Rabbi Melanie Aron
This week’s Torah portion is Matot-Masei: Numbers 30:2 – 36:13
I’m not sure whether the picture I have in my mind of the principal of the Beaver Road Infant (elementary) School in Manchester, England, giving me a milkshake because I was so scrawny is a real memory or just a recollection of the story that my parents told over and over. Was there really a milkshake? Was it really just for me? Britain was still recovering from World War II when we lived there in the early 1960s, and all the kids had been deprived. Maybe more dairy was an effort to strengthen the younger generation?
Maybe it was a reward, like the many recesses during the day, for sitting upright at our desks with our hands neatly folded.
Memory is a tricky thing. Scientists now acknowledge that it’s not at all like a recording. We have seen the fallibility of memory in court with eyewitness misidentification. We recognize that memories can be planted in the brain through suggestion, purposefully or coincidentally. What gets preserved in memory depends on many factors, including attention, what’s already in our memory and especially our emotional state.
I found the reflection on memory by Etgar Keret, a quirky contemporary Israeli writer, from his new book “Autocorrect” to be right on the mark:
“It’s time we acknowledge it: people are not very good at remembering things the way they really happened. If an experience is an article of clothing, then memory is the garment after it’s been washed, not according to the instructions, over and over again: the colors fade, the size shrinks, the original, nostalgic scent has long since become the artificial orchid smell of fabric softener.”
This week’s Torah portion, the combined portion Matot-Masei, includes in Chapter 33, verses 1-49, a long list of places that the Israelites encamped on their journey from Egypt to the Promised Land. It seems to be quite comprehensive, as it lists 44 different locations.
But if you look at it carefully, there are problems. Some important places aren’t listed and some places that are listed here are found nowhere else in the Torah.
Scholars inform us that lists of this type are not unknown in Near Eastern and Assyrian military records; in fact, itineraries were a literary form in Mesopotamia going back to the second millennium B.C.E. Still, to have a list of stops along the way and not find Sinai/Horeb is quite surprising. Were there events that were so well known they didn’t need to be mentioned? Were the places we don’t recognize today well known at some earlier time? The Or HaHaim, a commentary by the 18th-century Moroccan rabbi Chaim Ibn Attar, suggests that Moses wrote down this list as a sort of diary, as these events occurred, and that is why the list differs from the narrative in the Torah, which is written with perspective.
Isn’t that how our brains work as well? Our lives are like Abraham’s, who was told, Lech Lecha, go forth, and like the Israelites, ours include many setbacks and complications.
Notes from our lives written at the time, letters and diaries, differ greatly from the way we remember our lives, with our values and priorities imposed on past events. Looking back, we see what is really important: our perspective has changed. Knowing where the path led, we can see which are detours and which are stepping stones. Stories about people who remain important in our lives take precedence over those who come and go. The Israeli poet Leah Goldberg, in her “Poems of the Journey’s End,” expresses this change in perspectives as we move from childhood to young adulthood, and into our later years.
“The path is so lovely — said the boy
“The path is so hard — said the lad
“The path is so long — said the old man.”
May the memories we preserve help us understand the trajectory of our lives and may we remain aware that they are only one way of telling our story.
Rabbi Melanie Aron is rabbi emerita of Congregation Shir Hadash and co-chair of the Jewish Earth Alliance.
