Liminality and memory

This is a weird, transitional time of year. (Or has the word “weird” become too politicized to use? But certainly it’s useful.)

Camp is over. School hasn’t started yet. Because it’s been so wet this year, the world outside hasn’t become dry, as it usually does. Instead, it’s stunningly lush. But it’s getting dark earlier and light later. It’s still summer — it still does get light early and dark late — but the shifts are noticeable now. It’s breezier. It’s getting cooler. The world is changing.

This year, Labor Day is on September 2, and the month of Elul begins just two days later. The two calendars are in synch this year; it’s the time when things change, thoughts deepen, shadows lengthen, anticipation and elegy combine.

And this is a weird, transitional year.

American politics are so unusual, so full of firsts, that if this were a novel, I’d have to sit on my hand to keep them from jumping to the last pages. On the simple narrative level, I just want to know how this crazy story finally works out.

But of course this is real life, and I think it’s fair to say that many of us fear the outcome, should it go the wrong way, although we look forward with joy to the right one. (And I’m not so naïve as not to know that there are readers on both sides of this election.)

And then, of course, there’s Israel, and the hostages, and the war, and antisemitism.

I have no idea how Simchat Torah will be this year. It’s hard to imagine the intense, Torah-centric joy that’s the crown of the year, at least in my shul, happening again this year — or ever, for that matter, although that’s far too long-term a statement for anyone to make. But how will we be able to celebrate this year, knowing that it’s the first yahrzeit of at least 1,200 people?

I had an interesting discussion with Jonathan Brent, the extremely accomplished scholar and unusually nice man who heads YIVO, and his chief of staff, Shelly Freeman, an Australian lawyer who’s using her formidable organization skills as well as her very real charm to keep the institute moving ahead.

We were talking about memory. Jonathan, who was about to talk to the Jewish Genealogical Society, planned to discuss memory, which is both related to and oddly divorced from genealogy. He is mourning the loss of memory that keeps assimilated Jews away from their history, tradition, and culture. Shelly described how different it is in Melbourne, where most members of the fairly small, very tightly connected Jewish community are the descendants of Holocaust survivors. Memory is something they all share now — but they’ve also been told that they’re probably two decades or so behind us, and in a generation, or two at best, those memories will wisp away.

There is an inherent problem with memory. We can’t remember what we never knew. Yes, I know it’s not quite that simple — we make up memories all the time, we take stories we’ve been told about our childhoods and imagine ourselves into them and then remember them. Memories are malleable.

But we can’t remember our grandparents’ traditions any more than we can remember the smell of the Shabbat dinners they ate when they were children, or the view out of their windows, back in Vienna or Vilna or Budapest.

We can’t remember the victims of October 7, although we say that we do, because we never knew them. We can remember their names and their faces and their stories, but we can’t remember them.

I have no idea what memories we’ll bring with us as we enter this liminal season. They certainly won’t be uncomplicated. But as the light changes and the calendar pages turn, let there be some hope as we look forward.

—JP

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