Ekev 5785

Barbara Streisand is famous for her beautiful voice. The lyrics of the songs she sings are also quite meaningful. Some of them specifically point to one of the lessons expressed in our Torah reading for this Shabbat. One of the most familiar lyrics is:

“Mem'ries may be beautiful and yet
What's too painful to remember
We simply choose to forget,”

In this week’s Torah portion, Ekev, Moses specifically points out the painful moments, that I am quite certain the Children of Israel, now forty years later, were simply “choosing to forget.” What were those memories? The most famous is the incident of the Golden Calf.

What is most interesting in this week’s reading is Moses’ reframing the story in first person. He shares with them what it was personally like for him to be up on Mt. Sinai for forty days and forty nights, without any food or water, only to be summoned by God to go see what the people were doing down below. He paints the picture of how they had sinned, making for themselves a Golden Calf. And then Moses describes how he gripped the two tablets containing the words of God and flung them to the ground, shattering them in disbelief.

He continues with what seems to be a guilt trip, describing how he, Moses, had to intercede on behalf of his brother Aaron, who had created the Golden Calf, and for the people as well. God wanted to wipe you out, and was so displeased with Aaron that he wanted to destroy him as well. God then summoned me, Moses, back up the mountain, this time with tablets that I had to painstakingly recreate for you, and on which Hashem inscribed the Ten Commandments anew on them.

But even after that moment, you continued to challenge God when there was no water or the manna no longer satiated your appetite and your desire for meat.

How often did we choose to forget those memories in our own lives or paint them differently to make them perhaps not only tolerable, but perhaps even colorful and beautiful?

The lyrics in the song “The Way We Were,” ask that very poignant question:

“Can it be that it was all so simple then
Or has time re-written every line?
If we had the chance to do it all again
Tell me, would we? Could we?”

Thankfully, for most of us, we are able to place the memories we wish to forget of painful moments into the corner recesses of our minds. Occasionally, we will reexperience them in the recesses of our memories. And as we get older, many do find their way back into our thoughts. If they are too painful, then the memory haunts us, hopefully, only for a moment. In some instances, they remind us of a learning or growth experience. At other moments, the pain might have been inflicted upon us, and hopefully, through time, we have learned to manage and cope. The memory remains, unfaded, “in the corner of our mind.” It has shaped who we are, both positively and negatively, and with joy and with pain, sometimes hauntingly. Yet hopefully the memories have simply shaped us. The colorful painting of those moments remains “the way we were,” and has transformed us into the way we are.

For the Children of Israel, perhaps the memory had faded and had been somewhat forgotten over the forty years that they wandered in the desert. As a new generation emerged as adults, those painful memories became stories of the past, rather than their own story. And that memory needed to be reminded of not only who they were, but who they are.  How true that is for Jews living in America and throughout the world. But equally as important is what makes us so resilient, despite all of those moments we choose to forget.

And isn’t that true about each one of us as individuals and our life’s journey?

As Streisand so beautifully sings, that even with all that we choose to forget, or how we paint them anew

“…it's the laughter we will remember

Whenever we remember the way we were.”

Am Yisrael Chai!!!

Bring Them Home Now!!!!

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi K