חדש באתר: NotebookLM עם כל תכני הרב מיכאל אברהם

Yom HaZikaron Lecture – Memory, Its Meaning and Value

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This is an English translation (via GPT-5.4). Read the original Hebrew version.

This transcript was produced automatically using artificial intelligence. There may be inaccuracies in the transcribed content and in speaker identification.

🔗 Link to the original lecture

🔗 Link to the transcript on Sofer.AI

Table of Contents

  • The starting point: memory, memorial days, and the question of value
  • The common justifications for memory and the claim that they are not exhaustive
  • The question of unknown soldiers, empathy, and duty toward someone who is no longer here
  • Emotions, philosophy, and the price of grounding memory in emotion
  • The two possibilities: emotional need versus binding value
  • A response to the distinction between personal memory and national memory
  • Gratitude, victims of terror, and the difficulty of grounding the duty to remember in utility
  • “Wrongful life,” “it would have been better for a person not to have been created,” and the problem of obligation to the dead
  • “Blot out the remembrance of Amalek”: the meaning of “remembrance” as part of the thing itself
  • Memory as leaving behind a “part” of the person and reconnecting him to the world
  • “We do not make monuments for the righteous; their words are their memorial” and memory as the value of life
  • A critique of materialism and a distinction between universal duty and halakhic obligations

Summary

General Overview

The text raises the question of the meaning and value of memory against the backdrop of Holocaust Remembrance Day and Memorial Day, and argues that the importance people attach to remembering does not necessarily depend on religious commitment. It rejects as exhaustive explanations the common justifications for memory, such as preventing future holocausts, preventing denial, empathy, gratitude, and national ethos, and identifies a deeper sense of duty between one person and another toward the remembered person himself even after his death. It proposes a metaphysical-ontological basis according to which remembering leaves a “part” of the person alive through the presence of his ideas and deeds in the consciousness of those who remember him, and sees in this an expression of the value of life itself, while criticizing an emotionalist culture and the rationalizations of materialists who have difficulty admitting this basis.

The starting point: memory, memorial days, and the question of value

The speaker connects the discussion of memory to Holocaust Remembrance Day last week and Memorial Day today, and raises questions such as why it is important to remember and what it means to remember, both in a Jewish and in a broader philosophical-cultural context. He chooses to focus less on the Torah-Jewish aspect and argues that the value people see in memory does not depend so much on their religious outlook, because even people disconnected from any religious sphere attach great importance to remembering events and people. He explains that in a religious context one can lean on commandments such as “Remember what Amalek did to you” and the “deed of Miriam,” but argues that the question becomes especially sharp in the non-religious context, where memory is considered important even without a commandment.

The common justifications for memory and the claim that they are not exhaustive

The speaker presents justifications for remembering the Holocaust, such as preventing future holocausts, preventing Holocaust denial, and instilling an understanding of how far human beings can go, and he admits that these are important, but argues that they are not convincing as an exhaustive explanation of the depth of the phenomenon. He explains that the obsession with historical details and the public shock at ignorance about matters such as the Wannsee Conference are not required in order to prevent future holocausts, and therefore point to the fact that these rationalizations are not what really drives the sense that remembering is vital. He also proposes an explanation in terms of sharing in the suffering of survivors, but argues that this too does not explain the value in remembering someone who has no relatives and with whom no empathy can be enacted.

The question of unknown soldiers, empathy, and duty toward someone who is no longer here

The speaker compares this to remembering fallen IDF soldiers and to customs of locating soldiers without family or unknown soldiers and placing a presence by their graves, and asks whom this helps and what empathy means when there is no living recipient of that empathy. He argues that the various explanations may be locally correct, but they do not explain the feeling that the duty to remember is a duty focused on the remembered person himself, not a general duty for utilitarian ends and not empathy for someone suffering in the present. He describes memory as a “slippery” phenomenon whose explanations do not give meaning to the demand directed at the rememberer in the name of the person who has died.

Emotions, philosophy, and the price of grounding memory in emotion

The speaker argues that modern culture places strong emphasis on emotion, and therefore most people are not troubled by the philosophical question “why remember,” just as they are not troubled by the question “why be moral.” He presents the possibility of interpreting the obligation of memory as merely an emotional need with no philosophical justification, and describes a position according to which a person simply follows his feeling without justifying it. He warns that the price of emotionalism is the inability to make claims against someone who lacks that feeling, because if the basis is only emotion, there is no room to criticize someone who sees no importance in memory so long as he does not harm others.

The two possibilities: emotional need versus binding value

The speaker formulates two interpretive possibilities: either admit that memory is a need/emotion and not a binding value, and therefore there is no way to judge someone who does not remember, or try to ground a philosophical justification for the duty to remember and then argue that it also binds someone who lacks the feeling. He compares this to the prohibition of murder, which does not depend on the murderer’s emotions, and argues that if memory is a value, then there is a moral-human demand upon every person to remember. He sharpens the point that the question is on the plane of value, of why it matters, not the question of whether the act of remembering is cognitive or emotional.

A response to the distinction between personal memory and national memory

A questioner proposes distinguishing between remembering someone close to you, which expresses emotion, and remembering events like the Holocaust by someone with no personal acquaintance, and argues that memory is not a primary phenomenon but a result of longing. The speaker replies that he is intentionally placing different examples side by side in order to point to a common foundation beyond the rationalizations, and that he is not dealing with the psychological character of memory but with the question of what justifies its value-importance. He argues that distinctions such as gratitude or empathy explain certain layers, but not the root.

