Remember To Forget

To heal ourselves, we have to actively remember what to forget and not forget what we must remember.

It’s summer in Northern California, where the weather will do as it pleases with no thought or care for what us messy mortals expect when we hear the words June, July, and August. This has been the case in these parts long before climate change became a crisis for the rest of the country. This morning there was fog so thick it appeared to be raining, our deck was soaked, and we bundled up in flannel and fuzzy slippers. Now the sun is blazing and I’ve been keeping a close watch on my vegetable garden, lest my lettuce starts to dry up or bolt. Meanwhile, elsewhere in the world there is catastrophic flooding, deadly heat waves, and parts of the southern hemisphere are bracing for incoming rough weather. Batten down the hatches, friends, global warming et al is getting real.

When I was a young activist in the late 1970s, living in Portland, Oregon where the conversation about the havoc humans were wreaking on the atmosphere was just rolling. I was aware of this info because, well, I belonged to The People’s Food Co-op, I wore a lot of plaid, mostly wool, I ate more than my fair share of Brewer’s yeast, and I rode my bike everywhere come rain or come shine. So, naturally, I was active in the Trojan Decommissioning Alliance, whose raison d’etre was to shut down the Trojan Nuclear Power plant in nearby Rainier, Oregon. Recently I found a description of that effort in the Global Nonviolent Action Database:

When the plant began operating, environmentally and fiscally concerned community members formed the Trojan Decommissioning Alliance (TDA) and began to organize to more aggressively inhibit the capacity for the Trojan plant to produce nuclear power. On the 32nd anniversary of the nuclear bombings of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in August 1977, anti-nuclear arms protesters across the US mobilized in honor of the many that died. TDA initiated their campaign on this date. 

During the first month of protest, Nina Bell and Normon Solomon led what they believed to be the first occupation of a U.S. nuclear power plant.  Protesters were especially active during November of 1977 and police arrested many. TDA organized and implemented another occupation of the Trojan plant in August 1978. During the span of these occupations and protests, police arrested over 360 activists.

I was one of the 360. And in the lead up to our occupation of the power plant we went through extensive non-violence training, hours and hours of lectures and workshops with leading environmental scientists, including Dr. Helen Caldicott. Her prescient warnings about the disastrous climate crash we were going to face in 30 or 40 years if we didn’t start heading it off at the pass haunt me every time I read the news these days. Just last week I saw a video of a 2009 talk she gave at the San Francisco Public Library, which she opened by saying in her distinctive Australian lilt: “Things is grim. Bill Perry, former Secretary of Defense, General Cartwright, and many others are saying that we are closer to nuclear war now than we were at the height of the cold war. Why? Because we’ve all forgotten about it….”

And therein lies one of the biggest potholes on the road of Human Existence. When things are undeniably and immediately terrible, when the flood sweeps away the farm and all of its denizens, when the tornado rips the house right off its foundation, when the virus devastates an entire community–then we keen and wail. But, as soon as the crisis passes, most of us forget about it. That said, the flip side is also true: some never forget and find themselves locked into the trauma as if it were still happening. Some never remember and some never forget. But Torah asks us to do something ironic and radical when the inevitable occurs. Jewish wisdom rolls up to the crash site, gathers the shocked survivors, and just when the dust settles, commands us….to remember to forget. 

זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂה לְךָ עֲמָלֵק בַּדֶּרֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם׃…

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—…

…תִּמְחֶה אֶת־זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח׃

You must blot out the memory of Amalek from under the sun! You must not forget! (Deuteronomy/Devarim 25: 17…19)

What the heck? How are we supposed to A) remember the trauma enough to then B) blot out the memory of the perpetrator, while C) not forgetting it?? 

It is important, if difficult, to find the balance between living with our most jagged memories and forgetting them enough to attend to the ongoing, daily work of soul integration. Remembering to forget is a paradoxical spiritual medicine that fuels the journey from the crash to the next level of fullness –  fullness which was unattainable before the rupture. It’s a strangely brilliant prescription for how we might manifest wholeness and cultivate our faith in Oneness. 

My step-dad was a train wreck of a man. On the one hand, you name a domestic abuse, and between me and my mom, at least one of us suffered it while he was around. On the other hand, he was strangely supportive of my gender-bending expression, and for that I’m grateful. I have a picture of the two of us when I’m about 6 or 7—it was 1966, we’re both in chinos, I’m wearing a mossy green Wallace Beery shirt, he’s in a sweat shirt with the arms roughly cut off, both of us holding fishing poles, on our way to the beach to where he was teaching me how to sand cast. Looking at that picture it’s easy to remember how great it felt to be seen and honored for who I was, and equally how much I don’t ever want to be like him in so many other ways. What a weird paradox, to simultaneously want to remember being held and respected, and forget the abuse, which is actually impossible. And that’s what is so brilliant!! To heal ourselves, we have to actively remember what to forget and not forget what we must remember. In the 60s there was a Jewish academic called Richard Alper who went to India and came back on the path to enlightenment as Ram Dass. He famously wrote a book called “Be Here Now” in which those three words were repeated in that order in a circle, thus slightly shifting the meaning depending on where you started reading. Perhaps Remembering To Forget To Remember To Forget (on repeat!) is the Torah’s offering of a mystical devotional practice of Oneness: honoring all experience as real, important, and powerful and still to consciously choose to lift up the uplifting so as to cast a shadow upon the horrors.

