brunch, where they share stories, listen, and learn from each other. It’s different from a Holocaust speaker event in which one person tells a story before an audience. This is an opportunity to interact, to sit together, and to enjoy each other’s company. Henry Friedman, the survivor sitting beside me, noted that many of his survivor friends had died in the last few years, saying twice over the course of the conversation that “Our real enemy now is time.” Maybe we are commanded to remember so that we can mark our battles against it.
The Jewish calendar is replete with rituals for remembering and marking time. We are currently in the middle of the 49 days between Passover, the holiday celebrating our escape from slavery in Egypt, and Shavuot, the day the Jews received the Torah at Mt. Sinai. This journey from liberation to revelation is remembered, one day at a time, through a ritual called “counting the omer.” We say a blessing for each of the 49 days, a countdown between the moment of freedom and the moment when we became a people. Each of the seven days within each of the seven weeks is associated with one of the seven sefirot (attributes) of the kabbalistic Tree of Life, providing context for daily focus and growth. We are about to conclude a full week dedicated to the attribute of netzach, endurance, and yesterday we focused specifically on hod b’netzach, glory in endurance. In a sense, this is a day when we celebrate that we have endured long enough to remember.
From Spain in the 1400s to the pogroms in the 1800s to the Holocaust in the 1900s, we endured so we could build memory, but we also built memory so we could endure. Instead of finding glory only in finishing the journey, Jews also find glory in continuing and in struggling. Endurance means we have been liberated and that we are learning to be free. Endurance is how Henry learned English as a soldier fighting in the Korean War, drafted a mere 10 months after arriving on American soil. It’s Henry addressing the young adults at our table, asking us to “Never give up.” Endurance means that yesterday, I could share a meal with Holocaust survivors and learn the future tense of the verb zachor. Remembering is about the past, but anachnu n’zachor, “We will remember” is the result of endurance. Anachnu n’zachor is the promise of the future. The remaining Holocaust survivors will eventually lose their battle with time, but we will remember their endurance, and their stories, in future tense.