Gratitude, victims of terror, and the difficulty of grounding the duty to remember in utility

The speaker argues that gratitude may explain remembering someone who sacrificed himself, but it does not fit many of those remembered, including Holocaust victims and many fallen IDF soldiers or victims of terror who did not consciously “do something for me” by choice. He explains that victims of terror arouse compassion and empathy but are not a basis for gratitude, and therefore the duty to remember them does not arise from that mechanism. He presents this as further proof that the duty to remember cannot rest on a single consequentialist-practical explanation.

“Wrongful life,” “it would have been better for a person not to have been created,” and the problem of obligation to the dead

The speaker uses the tort concept of “wrongful life” to illustrate a philosophical difficulty in comparing a person’s existing condition and suffering with a condition in which he does not exist at all, and argues that there is no way to make a comparative “assessment” when the alternative of abortion is not a state of that same person. He applies the same point to the meaning of the statement “I would have preferred not to exist” and to the difficulty of understanding “it would have been better for a person not to have been created than to have been created” as a comparative claim about a person’s condition. He returns from this to the question of memory and argues that if memory is directed toward the remembered person, who is no longer here, the question arises how there can be an obligation between one person and another toward someone who has died, and he notes that in Jewish law there are conceptions of obligation after death, such as “it is a commandment to fulfill the words of the deceased,” but in the secular world too there is still such a sense of obligation without a clear basis.

“Blot out the remembrance of Amalek”: the meaning of “remembrance” as part of the thing itself

The speaker cites the verse “You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; do not forget,” and explains that “remembrance” here is not a mental act of remembering but a “trace” or actual part of the thing, and therefore there is no contradiction between blotting out “the remembrance of Amalek” and the commandment to remember Amalek. He cites Rashi’s interpretation in the portion of Ki Tetze: “From man to woman, from infant to suckling, from ox to sheep, so that the name of Amalek should not be mentioned even regarding the animal, such that one would say: this animal belonged to Amalek,” and emphasizes that the meaning is the destruction of every remnant, not erasure from consciousness. He argues that this sense of “remembrance” as something of the thing itself is the key to understanding human remembering.

Memory as leaving behind a “part” of the person and reconnecting him to the world

The speaker argues that when a person remembers someone, “a part of him is with us” in consciousness, and that this is not a metaphor but an ontological claim under a dualistic assumption of body and soul. He presents an analysis of the three severe transgressions and argues that murder is damage to the “hyphen” connecting soul and body, and therefore what is terrible about death is not cessation but the absence of the soul’s connection to the world of action, where one can act, repair, and advance. He argues that memory “leaves something of the hyphen” and reconnects the person to the world through his presence in the consciousness of the living.

“We do not make monuments for the righteous; their words are their memorial” and memory as the value of life

The speaker argues that memory is “ultimately a value of life,” because to remember someone means to keep him alive to some extent, and to weaken the aspect of death as separation from this world. He cites “We do not make monuments for the righteous; their words are their memorial” in order to argue that remembering the ideas of Rabbi Yohanan or Maimonides is their real presence, and that “pathetic” memorial ceremonies are not the main thing. He explains that on this basis one can understand why there is also a duty to remember an unknown soldier, and illustrates this with a story about a victim who was in the middle of a startup and whose parents continue his startup as a way of realizing his action and keeping him present.

A critique of materialism and a distinction between universal duty and halakhic obligations

The speaker argues that materialists and atheists who speak with pathos about the value of memory live in denial and are “disguised dualists,” and therefore they offer rationalizations such as preventing future holocausts or national ethos instead of admitting the metaphysical basis of “keeping the person alive.” In response to a question about “remember what the Lord did to Miriam,” he argues that he is dealing with a universal human obligation to remember that does not depend on commandments, whereas the halakhic obligations of remembrance are consequentialist-pragmatic duties not intended to “keep someone alive,” and therefore they do not explain the value of memory on these days. He concludes that on top of the general platform of memory as the value of life, one can add further layers such as empathy, gratitude, and national ethos, but they explain only certain kinds of memory and not the root of the obligation.

Full Transcript

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] Okay. Good, so our topic is the meaning and value of memory, and of course that connects both to Holocaust Remembrance Day, which was last week, and to Memorial Day, which falls today. That raises all kinds of questions we can discuss both in the Jewish context and in the broader philosophical, cultural context. Why is it important at all to remember? What does it mean to remember? And I especially want to focus perhaps less on the Torah-Jewish aspect, although I think it’s not really different. People claim that it’s different, but I’m not sure it really is different. Because the fact is that the value people see in memory does not depend all that much on their religious outlook. In other words, people who are completely detached from religious commitment, from any connection to a religious world, to a religious sphere, can still relate with great appreciation, with great importance, to the memory of events, of people, and so on. And that itself raises the question: why?

In the religious context, it’s easier for us somehow to hang things on various commandments. We’re commanded to remember: “Remember what Amalek did to you,” all the remembrances we know also from the prayer book, so you can say, okay, there’s some religious command that obligates us to remember various things, and even there one has to understand what, and why, and how far, and whether it’s really an obligation or not really an obligation, the deed of Miriam, yes, all kinds of remembrances we know. But especially in the non-religious context I think it’s more significant for this discussion, because there it seems that people see value in remembrance and in memory even without any connection to religious commandments. And the question is what exactly the value of this thing is.

