What Was Washed Away, and What Remains

One of the great novels of our time, "Remembrance of Things Past," is a sustained meditation on the meaning of memory. The author, Marcel Proust, is haunted by memory. His entire artistic life was given to evocations of his past. His work, in several volumes, delicately traces the web of recollection from early childhood. His book is an elegy to a lost world, the world of his youth.

Proust was Jewish, and it is likely that his ancestry sparked some of his obsession with memory. Jews are afflicted by memory, uplifted and impelled by it. To be a Jew is to dote on the past, to understand what has changed; to recognize not only what has been gained, but what has been lost.

Jewish memory teaches us that things do not remain as they were. It helps us overcome the sense of our own invulnerability, and the permanence of the world. It is an early and innocent belief of life that things do not change--that nothing will fade, or break, or die. That sentiment soon disappears; it roars out of the broken dam of our first tragedy, our first experience with what can never return. Then we remember what was, and in the act of memory is the recognition of loss.

As we grow, we become increasingly aware that life is studded by loss. Some losses are small, inconsequential. Others shake the roots of our lives.

Watching the news this week from a safe niche far from the hurricane, I saw devastating pictures of loss. The most permanent fixtures of being--homes, businesses, life itself--were torn away in an instant.

It was an inexplicable burst of tragedy. No answer can magically soothe the scars of desolation. Nonetheless, Judaism, with its insistence on memory, provides some context for such a horrible event.

At the Yizkor service on Yom Kippur we mourn the impermanence of life. We speak about the brief years we are granted on earth, how all of our accomplishments are rooted in time. Inevitably, we scan the synagogue for those who worshipped with us last year who are now gone.

Reinforcing the theme of impermanence, Yom Kippur is followed by Sukkot. On Sukkot, we read the book of Ecclesiastes, with its insistence on the brevity and evanescence of all things. During that week, we also we dwell in a

, a flimsy hut that temporarily serves as a home.

Continued on page 2: »