30 MITZVAH AND Memorialization

Rick Hilles

In Jewish devotional practice, there are passionate repetitions of key moments ofJewish scriptural history, such as Passover, that reaffirm the structure of belief on which Jewish life and religion rest.

There is one respect in which mitzvah may be compared with the Christian sacrament of marriage or baptism. Specifically, it is a moment in the lives of believers when the frame of belief is inhabited and animated as a form of reenactment. Although forbidden any knowledge of the future, Jews performing mitzvah fetch the history of Jews into a present moment of their lives that is suspended between what has happened, is happening, and may happen.

The German Jewish philosopher and literary critic Walter Benjamin explores the sacramental possibilities of such a moment in his essay, “Theses on the Philosophy of History,” in the fol­lowing passage:

We know that the Jews were prohibited from investigating the future. The Torah and the prayers instruct them in remembrance. This stripped the future of its magic, to which all who turn to the soothsayers for enlightenment succumb. This does not imply, however, that for the Jews the future turned into homogeneous, empty time.

(1968, p. 263)

It is worth dwelling on Benjamin's assertion that the Jewish prohibition against investigating the future did not hinder Jews' path to enlightenment. In focusing instead on remembrance, the experience is not qualified or distracted by premonitions and presentiments; it is full beyond measure. By directing Jews to the harder path of remembrance, their system of belief opens up

Rick Hilles

a moment of sacramental intensity that alerts each inhabitant of that moment to the presence of historical time (Figure 30.1).

Of course, it has not always been Jews or those friendly to them who have built, composed, painted, and photographed memorials to Jewish life. Hitler planned to have a Museum of the Vanished Race situated in a Prague synagogue. While no such museum exists, four former synagogues in Prague have become museums of Jewish life, culture, and history. In the post­Holocaust era, the task of representation for the so-called Generation of Postmemory is com­plicated by the growing distance between Holocaust survivors and what they might recall. As Marianne Hirsch, who first coined the term “postmemory,” asks: “How (can) that ‘sense of a living connection’ be maintained and perpetuated even as the generation of survivors leaves our midst, and how, at the very same time it is being eroded?” (2012, p. 1). Hirsch goes on to ask:

How can we best carry their stories forward, without appropriating them, without unduly calling attention to ourselves, and without, in turn, having our own stories displaced by them? How are we implicated in the aftermath of crimes we did not ourselves witness?

(p. 2)

Figure 30.1 Karen Zusman, Hasidim Post Sukkah at Coney Island (Source: Karen Zusman). Sukkot (often translated as “Harvest Festival” or “Feast ofTabernacles”) is observed every year for eight days, beginning on the 15th day of the seventh month, Tishrei (usually occurring in late September or October) during which time Jews are “commanded to rejoice for the blessing of God’s provision and care” (Deut: 16: 14-15).

Mitzvah and memorialization

And concerning what Hirsch calls “the memory archive”: “How can it offer what history alone no longer seems able to offer (p. 3)?”

As well as reenacting the sacred passages of Jewish life and belief, memorialization has an additional definition in the OED: “a petition of objection, disapproval, disagreement, even pro­test. ” Now that fewer survivors are alive to tell their stories, being able to see a Holocaust memo­rial of any kind as a palpable form of protest can spur the imagination of the secondary witness. Whether it is a museum installed on the grounds of a former SS concentration camp, a graphic film that draws the viewer into the horror, a memoir that emphasizes the loneliness of extreme suffering, or a puppet theater that makes pathos out of the very obviousness of its artifice, there is a Hebrew word for what this kind of representation demands: Zakhor. The word translates into a warning, “Never forget!” and a commandment: “Remember!”

A plaque outside the former Polish Jewish shtetl of Nasielsk, just 35 miles outside ofWarsaw, records the total absence of its former Jewish population. Such a spare notice of annihilation may seem perfunctory, but the absence of representational art instigates the imagination to fill the empty place. One work of dynamic imaginative recuperation and retrieval that has somehow robbed death at Nasielsk of its absoluteness is Glenn Kurtz's non-fiction work, Three Minutes in Poland: Discovering a Lost World in a 1938 Family Film (FSG, 2014). Kurtz's book itself is a story within a story—intermingling his own tale of finding and restoring his grandfather's original color film footage (taken during a family trip to Europe in 1938), and driving it him­self to the Steven Spielberg Film and Video Archive at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington, DC, to be digitized.

Among the highest mitzvot that a Jewish person might enact is to tend to the proper care and burial of the dead. The Jewish mitzvah of tending caringly and lovingly to the remains of the departed also extends to the disposal of books that inform, enliven, and inspire Jews by perform­ing the complexity and vibrancy ofJewish life. When a Jewish holy book—which has presum­ably illuminated its owner—wears out from use, the owner does not simply and thoughtlessly throw it out. Instead, the faithful tome's owner disposes of it as if the bearer were returning some ancient debt of knowledge, insight, wisdom, and illumination. The Hebrew word genizah or geniza (plural: genizot—meaning storage or receptacle) refers to a place where sacred holy texts that are no longer usable are placed respectfully, so as to protect the sacredness of their inner contents—the veritable “inner life” of the closed book.

Over time, genizot would become known as places to dispose of holy texts and where other texts—profane, heretical, sacrilegious, or otherwise deleterious—might also be taken to be bur­ied, so that their hazardous contents would no longer cause harm. Imagine: not even the most harmful book was burned. This twin notion of the genizah—fleshed-out more palpably in Adina Hoffman and Peter Cole's Sacred Trash: The Lost and Found World of the Cairo Geniza (2016)—may give the so-called “hinge” second generation a powerful way of regarding their own passionate acts of retrieval in the name of representation, memorialization, and the continued celebration of the rich diversity of Jewish culture and its traditions. Such reenactments are reaffirmations of passionate retrieval by which practitioners aim to reconnect to sacred aims and strategies of resistance and resilience, which are arguably more essential to Jewish life (and life in general)

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than ever before, especially in light of the global rise in anti-Semitism and white nationalism. This should remind both Jews and non-Jews alike how vital memory (Zakhor) is as a value in itself, as well as how important observing the many mitzvot ofJudaism—including the Hebrew concept of tikkun olam (healing the world)—can be, in what Bertolt Brecht (1979, p. 320) might have called “the [new] dark times.”