Now I’m not talking specifically about fallen IDF soldiers, but also about the Holocaust, maybe also about remembering ordinary people who died from the family or friends or whatever, not only in the context of national events. But maybe we should think especially about national events too, whether there’s something unique about them or not. What is the meaning of memory in those contexts? And here and there all kinds of explanations come up in different settings. When I ask, for example, why remember the Holocaust or the victims of the Holocaust—which of course is not always the same thing—then all kinds of explanations come up: in order to prevent future holocausts, to prevent Holocaust denial, to deeply instill in people how far human beings can go, all kinds of things of that sort.

My feeling is that of course preventing future holocausts is important, and of course it’s worth remembering if there were extraordinary events there from which one can learn, draw one conclusion or another. But I think, quite clearly it seems to me, the feeling is that these are unconvincing explanations. Not only are they unconvincing in themselves, they also don’t really exhaust the full depth of the phenomenon. Meaning, if the issue here were preventing future holocausts, it would be hard to explain by that the obsession that accompanies everyone in checking how much each person knows every detail of what happened there in the Holocaust, and how terrible this ignorance among the young is, that they don’t know what the Wannsee Conference was, and don’t know what happened here and what happened there, and how many Jews were murdered here and how many Jews were murdered there. All those details, which are ostensibly the business of professional historians and not really important for preventing future holocausts, it seems to me, raise the sense that the explanations and rationalizations offered for Holocaust memory are not convincing. In other words, they’re not really what underlies the feeling that it’s important to remember, that it is so vital to remember this matter.

There are people who want to offer maybe an explanation of participating in the suffering of the survivors, yes, in the terrible troubles they went through, some sort of empathy, participation, of course help as much as possible those who need help, those who can be helped. But that too of course does not explain the matter. There are people who perished there and have no relatives and there’s no one with whom to empathize, and that’s it, no trace of them remains. So what is the value in remembering them, or what happened to them?

The same in the context of IDF soldiers, for example—you can ask the same question. All the customs, mainly I think of recent years, of locating soldiers who have no family, unknown soldiers, sometimes ones whose names are not even known, certainly nothing is known about them, and placing a soldier there, or trying to clarify what happened there, trying to summon up details of what happened there. And again, the question is why? Who does this help? Empathy with whom are you trying to express? To whom are you trying to express empathy here?

That’s why I say: many times all kinds of explanations come up which in themselves are of course perhaps all true. In other words, showing empathy to people who suffered is of course important; to people suffering now, of course that’s important; remembering so as not to allow future holocausts, no question, no one disputes that these things are important. What I’m claiming is only that all these correct and important explanations don’t really exhaust the phenomenon of memory. In other words, the importance people attach to remembering apparently doesn’t begin and end with these—again—correct explanations. There’s something there beyond that point.

I’d even say more than that: there is some sort of feeling that the duty to remember, if I formulate it this way, is a duty between one person and another. In other words, some obligation we have toward those very people whom we remember. And then it’s not the prevention of future holocausts, but it’s also not empathy, because those people are no longer among us; they don’t need our empathy. There’s something here like an obligation focused on the person, and if so it may even be—not may be, apparently it is—not connected specifically to the great events we speak about on these days, but to remembering human beings who are gone in general—family, again, friends, or just people, it doesn’t matter.

There’s something about memory, something very elusive, that somehow, first, is not understood—the explanations offered for it don’t really explain it—and second, of course, all those explanations also do not give meaning to this feeling that the duty to remember is a duty toward the remembered person or persons. A focused duty, not a general duty toward the Jewish people, toward preventing future holocausts, toward empathy for suffering and harmed people. Again, all these explanations, first, do not really exhaust the depth of the phenomenon; second, they don’t really explain why there is this feeling that the duty is toward someone specific, toward the person I remember.

I’m not going to address the chats right now because it will interrupt the discussion, and also trying to look at the chats while speaking. So what I suggest is saving those comments for the end of the lecture, and then we can certainly talk and discuss.

So I come back again: what is the meaning of this matter of memory? In our world there is a very strong emphasis on, or importance attached to, a person’s emotions, and so I think that to a great extent most people today simply don’t trouble themselves at all with this detached philosophical question I’m raising here. What practical difference does it make why one should remember? Everybody understands that one should remember, and it’s also obvious to everybody that it’s important; there’s no dispute about it—maybe at the margins, but not really. So what, why philosophize? In the end it’s completely obvious, everything is fine.

It’s like questions in moral philosophy: why be moral? Everybody understands that one should be moral; there are no significant challenges to that. That doesn’t mean everyone always lives up to it, fine, we’re all human, everyone has inclinations, but there’s no real problem with commitment to morality. Normative people, normal people, are committed to moral principles. So why should I care why morality binds? Those are philosophers’ questions—why is this thing important?

So true, but first of all I can’t deny my philosophical temperament, and yes, philosophical questions interest me. I think they also ultimately illuminate the things themselves, even for someone who isn’t troubled by that. I think that when the matter is clarified it can add something even for someone who is not especially interested in philosophy.

By the way, regarding why morality binds, in a moment I’ll raise another aspect that comes up there too. There as well it seems to me that many people offer explanations for why morality obligates that simply don’t hold water. And no, I won’t get into all the explanations now, but in the end they don’t hold water—that’s pretty clear.

Then the interpretive possibilities for this phenomenon are two, and those are the same two possibilities in the context of memory, which is why I’m making this analogy to the attempt to understand the root of morality, the force of morality. The two possibilities are: first, to be honest and admit that this thing is really a need and not a value. In other words, I have a feeling—I mean, I feel that it’s important for me to be moral, not because there is some convincing philosophical explanation, not because of anything, but that’s how I feel, that’s the feeling rooted in me. Why should I fight that feeling? In other words, if that’s how I feel, then that’s how I live, and everything is fine. If someone has some problem with that, on the contrary, society probably accepts that I should behave morally, so what’s the problem? True, there’s no justification, fine, but I have a feeling and I go with it. That’s all. Why search for explanations?

Maybe you can even call it not a feeling but an emotion. I have a moral emotion, that emotion pushes me to behave in a certain way, and I see no reason in the world to resist it—on the contrary. So what’s the problem? Why do I now have to philosophize, or why should I seek or check whether there is real justification or not—everything is fine. In our world emotions are accorded great importance, and so it seems to me that this is one of the reasons these questions really don’t trouble the public, most of the public. Because that emotion certainly exists, both the emotion of memory and the moral emotion certainly exist, and in that sense everything is fine.

And once you ask people, wait, wait—but why really? Then what, I also have an emotion to speak slander; why shouldn’t I go with that? So people say fine, but here I don’t have a conflict. I’m not in some tension between my emotion and what I think is important, and therefore everything is fine. So true, I have no justification—so what? What’s the problem? More than that, what’s wrong with emotion? I go with my emotion.

Yes, it reminds me of a joke I once heard in the name of Dov Sadan. He was a literature scholar at the Hebrew University, a very interesting man, and he said that the next person to make a revolution in the world will be a Jewish orthopedist. Why Jewish is pretty clear, because almost everyone who makes a revolution in the world is Jewish, but why an orthopedist? So he said: because the first Jew who made a revolution in the world was Abraham our Patriarch. He told us, people, use your head: “Lift up your eyes on high and see who created these.” The second Jew who made a revolution in the world—yes, I’m skipping Moses, though you could put him in there too—the second Jew who made a revolution in the world was Jesus, who said, people, the Merciful One desires the heart; go with the heart. So we started with the head, moved to the heart.

The third Jew who made a revolution in the world was Marx, who said that everything is in the belly—yes, Capital, needs are what really determine things, the stomach is what really determines everything. So we started with the head, went down to the heart, continued to the belly. The next Jew who made a revolution in the world was Freud, who of course said that everything is below the belt. So it seems to me that after the head, the heart, the belly, and below the belt, the next stage will probably be an orthopedist dealing with the feet—or a podiatrist, if you want, someone who deals with the feet.

In other words, I think what this joke really says is that it describes a real process. And that process is a kind of lowering of the center of gravity in human culture. I’m not talking about culture becoming more stupid, less intelligent—I don’t think that’s true—but it does place more emphasis not on intelligence but on the lower dimensions, so to speak. A person can be very, very smart, but still be driven by his heart or by his belly or by what’s below the belt or by his feet, if you like. In other words, even though he is a very intelligent person, it’s not because he is stupid; it’s because he does not place trust in reason as something that ought to guide behavior. For him, behavior is about emotion; reason is for solving problems in mathematics. It has nothing to do with life, nothing to do with values, and nothing to do with choosing my way of conducting myself and my way of thinking about the world. And therefore he does not emphasize it—not because he is stupid.

And I think that in a broad sense, our culture is a very emotional culture, one in which if you hurt a person’s feelings, that’s the gravest offense there can be. And conversely, many times arguments rooted in emotion or in emotiveness take the place of rational arguments, even in political debate—for example between left and right, peace, no peace, yes return territories, make an agreement, don’t make an agreement—the discussions often hang on emotional considerations. Look how much this one suffers or that one suffers, look how wicked this person is or that person is, in both directions. And people try somehow to lead us through our emotions to adopt a worldview, when a worldview really ought to be shaped, in my view, on the basis of rational considerations, logical considerations, on the basis of thought.

True, one should care that people not suffer—granted, that is a moral principle—not only because my stomach hurts when I see a person suffering. But that shouldn’t necessarily dictate my worldview. You go to a museum or a concert, and the reviewer immediately tells you whether it was moving and how moving it was. He doesn’t discuss whether there were interesting concepts there, whether something new happened there, whether there was some, I don’t know, special idea, a particular form of interpretation one way or another. Sometimes there are comments like that, but first and foremost the main thing is whether it is moving or not moving, because emotion occupies a very central place in our culture.

And so it seems to me—if I return now again to morality and even more so to memory—that’s why people are less troubled by the question why remember. Why remember? Because we have a strong feeling that one ought to remember. We feel some connection, some identification with the fallen, with Holocaust victims, with people who have died, and that’s all, and therefore we remember. Why look for justifications?

But there is a price to this pragmatism, let’s call it that, or to this emotionalism. The price is: what happens when someone doesn’t have that emotion? If someone doesn’t have that emotion, then of course if the basis is only that I have the emotion, then he will see no importance in memory, maybe he’ll even scoff at memory, maybe he’ll even hurt people who think it’s important to remember, people for whom this matter is sensitive. Here of course that would immediately be bad character traits, but let’s leave aside the “hurting people.” He just doesn’t care about memory, doesn’t deal with it, that’s all, leave me alone. The question is whether I can have any claim against him.

If the basis on which I remember is only an emotional basis—this is how I’m built, I have such an emotion, it’s important to me to remember, so I remember—then that other person who doesn’t have such an emotion, I cannot have a claim against him. My claim against him is based on my emotions, not on his emotions. So why should he behave according to my emotions? I too am doing it only because I have one emotion or another. He doesn’t have it—so what’s the problem? Why do I have some demand of him?

