Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past

Introduction: From Memory to History

1 introduction From Memory to History The opposite of the past is not the future but the absence of future; the opposite of the future is not the past but the absence of past. The loss of one is equivalent to the sacrifice of the other. —Elie Wiesel, “Hope, Despair, and Memory” (Nobel Lecture), December 11, 1986 Once upon a time, the past was present, and the future was redemptive and hopeful. Never mind that the present was itself forgettable; the premodern world was probably not fun to inhabit, especially for Jews. Still, this arc of time and the way Jews related to it were useful. The past provided context and purpose, the future lent hope and optimism , and the present—well, the present was often awful, but in the words of one of the great sages in Mishnah Avot, the world was anyway just a hallway—a prozdor—through which we pass to the banquet hall of whatever comes next. To be sure, as Rabbi Jacob goes on to say in that same passage, Shuva 2 one moment of repentance and good deeds in this world exceeds all there is to find on the other side. There is meaning in how one walks through the hallway; even in its darkest times, classical Judaism never became so nihilistic, or obsessed with the “next world,” at the cost of participating actively in this one. Jewish leaders have generally succeeded at articulating a sense of mission in spite of, and still directed toward, ultimate salvation on the other side. Nevertheless , the premodern Jewish experience held together in part because of this view of time, because of the unique ability to bind the stuff of the past with the stuff of destiny. This system—drawing fodder from the past, which drove action in the present toward a purposeful future—was strong enough to absorb calamity rather than be destroyed or consumed by it. This consciousness of the past, the ability to take a “usable” past and strengthen the present, became a forceful marker of identity. Since the modern turn—with all of its enlightening and emancipating , its unfettering of chains ideological, political, and collective —Jews have tended to leave the mythic imagination behind. One of the great ironies of modern Jewish life is that we now know much more about our origins, our history, and our ancestry than we ever did before; and as a collective, we care about it considerably less. The key system by which Jews relate to their past has changed to “history”—in many ways the corollary or sometimes the antithesis of memory. History has served as the hallmark of the powerful critiques of Jewishness characterizing the modern period, those from both within and without. The reformers of Judaism in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries fixated on the study of Jewish history , particularly in the ancient world, as a means of uncovering the “true origins” of the faith, usually with the intent of stripping away the accumulated dust of medievality and rabbinism to get to what was essential. Scholars and critics have used historical methods to deconstruct Jewish myths of origin, nationality, oppression, and uniqueness in seeking either the triumph of their own breed of particularism or in championing some denuded universalism. As early as Spinoza on the authorship of the Bible, as recently as today, with political agendas ranging from the validation of Jewish sovereignty over Biblical Israel to the questioning of the conventional Introduction 3 narrative of the Holocaust, the principal tool in Jewish argumentation is historical. Validity lies in empirical demonstration; to borrow Jacob Neusner’s felicitous phrase, “What we cannot show, we do not know.” Memory, in contrast, with its architecture of mythology, its obligations and recitations, and its reliance on the raw vulnerability of the human mind, stands little chance of surviving in this climate of the empirical and the rational. Both of these modes, history and memory, entail looking backward in time toward achieving progress , but memory seems hopelessly quaint and downright ineffective in comparison with history’s brute force. Still, the contemporary surfeit of Jewish museums, archaeology, and scholarship has not suppressed or resolved an anxiety about our growing distance from our past as much as they have caused it to surface. The loss of the past is a source of confusion, anxiety, and concern in Jewish life. Among the aspects of modernity that create anxiety about present and future...