But, of course, that is easier said than done. Humans, as a rule, are pattern seekers with an unsavory tendency to reduce life to unrealistic, clean cut, binaries: black and white, us and them, good and bad. If I’ve learned anything in my nearly seven decades on this planet it’s that nothing is that clear cut. The world is messy, life is messy, and if I’m being honest, I am messy. One of the enduring reasons that I love learning Torah and Talmud is because they both luxuriate in life’s grey scale and murky relationship between what was, what is, and what will be. Fog in the morning, sun in the afternoon, and mystery at night.

Traditional Jewish text study teaches us how to selectively forget by cultivating the art of creative remembering. The Rabbis, maggids, and other ancient smarty pants comb through the painful past to find every single tool they can use with which they might craft a way through the hellscape du jour. And they left us a brilliant record of what worked and what didn’t in their day, including many of the mistakes they made, so that Be Here Now might continue the work of creating a world of holy wholeness. 

Talmud and Torah compel us back to remember the fact that today’s cultural messes, corrupt politicians, and economic crises ain’t nothing new. Our ravs, mages, and sages captured, contemplated, and confronted their own moments of chaos and mayhem and met it with wit, wisdom, and plenty of warnings. It seems clear that they were banking on us, hoping that centuries later we would be searching for the best ways to navigate rough waters by studying their stories, knowing full well that we would return to them after having poo-pooed them. They recognized the importance of maturity and how wisdom sort of accumulates for most of us. They reckoned with their own youthful arrogance and inability to fully understand the scope of their learning at the moment of their learning. 

.אָמַר רַבָּה: שְׁמַע מִינַּהּ לָא קָאֵי אִינִישׁ אַדַּעְתֵּיהּ דְּרַבֵּיהּ עַד אַרְבְּעִין שְׁנִין

Rabba said: Understand this: a person does not occupy their teacher’s knowledge until forty years have passed. 

And this is why we must not forget the teacher, even those who were harsh, broken, or incomprehensible. It did take me around forty years of work, and it’s not easy to say this, but though my stepdad was a terrible parent, he was an excellent teacher in the long run. Because there was blessing marbled into the curses…because I have not forgotten to honor my own resilience…because I’ve remembered how much his trauma influenced who he became because he wasn’t as resilient…because I’ve remembered how empowering it was to be seen…because I’ve been able to forget the animus I have a right to hold for him and his ilk. Because of all of this, I have been graced with compassion and empathy which, ironically, make me feel incredibly powerful. It’s not easy, it doesn’t come quick, but I have come to accept that I’m a lot happier when I’m able to see the blessings through the mire. 

Torah offers a companion piece to “remember to forget” to support this spiritual practice. In the midst of a biblical hellscape horror filled diatribe the likes of which could have been penned by the love child of Stephen King and Hunter S. Thompson, the Torah offers the following insightful advice:

תַּחַת אֲשֶׁר לֹא־עָבַדְתָּ אֶת־יְיְ אֱלֹהֶיךָ בְּשִׂמְחָה וּבְטוּב לֵבָב מֵרֹב כֹּל׃

Because you would not serve your God in joy and gladness over the abundance of everything,

וְעָבַדְתָּ אֶת־אֹיְבֶיךָ אֲשֶׁר יְשַׁלְּחֶנּוּ יְיְ בָּךְ בְּרָעָב וּבְצָמָא וּבְעֵירֹם וּבְחֹסֶר כֹּל וְנָתַן עֹל בַּרְזֶל עַל־צַוָּארֶךָ עַד הִשְׁמִידוֹ אֹתָךְ׃

you shall have to serve—in hunger and thirst, naked and lacking everything—the enemies whom God will let loose against you. [God] will put an iron yoke upon your neck until you are wiped out.

This simple practice, to serve joyfully when things are good, preempts the harder practice of remembering to forget. Fog rolls in—greet it with Amen, Hallelujah! How sweet to breathe in the cool, moist, air. How delightful to pull on an extra cozy sweater. Thank you HaShem for this merging of land and sea. Oh, wait!! The sun just peeked through!! Forget the sweater. Go water the garden. Revel in the shade. If we practice appreciating the simple blessings that fill every day, breath by breath, we will fill our tanks with an awareness of abundance that just might fuel us over the roughest roads. And when we look back we will rejoice in just how alive and resourceful we were. How amazing to be on this journey, at this terrible beautiful time, fraught as it is. May we live long enough to see the curses turn into blessings through our ability to remember to forget.