Again, I’m not talking about when he harms. If he harms, that’s something else—don’t hurt others who have sensitivities, that’s obvious. I’m talking about a situation where a person just doesn’t care about all this memory business, doesn’t engage with it. Do I have any criticism of him? Do I think he is somehow not okay? Again, without hysteria, but is there something not okay about it, or is everything fine? The public feeling, I think, is that it’s still not okay. And the question is why?

Now again, if I escape in the emotional direction, then for most people this doesn’t raise a problem because they themselves have those emotions. But here I’m showing that this philosophical clarification matters, because with respect to people who are not endowed with these emotions, the question is whether I can have a claim against them. Is there room to judge them in one way or another?

So someone who is honest with himself, and the only way out he finds is the emotional one, has to admit that indeed there is no way to judge them and no justification for judging them, and everyone should do as his heart desires. In other words, everyone who feels should do what he wants, and whoever doesn’t feel should do what he wants. And there is no room for criticism; there is no right and wrong here; it’s a personal matter. And of course I will respect what you feel, you respect what I feel, and everything will be fine—as long as we don’t interfere with each other. That’s one possibility.

The second possibility is to try and understand whether perhaps there is nonetheless some philosophical basis or justification for this duty to remember. If so, then of course one can also make claims against, or judge, people who do not behave that way. The fact that you don’t have that feeling—fine, you don’t have it, then take a pill. But the obligation—call it moral, human, in a moment we’ll see what this thing might be—binds you too. It’s not about emotion. Even someone who has no feeling is forbidden to murder, even though he feels no heartbreak when he murders, because something in his system is broken in that area of empathy, of moral responsibility. Fine, I mean in the moral emotion. He is still forbidden to murder, yes, that’s obvious.

Okay, assuming we are talking about a value and not about a need or an emotion, then this no longer depends on whether you have emotions or not; there is some demand upon you that you are supposed to do something with respect to memory. You are supposed to remember. And the question is: what could be the basis of that demand? I’ll present things perhaps more sharply.

