Selecting a few items, and memories, from the complex life of a loved one is the best way to keep them from being forgotten.
This yizkor sermon was delivered at Congregation Shomrei Emunah in Montclair, NJ on Yom Kippur 5785 (Oct 4, 2024). An earlier version was given at the Jewish Center of Princeton on Yom Kippur 5775.
41 years ago, in 1983, a book of photographs was published. The title of the book was A Vanished World, and the name of the photographer was Roman Vishniac. The book features hundreds of images of prewar Eastern European Jewish life: two young boys in black hats in cheder, sitting side by side and studying a page of rabbinic commentary; a sad shopkeeper with nothing to sell; a grandmother and her granddaughter, smiling slightly, standing in a small room that functions as both a kitchen and bedroom.
Roman Vishniac, born in Russia, took the photographs between 1935 and 1938 in the Pale of Settlement. His images evoke what many of us imagine when we think of Jewish life in the shtetl. His photographs were featured in books by Isaac Bashevis Singer and Irving Howe. They served as a guiding force for the cinematography of Shindler’s List. Vishiac had become, in the words of one art critic, “the official mortuary photographer of Eastern European Jewry.”[1]
Seventeen years after the book was published, in the year 2000, a graduate student in art history and museum education at Harvard was assigned to research a book of photography. Her name was Maya Benton. She remembered a coffee table book of Vishniac’s photographs from her grandmother’s house and chose it for the assignment. She dug into Vishniac’s work and became both fascinated, and troubled. Benton discovered that Vishniac had actually accumulated a much wider collection of photographs than the ones that he published — including many images that were of higher artistic quality, but that did not fit the narrative of impoverished Jewish life. She also found that Vishniac had a tendency to add captions to images that were imaginative, or more precisely, fictional. For instance, one pair of photographs put together a middle age man and a young boy. The caption reads, “The father is hiding from members of the National Democratic Party. His son signals him that they are approaching. Warsaw, 1938.” But the two images were taken from different rolls of film, and probably even different cities.
As she continued her research, Benton found a note from the sales executive who worked on Vishniac’s book, A Vanished World. The note described the publication as “an illustrated book of social history that would also appeal to a popular Jewish nostalgia market.” Benton talked to the editor of the book, who said that at one point he realized that Vishniac “had become a mythmaker of his past — telling stories that were better than what really happened.” Referring to Vishniac’s creative captions, the editor said that he saw it as his job to keep some of the quote “baloney away from the pictures.” Benton, the curator, put it this way: “It’s as if we took pictures of homeless people in New York and then the city fell into the sea, and 50 years from now people looked at those photos and thought, That’s what New York was.”
Eventually Benton discovered that Vishniac’s trip to the Pale of Settlement in the mid 1930’s was actually a paid assignment from the Joint Distribution Committee. He had been commissioned to document the poor and the Orthodox among Europe’s Jews so that the images could be used in fundraising work.
Vishniac’s powerful and memorable photographs turned out to be absolutely perfect for that assignment. With his camera, and his captions, Vishniac crafted a powerful story.
Perhaps most importantly, Vishniac was a master curator. He carefully selected only certain images and cropped each image in particular ways to tell a singular story of impoverished Jews.
* * *
My father died twelve years ago. His death introduced me to becoming a mourner. My father’s belongings occupied their own section of our basement, and it took me many years to sift through them. Like many before me, I started by going through the process of curating memories. I asked questions like, Which parts of his life do I want to remember? Which parts do I want to forget? Which parts do I want to tell my kids about?
I started to wonder: when we lose a loved one, should we aspire to be an historian, who pursues truth by representing the nuance and complexity of their life? Or, should we aspire to be like the photographer Vishniac, spinning a powerful story of their life, even at the cost of ignoring or misrepresenting other parts?
As I explored these questions, I came across a book by my friend and teacher Yehuda Kurtzer, president of the Shalom Hartman Institute. His book Shuva is about the roles of history and memory in forming and sustaining the Jewish people.
Kurtzer discusses “memory season” on the Jewish calendar. Each spring, we experience a series of holidays related to memory and history. First come two traditional holidays, Purim and Passover. They are followed by two modern holidays, Yom Hashoah and Yom HaZikaron.
Purim and Passover ritualize the past as acts of memory. Purim is the template for celebrating any moment when we emerge unscathed from a dangerous situation — like a communal benching of the gomel prayer. The tried to kill us, we survived, let’s eat! And on Pesach, Kurtzer notes, we “mostly tell stories about how people have told stories”[2] of what happened on Passover. On Pesach there are no harrowing testimonies of survivors. Instead, we get swept up in the “ongoing relevance of the message of liberation” that the holiday has come to represent. Purim and Pesach are exemplary holidays of Jewish memory in action.
But Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron do not look anything like the templates of Purim and Pesach. Instead, they strive to be Jewish history. “On Passover,” Kurtzer writes, “we insert ourselves into a narrative, we become the oppressed and the liberated; [whereas] on Yom HaShoah…we become passive listeners to a survivor or eyewitness.” Yom HaShoah and Yom HaZikaron privilege historical accuracy. Purim and Pesach privilege collective memory and meaning making.
