It is all the more remarkable, therefore, that biblical Hebrew has no word for history. Modern Hebrew had to borrow a word: historia. The key word of the Hebrew Bible is not history but memory.
The word zachor in one or other of its forms occurs no fewer than 169 times in the Hebrew Bible. This was Moses’s injunction to future generations: “Only be careful, and watch yourselves closely lest you forget the things your eyes have seen or let them slip from your heart as long as you live; teach them to your children and to their children” (Deut. 4:9).
Jews were to become a people of memory.
The word zachar, meaning “male,” comes from the same root as zachor, “remember,” suggesting that there are two dimensions of Jewish identity – biological, conferred by the mother, and cultural, conferred by the father in his role as storyteller, guardian of a people’s past, which he is charged with handing on to his children. There is an identity we acquire at birth. We are the children of Abraham, Isaac, and Jacob; of Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel, and Leah. We are part of the covenantal family. That is the maternal gift. But there is another identity, going back not to the patriarchs and matriarchs but to the revelation at Mount Sinai, whose content we only gradually learn and internalize. That is the function traditionally ascribed to fathers, who are charged with giving children the identity that comes through memory.
The Hebrew verb zachor signifies more than a consciousness of the past. My predecessor, Lord Jakobovits, pointed out that the word yizkor, the name given to the traditional Jewish prayer for the dead, is associated in the Torah with the future. “God remembered Noah” and brought him out on dry land. “God remembered Abraham” and rescued his nephew Lot from the destruction of the cities of the plain. “God remembered Rachel” and gave her a child. We remember for the sake of the future, and for life.
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There is a profound difference between history and memory. History is his story – an event that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is my story – something that happened to me and is part of who I am. History is information. Memory, by contrast, is part of identity. I can study the history of other peoples, cultures, and civilizations. They deepen my knowledge and broaden my horizons. But they do not make a claim on me. They are the past as past. Memory is the past as present, as it lives on in me.
Without memory there can be no identity. Alzheimer’s disease, the progressive atrophying of memory function, is also the disintegration of personality. As with individuals, so with a nation: it has a continuing identity to the extent that it can remember where it came from and who its ancestors were.
Yet there is a paradox in the idea of collective memory. How can I remember what did not happen to me – an event that took place long before I was born? The answer given by the Seder service on Pesach is: through reenactment, by living again the events of ancient times as if they were happening now. That is the significance of the statement of the sages that on Pesach, “Generation by generation, each person must see himself as if he himself had come out of Egypt.” At the beginning of the Seder, by lifting the matzah and declaring, “This is the bread of oppression our fathers ate in the land of Egypt,” we make the leap across time and turn “then” into “now.”