[Speaker B] Can I make a comment? Ask, comment? Yes, yes. I think one has to distinguish between remembering someone close to you, where there is an expression of emotion. I think memory is not a primary phenomenon but the result of longing, or I don’t know—memory itself is not an emotion; it’s a cognitive ability to remember things, but it stems from something else. And when you remember events—for someone who is third generation after the Holocaust and doesn’t know anyone—there’s a difference between remembering someone close to you and remembering such that if you don’t commemorate a fallen IDF soldier or someone, you as a person, as a human being, feel a need or a duty or solidarity or however you want to call it. I think one has to make a distinction between those two kinds of memory.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] I’ll answer this briefly, and then later on I think it will become clearer. First of all, I brought examples from all directions earlier in order to show that even so, at the base there is still something shared despite all the differences. The differences we make are differences that touch on all the rationalizations I presented earlier. Differences like, say, gratitude: of course I owe gratitude to a soldier who gave himself for me, but to someone who perished in the Holocaust I do not owe gratitude. He didn’t do anything for me. I may feel compassion for him, but not gratitude. Okay? So it’s clear that the explanations I gave earlier are explanations that can differentiate between different kinds of remembrance. But precisely because I claim they are not sufficient, I’m looking for something more fundamental, and that’s why I’m deliberately ignoring those differences. On top of that more basic point that I want to argue for, you can also add those explanations; I agree that they are true, they just don’t get to the root of the matter. And one more comment, which has to do with sharpening what I’m saying: I think you missed something in what I’m saying. I’m not talking about the question of whether memory is an emotional act or not, or a cognitive one. I’m talking about the question of what reason there is for me to see remembering as important. Not the act of remembering. I’m talking on the value plane. And there the question is whether the reason is simply that I have this sentiment, I just have this feeling that it’s important to remember—not that memory itself is a feeling, but that I have a feeling that it’s important to remember—or whether there is some value in remembering. And that’s the question I’m asking, not the question of what the nature of memory is, what remembering itself is. So okay, let’s continue. I want to sharpen the difficulty a bit more. I said earlier that there is some kind of sense that the obligation to remember is an obligation directed toward a particular person whom I remember, and not necessarily in the utilitarian or consequential sense—yes, to remember in order to prevent future Holocausts, to remember in order to, I don’t know, all sorts of things like that—but rather that there is some kind of obligation to the person, to remember him. Something—I owe him something. Now, if the person gave himself for me, say an IDF fallen soldier who died in war, sacrificed himself, and so on, then that’s pretty understandable, yes, that’s gratitude. It’s pretty clear that gratitude is first and foremost an obligation to the person to whom I am grateful. But as I deliberately do not make those distinctions, as I said earlier, memory toward everyone who died cannot be explained that way. To most of those people I do not owe gratitude. By the way, not even to most fallen IDF soldiers. I think most fallen IDF soldiers did not die in places where they contributed something to victory in the war—or I don’t know, most, I didn’t do statistics, I didn’t check—but a great many of them did not die in places where they contributed something to victory in the war; some of them died in the context of car accidents, for all I know, not to mention victims of terror. Victims of terror—I can feel compassion and pity for what happened there, empathy, but I do not owe them any gratitude. They didn’t do anything for me. They’re unfortunate people: they were hit by the bullet, others weren’t hit, they were. It wasn’t something they did, some decision they made to do something for me, and then I owe them gratitude. So the obligation to remember them cannot be understood on that basis. Maybe there isn’t one—someone might say, okay, then there’s no obligation to remember them. But if I claim that there is some basic obligation to remember, then apparently gratitude too is not the proper basis for this matter. I’ll say more than that. In the legal world they speak about a tort claim called wrongful life. What does that mean? I’ll put it in its most extreme form; there are a few different nuances to it. In its most extreme form, it’s a child born, say, with a very, very severe illness, incurable, who wants to sue his parents for not having had an abortion. A tort claim. Meaning, he wants to sue them for not having had an abortion. Now, that raises some very difficult philosophical problems. Most legal systems in the world, as far as I know at least, do not allow such a suit, but there are systems that do. By the way, in the State of Israel a certain kind of such claims does exist. I don’t think—I don’t know if all of them do, I’m not a lawyer—but at least some do. Say, suing the doctor certainly is possible; suing the parents, I’m not sure, I don’t remember right now. In any case, what is the problem with such a suit? I’ll bring one problem, because this is not our topic, I’m only using it to sharpen a point. One of the problems here is that in a tort suit, when you sue someone because, say, I don’t know, he made you disabled, then how do you assess the damage? How much should he pay? So the damage is assessed, as with a Hebrew slave, a Canaanite slave—this is a dispute between Rashi and the Rosh at the beginning of the ninth chapter of Bava Kamma, the chapter on one who injures. But the assessment, in principle, is done by comparison. What does that mean? I compare his condition before he became disabled to his condition after he became disabled, and I check the difference. Say, if he were sold as a slave either way, what would his market value be? You go to an appraiser and check his market value. The details don’t matter right now, but at the base of such an assessment it is basically a comparative matter. Now, in the context of wrongful life, there is no way to make such an assessment, because there is no way to make that kind of comparison. What would the comparison be? Suppose the parents had had an abortion, as I would have expected them to do. If they had had an abortion, I would not exist. There is no option in which I exist but without the defect. There is no such option. Right now I exist with a defect. The only possibility, the only alternative, is that I not exist at all. Meaning, they would essentially have had an abortion and I would not be here. Now, when I make a comparison, when I make a tort comparison, I need to compare two states of a person. There is a person in a better state, a person in a worse state, and I make the comparison, make an assessment: what’s the difference, what’s the difference in value between those two states? But if I compare a state in which a person is very sick to a state in which he does not exist at all, the state in which he does not exist at all is not a state of his. It’s not a comparison between two states of a person. A state in which the person does not exist is not his state at all. It is perhaps a state of the world in some sense, but not his state; he doesn’t exist, there is no such person. Therefore, one of the arguments against a wrongful life suit is, first, that there is no way to assess damages, and second, maybe even more than that—some formulate it this way—if we accepted, if your parents had acted as you recommend and had had an abortion, you could not stand here and sue. Meaning, the fact that you exist is thanks to the fact that they did not act the way you would have wanted them to act. A person cannot sue the tree for being one of its branches. You can’t sue someone for an act thanks to which you can stand here and sue in the first place. Even though you suffer, fine. And maybe it’s true that it would have been better for a person not to have been created than to have been created, like Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel who took a vote and concluded that, and certainly for a person who suffers greatly—we are not denying that you suffer—and maybe there is even some meaning to the statement, although I have great doubt about it, that I would have preferred not to exist; but as a legal claim it certainly cannot stand. By the way, the same problem exists with the very meaning of the statement “I would have preferred not to exist,” because if you did not exist, that is not your state. So what does “I would have preferred” mean? “I would have preferred” means I have state A and state B, and I prefer to be in state A rather than state B. But if state B means not existing at all, there is no way to make such a comparison between a state in which I am in state A and a state in which I do not exist at all. Therefore this is already a difficulty for Beit Shammai and Beit Hillel, who said it is better for a person not to have been created—what is the meaning of such a statement at all? What does it mean to say it is better for a person not to have been created? If he had not been created, he would not be. It would not be better for him. Maybe it would be better for the world, I don’t know, in some sense; better for the Holy One, blessed be He, I don’t know—but in what sense is it better for me that I should not have existed? If I did not exist, that is not my state. I can compare between two states of mine and say this is preferable to that. I cannot compare between my state and someone else’s state—what is the basis for comparison? Or to the state of no one at all. So I bring these things not in order to discuss them—that is not our topic—but rather to return to the question of memory. Because if memory really is directed toward the person being remembered, he is no longer here. What obligations does one person have toward another person who has died? So again, in Jewish law there are statements that say yes, there are certain statements: it is a commandment to fulfill the words of the deceased, all sorts of things like that. By the way, most of it is not Torah-level, but there is some halakhic conception that there is an obligation to a person even after he dies. But I return again to my opening point: in a secular world it is very hard to accept. The fact is that even in a secular world there is a sense that there is such an obligation. And the question is: based on what? What I think lies behind these things—perhaps first I’ll explain and then—first I’ll say what I want to say, and then one more methodological clarification. I think all these things hint that there really is some obligation to a person who has died, with no connection to the question of whether I owe him gratitude. No, I’m not talking about gratitude. I’m talking about the very concept of an obligation to a person who has died. I’ll explain it perhaps in the following way. It says in the Torah: “You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under the heavens; do not forget.” What is “the remembrance of Amalek”? What is that remembrance in this verse? Remembrance, ostensibly, is memory—to erase Amalek from memory. To format the disk. Okay? But that can’t be right, because there is a commandment to remember and a prohibition against forgetting. One of the remembrances is remembering what Amalek did. So how can it be that we are commanded to blot out the remembrance of Amalek if there is a commandment to remember Amalek and a prohibition of “do not forget”? When you look at the plain meaning of the verse, it is clear that that is not the