Over the last three years, we have witnessed Yom HaShoah begin to transition from ritual of history… to ritual of memory. Until very recently, almost all commemorations of Yom HaShoah featured the testimony of a survivor. Because that practice has become increasingly difficult, and because in a few years there will be no living survivors to turn to, the way we commemorate Yom HaShoah is starting to change. A new ritual was recently developed in Israel and has started to make its way to American Jewish communities. This new ritual, called Hitkansut, weaves together texts, testimonies, discussion, prayer, silence, and the voices of participants, not unlike the Haggadah of Passover. Before our very eyes, Yom HaShoah is starting to evolve to focus less on history, and more on memory and meaning making, earning its long-term place on Jewish memory season calendar.
And five days ago, on the first anniversary of October 7, we experienced an even more recent version of this process. Perhaps because the ongoing trauma that was triggered by that day is far from over, it felt — to me, at least — too early to make choices between history and memory.
Purim, Pesach, Yom HaShoah, Yom HaZikaron: these holidays embody the difference between memory and history. They contain wisdom that we could encapsulate as follows:
Jewish memory is not a photographic, comprehensive catalog. Jewish memory challenges us to create narratives of past events that lead to meaning, commitment and obligations.
The best way to think about this idea is with a metaphor, and the best metaphor I have found is an exhibition case.
When we try to preserve the totality of history — like preserving a whole library — without curating an exhibition case, we fail to transmit meaning. A vast but unused library may be more historically accurate, but it also gets very dusty. The Jewish way to remember is to curate an exhibition case with a handful of precious items and then tell stories about them, even if that means that the meaning of those memories evolves over time.
* * *
My father suffered from an un-named condition that causes hoarding. He was, in a phrase, a pack rat. A very successful pack rat, I might add. Throughout his life, he was surrounded by tall piles of stuff: in every room of every house he lived in, on every flat surface in each of those rooms, in every car he owned, in every bag he carried, there was lots and lots and lots of stuff. He was psychologically incapable of throwing things away.
In the backbreaking work of sorting through and getting rid of all that stuff after he died, I learned a simple truth: when you keep everything, you have kept nothing.
This is true for our physical material lives, and it is true for our digital lives: Only when you take the time, and spend the energy, to curate something have you created value and meaning. Only when you have abandoned completeness and accuracy in pursuit of a simple story that offers meaning — only then can you hold on to something for a long time.
This is the irony of Jewish memory: curating a few precious memories — and letting go of everything else — is the ultimate act of preservation. Placing a few memories, imbued with meaning, in a display case gives our loved ones a chance at being remembered.
So what do I put in the metaphorical display case of my father’s life? In my father’s display case, there are three things:
First: a few of his landscape photographs. I selected them from the literally thousands that he took in his life. These images remind me of how much he loved to be behind the viewfinder, of how much he longed to be outdoors, of the wonder he felt when he approached the natural world. These few images hang throughout our home.
Second: the display case contains a copy of my parents’ divorce court proceedings. I was 6 years old when they divorced, and I discovered these court proceedings as a teenager. The moment I read through them, I took a large step toward young adulthood. The divorce proceedings remind me of the pain of infidelity, the infinite complexity of parenting, and the amount of sacrifice required for a marriage to last.
Third: in the display case there is a piece of scrap paper with notes Dad jotted down during a phone call with me when I was 20 years old, living abroad in Jerusalem. I discovered the note in one of the hundreds of tall piles of his stuff. That note reminds me that he cared about what I was doing. And it reminds me that he really did keep everything.
Our relationships with our loved ones are complex, layered, containing multitudes. When our loved ones die, the memories we choose to display can be positive or negative. Romanticizing the past may not help. We make meaning from painful memories just as easily as we do from joyful memories — certainly we have learned that lesson from the Jews who came before us.
The display cases of memory that we construct may not be historically accurate. They will, by necessity, leave out many things. Kurtzer warns us not to “mistake accuracy for truth,” because approaching the past like an historian does not necessarily lead us to truth. We should have an historical consciousness, he argues, but not at the expense of creating “sacred myth” and meaning.
This is the genius behind the work of photographer Roman Vishniac. Did he realize that only by carefully selecting a few photos, and crafting a narrative around them, he would preserve the memory of Jewish life in the Pale of Settlement for generations to come?
No matter how many museums or centers for Jewish history we build, the future of the Jewish people cannot be built on archives. The only way to ensure the future of our people is to find the humanity in the stories of our loved ones and our communities — the stories that echo in our souls.[3]
One of my favorite Bible verses is from Psalms, one that we sing in Hallel: lo hametim yehallelu yah — those who are dead, cannot praise God. A companion verse might be: It is the job of the living to curate the memories of our deceased loved ones. Our deceased loved ones cannot do it for us. It is we who are living who have the responsibility to choose what we carry forward, to put those precious items into a display case, and to tell those stories to everyone who walks by.
Yizkor is our communal ritual for individual remembering. For a few precious moments we select a few precious memories to place in the display cases of the lives of those who made us who we are. Rediscover a memory. Add a memory. Maybe even exchange a memory. Yizkor is our designated time to build and refresh the display cases of memory of those we have loved and lost.
That is how our loved ones, and our people, will live into the future, safeguarded against being forgotten.
[1] Alana Newhouse, NYT. 2nd quote by Leon Wieseltier, quoted in same article.
[2] Kurtzer, Shuva, p5
[3] Paraphrased from Kurtzer, 142.
Video Archive
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- Parashat Vayera – Redeeming Sodom - Thu, Nov 21, 2024
- Yom Kippur Sermon, Curating a Memory Display Case for Our Loved Ones - Wed, Oct 16, 2024