by Justice Elyakim Rubinstein (translated by Gilad Abiri)
The original Hebrew text of this essay was published in Haaretz-Tarbut ve-Sifrut April 13, 2021.
In 1965, twenty years before he passed, my father wrote a spiritual will, which I discovered many years after he parted from us. He asked that my brother and I continue to say Kaddish on the yahrzeit for his parents, sisters, and their entire family, who were shot into a mass grave in their hometown of Lenin in Belarus on Rosh Chodesh Elul in 1942. He explains this request: “all of these [actions] are to emphasize with their sacred souls, and to spin the golden thread of the chain of generations, so that their memory is not lost.” He went further, “my bones will rejoice if you educate your children to love Israel, to know the Torah and to observe its` commandments, and the golden thread will not be cut, and my descendants would not be as a wooden stick, blown about by every passing wind, and I pray that you and your sons will be rooted in the soil of the nation with all its values, and that you shall do what is good and right in the eyes of God and man, and through this my memory and that of your pure and brave mother will be dignified.”
Furthermore: “I will not fulfill my duty if I do not mention my childhood with my holy parents… that raised us to observe the Torah and do good deeds and always represented to me all that is good and noble, like a bright torch, a forever lit candle…”
And here, in what Judaism calls divine providence, I received a year ago from the historian Moshe Nachmani, the author of the book “The National Hero” about Joseph Trumpeldor, an email that directed me to a link to the archive that includes the belongings of the hero of Tel-Chai, that fell in battle a century ago. There we find this note: “as a sign of my boundless loyalty to my dear teacher Joseph the son of Vladimir Trumpeldor, I am grateful for the work you agreed to do for me. From your student, Elyakim Magdelovich.” The writer is my grandfather, after whom I am named. He was (like Trumpeldor) a soldier in the Tzar`s army in the Japan-Russia war. Like him, he was taken captive when the Russians lost in 1905. He survived, went back to his town and started a family, and eventually passed away in the Holocaust. Trumpeldor –I am guessing—taught him to read and write in Russian since his education was Jewish – in Yiddish and Hebrew.
These pieces represent for me the dimension of personal memory that grows from the roots of national memory. A Jewish memory that started in the Tzar`s army in 1905 continued during the Holocaust and developed into a magnificent tree in the state of Israel, in union with my mother, the daughter of the Third Aliya, that was among those that brought the exiles of Mauritius to Israel and among the founders of the Military Hospital in Tel Hashomer, today Sheba Medical Center.
I picked up the excellent book “Life Plays with Me” by David Grossman, an illuminating literary revelation of a living holocaust memory, and read it in one go. The challenge of writing literature on actual events connected to the successful attempt to write Hebrew dialogues that exhibit the charming garbling of a non-native speaker. I found the last line of the book, which stated that the infant Nina, fourth generation to the protagonist, is “a grain of my soil.” The Jewish historical memory sounded survival, but also an expectant eye looking toward Zion.
And indeed, the memory and the dream brought us here. The Jewish people are the people of memory. Memory is ingrained in our national genome. Without it, we would likely not exist. “There are certain people, scattered and dispersed among the other Nations,” as Haman, one of the first who planned a genocide, (the term was unbeknownst to him) categorized the Jews. The Jews survived while many of those that prosecuted them were forgotten, because we were ingrained with the sign of living memory. Is it possible to conceive of our survival for two thousand years, without the memory that infused the “cheder” in all of Israel`s diasporas, in the daily prayer, in the Torah literature within the Jewish canon that was written in Hebrew, in the family rituals of Shabbat and festivals , in Rosh Hashanah that is also called the day of memory and in one of its central prayers called Zichronot, memories? Already in the book of Exodus, wherein the Jews are transformed from a family to a people, we find the commandment to remember. This commandment is mentioned in the context of two powerful events: The first, the Exodus of the Jews from Egypt, and the second, the memory of Amalek.
In the Exodus (13:3), “Moses said to the people, “Remember this day, on which you went free from Egypt, the house of bondage, how the LORD freed you from it with a mighty hand.” And Rashi says there, “This teaches that one must make mention of the Exodus from Egypt every day.” And following that, (13:8-9) “And you shall explain to your son on that day, ‘It is because of what the LORD did for me when I went free from Egypt.’ And this shall serve you as a sign on your hand and as a reminder on your forehead—so that the Teaching of the LORD may be in your mouth—that with a mighty hand the LORD freed you from Egypt.”
And in the context of the war with Amalek (17:14), it says, “Then the LORD said to Moses, “Inscribe this in a document as a reminder, and read it aloud to Joshua: I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.” And the complimentary text in Deuteronomy (25:17-19) commands us to: “Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt -- you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!”
To where did the “LORD your God free you from Egypt”? to the Land of Israel. As Nechama Leibovitz said, Amalek is the symbol of the evil that exists in every generation because we do not know its concrete identity—it wishes to destroy, to prevent this journey. We must preserve the memory of the Exodus, and we must fight the ever-transforming Amalek.
There is no doubt that without the genetic code of memory, the miracles of the founding of Israel and the revival of the Hebrew language could not occur. It is likely that no other people besides us renewed their youth and gathered from the four corners of the earth in human history. When I was a child, my father would sing me a lullaby by the poet Aharon Liboshitski, who was killed in the Holocaust:
“Lie down and sleep my dear son,
Listen and I will tell you a poem,
In ancient times in a land far away,
There was a city,
You ancestors lived there,
Then they lived a life of happiness,
Then they were a people
A people who strode on their own land
A land of milk and Honey…”
At the end of the poem, those who were exiled return to the city because “they hope that a day will come and they will return to be a nation.” And what is hope if not a memory? And as Amos Oz and Fania Oz-Salzberger write in their book “The Jews and Words,” Jewish continuity always relied on the spoken and written word. Let me be precise: Judaism is all of its shades, all of its shades a living memory that takes many forms. And the memory as the root of national revival does not exclude the love of the other, the dignity of the other, or human rights; it merges with them in harmony.
And to conclude, something on anti-memory, or on the syndrome of blurring memory. The State of Israel is a great trust given to us by providence and Jewish history. The price of its preservation is precious. The metamorphosis of memory laid the groundwork for the Zionist project. Aharon Barak, a child Holocaust survivor, says that he learned two lessons: The need for a Jewish state so that the gates will always be open to the oft prosecuted Jew, and Human Rights to preserve us from treating others the way we were treated. The phenomenon of pursuing foreign passports and even emigrating young people from Israel, even in my extended family, hurts me almost physically. For me, this is a part of the blurring memory, of anti-memory, disconnecting from the genetic code. I wonder if this is due to a disconnection from Jewish roots, not only religious, in a way that leaves these individuals like a leaf driven by the simple wind that my father sought to prevent—an open question. The challenge is the spirit. How to avoid the genetic code from getting consumed, from becoming post-memory, group dementia. Please – let us not let this happen. The preservation of memory is the living historical command to the living Jew.
Justice Prof. Elyakim Rubinstein is a former Vice President of Israel’s Supreme Court and can be reached at elyrubinstein@yahoo.com. Gilad Abiri is a Lecturer in Law at Yale Law School. He can be reached at giladabiri@gmail.com