plain meaning. The term “the remembrance of Amalek” means a trace of Amalek. That is what “the remembrance of Amalek” means. Every—just as in our Hebrew today, by the way. “I didn’t leave a trace of such-and-such”; that means I didn’t leave any part of it. It has nothing to do with memory as a mental act. “Remembrance,” in literal translation, is part of the thing. A corner of the thing, some bit of the thing, some trace of the thing. That is called a remembrance of something. Look, for example, at Rashi on the portion Ki Tetze: “You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek”—Rashi writes: “You shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek—from man to woman, from infant to suckling, from ox to sheep, so that the name of Amalek should not even be mentioned in connection with an animal, by saying: this animal belonged to Amalek.” Meaning, every part that is connected in any way to Amalek must be destroyed from under the heavens. And again, not in order to forget. On the contrary, we are obligated to remember Amalek. This simply means physically destroying every part of Amalek and then remembering him with all the details. Okay? Meaning, remembering has nothing to do with the question of whether I need to destroy his remembrance. Because “his remembrance” is not a mental act, not remembering him; rather “his remembrance” means a part. Every part of him, a physical part. Simply a part of Amalek—even Amalekite animals or Amalekite human beings, all of them must be destroyed. Not to leave a trace of Amalek. What does that actually mean? That the literal meaning of the term “remembrance”—I’m not talking now about homiletics—the literal meaning is a part of the thing. That is called a remembrance. Now when I—why does this also serve in the mental context, in the mental act of what we call remembering? Remembering is certainly an act; it is not an object, not a thing. Yes, remembering is a mental act. Why use the same root? It seems to me because when we remember someone, part of him is with us. In our memory, in our consciousness, in our mind. If we start from a dualistic premise, meaning that a person is basically body and soul together, then what I am saying now is not a metaphor. Like we are used to hearing a lot in these days, that “their memory is with us forever,” and may his name be remembered, and all kinds of pathetic things of that sort. I don’t mean those things at all; I really don’t like pathos. I’m talking about a simple metaphysical, ontological statement. What I basically want to claim is that something of the person is with me when I remember him. Why? Of course it’s not his molecules, but a person is not only molecules. A person is also thoughts, ideas, soul, all sorts of things. Therefore, when I say this, in my eyes it is not a metaphor but something of him is with me when I remember him. And when I do not remember him, then maybe he accompanies me in the subconscious, or maybe he is not here at all, I don’t know. But my claim is that remembering as a mental act is not accidentally described with the same root as a part of the thing, the remembrance of Amalek. It is described with the same root because remembering in biblical language, in the holy tongue, basically means to leave something of the thing with me. That is what it means to remember. And if that really is the point—yes, perhaps I’ll give an example. You know, there are three severe transgressions: idolatry, forbidden sexual relations, and murder. Interesting—I don’t know whether this is homiletic or not, but it’s interesting, think about it sometime. Each one of these transgressions is focused on something else in our being, in our reality. Idolatry is a cognitive transgression; yes, it is a transgression of the intellect. Forbidden sexual relations is a bodily transgression; it is in the body. It’s in the body and in the soul, in the mind, in the intellect. Murder is in the hyphen. Meaning, murder is not injury to the body; there are all sorts of bodily injuries. Murder is the severing of the soul from the body. A person is some kind of joining of soul and body, and murder does nothing, in principle, either to the soul or to the body, but simply separates them from each other. There is no longer a connecting hyphen between the soul and the body. So if idolatry damages the soul, forbidden sexual relations damages the body, murder damages the hyphen between them. And in a certain sense, a person’s death is so grave in our eyes not because he is annihilated. He is not annihilated; his soul apparently—so it is commonly thought at least—his soul still wanders around in one way or another, still exists. It does not disappear. Assuming it was, it still is. Rather, what? It is simply no longer connected to the body. And what does that mean? That in fact what is terrible about death is not extinction, because there is no extinction here. What is terrible about death is the absence of the soul’s connection—which still exists—to our world, to the world of action, to the world in which one can do things, fix things, advance, learn, as all the ethicists of course elaborated at length about how on one’s deathbed you always think what I didn’t manage to do, and that’s it, I’ve lost my chance to fix things, to do things, and so on. So memory—I return to the matter of memory—memory basically means leaving something of the hyphen. The soul is somewhere, wherever it is, but we want to reconnect it to our world, to leave something of the hyphen, and that is what is done through remembering. In other words, what I want to claim—and again, I do not mean this as a metaphor at all, I mean these statements literally—the value of memory is ultimately the value of life. To remember someone is like keeping him alive; very few people would argue with that, with the idea that there is value in keeping someone alive, in preventing his death. Memory, in some sense, simply prevents his death. His death is not extinction; his death is separation from this world. Memory leaves him still here. Therefore, insofar as I remember his ideas—“we do not make monuments for the righteous; their words are their remembrance”—the intention is really that if you remember their ideas, then forget the pathetic memorial ceremonies. If you remember their ideas, they are as present as can be. Truly, not metaphorically—truly. Since part of Rabbi Yohanan is the ideas he created, part of Maimonides is the ideas he created, and if the ideas are here then Maimonides is still here. And if a person’s worldview, ideas, thoughts are remembered by other people, then he is still here. Something of his death is prevented, or dissipates, or weakens; he still exists a little. It seems to me that this is the subtext—yes, this is the feeling, or the basis for the feeling, that exists among all people or most people who feel there is an obligation to remember. And again, I’m not talking about the Holocaust and fallen IDF soldiers; I’m talking about simply remembering the dead. To remember the dead is to keep them alive in one way or another. Now true, I said at the beginning—and not for nothing did I preface it—there are many people who are materialists and still speak in a very pathetic way about the importance of memory and the great value it has, and so on. To my mind this is denial, living in denial. Meaning, in the end they are basically disguised dualists. They believe that something of the person remains; only that is how I can explain to myself this strong sense of the importance of memory. Except that they cannot bring themselves to say it. When you ask the person—after all he is a declared atheist or materialist—he cannot give you explanations of the kind I’m giving now. So what does he say? No, no, it’s in order to prevent future Holocausts, in order to express gratitude, in order to, I don’t know, connect to the national ethos. All these explanations, in my eyes, are rationalizations after the fact. All of them may be true, but I don’t think they capture the essence, the core, of the obligation to remember. The essence of the obligation to remember is an obligation focused on the person whom I remember—not on ideas, not on collectives, on the person. And what is the obligation? The obligation is simply to keep him alive, to save him in a certain sense, to give him a few more years of life. And in that sense I think the value of memory is nothing but an expression—perhaps a weaker one, of course, but still some kind of expression—of the value of life. Simply to remember, simply to keep human beings more alive. And now, on top of that, of course there can be many, many additional layers. Now there is a national ethos, and there is gratitude, and there is empathy, and there is preventing future Holocausts, and there are many, many things—each one of which, by the way, explains only part of the obligations of memory. Preventing future Holocausts applies to the Holocaust, and even there you don’t need all the details for that. Gratitude applies only to those to whom I owe gratitude. Yes, empathy applies only to those for whom there are still people suffering because of their passing. If there are no such people, then there is no need to remember him for the sake of empathy, as I said earlier. Therefore all these explanations are explanations that give local explanations for very particular kinds of memory. But underneath there is some general platform that seems to me to explain all obligations of memory. And after it, on top of it, there are of course additional layers, all of which can be true, that explain or give value to very specific memories. Now it is also clear why there is value in remembering an unknown soldier. Because an unknown soldier too—there is still some sense that people want to keep a bit of him alive as well. Now again, to what extent standing by his tombstone keeps something of him alive, I have great doubts. If I know something he thought, something he wrote, something that was important to him, and perhaps I realize it when he did not manage to—that, this morning, I heard exactly: my son heard about some one person, someone who was killed actually—not a soldier, some terror victim, I think—who was in the middle of a startup. And his parents are continuing his startup. To me that is very beautiful. It is not an emotional matter. There is something in that which keeps him alive; it is a matter of value. It is not a question of some feeling of participation, some emotional outburst. I want to claim that this has some cognitive basis. It is basically the value of keeping something of him alive. If he were alive, he would devote some of his time to that, so here I am doing it in his place; it will be realized even without him. And in that sense, something of him is still here. Because in the end, with the value of life too, you can ask why it has value, and there too all kinds of rationalizations will come, and I won’t get into that here, but part of them is that a person wants to act and continue, and if he dies then he is gone, he has lost the possibility of doing that. So if I give him the possibility to do that in this way, in the form of memory, commemoration, continuation of his activity, then here too there is something of keeping him alive. It may sound a bit metaphysical, mystical, I don’t know exactly—regions I don’t usually tend to go to—but it seems to me that it is hard for me to point to another explanation for this pathos that accompanies the obligation of memory, the value in memory. And I think this also casts a somewhat different light on the debates over whether to remember collectives or remember individuals, whether to focus on ideas or on the person himself—what he loved, what he didn’t love, what his character was, and all sorts of things like that. Everyone will draw from this whatever implications he draws, but it seems to me that these things also have perhaps even practical implications, and are not only a detached philosophical question. So at this stage I’ll stop here, and if anyone wants to comment or ask, this is the opportunity. Yes.

[Speaker C] What about—how would I look at it if I combine what you said with what is written in the Torah, “remember what the Lord did to Miriam”? Do I remember her in order to keep her alive, and by that I don’t speak slander? Or do I remember her for the function of remembering, so that I won’t speak slander, if I understood correctly? So how does that fit with what you’re saying?

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] On the contrary, that’s why I gave the introduction at the beginning. I gave the introduction at the beginning that I am not talking about the religious or halakhic aspects of memory. I deliberately gave all kinds of indications through the way secular, materialist, atheist people think, in order to show that even there there is some conception that memory is a value. And that is basically what this says: as Cicero said, nothing human is foreign to me. Meaning, even a believing Jew who is obligated in the commandments is first of all a human being. If there is a value that obligates all human beings, then it obligates me too. On top of that there are of course also the religious obligations. And what I want to claim is that the obligation to remember is a universal human obligation. On top of it there are particular obligations. There are halakhic religious obligations that really are not about keeping alive. There is no point at all in keeping Amalek alive. The obligations to remember, the halakhic obligations to remember, are obligations whose purpose is pragmatic, consequential. And therefore I claim that they cannot serve as a good explanation for the value of memory we are talking about in these days. And that is exactly the distinction I made at the beginning. Thank you. Anyone else?

[Speaker C] Okay, then, more power to you, and thank you very much.

[Rabbi Michael Abraham] May tomorrow be a happier day. Goodbye.

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