Memory
Rosh HaShanah Morning 5782
Rabbi Samuel M. Cohon, Congregation Beit Simcha, Tucson, AZ
There was a wonderful piece published in Sports Illustrated, a magazine which still comes out in the glossy hard-copy format I remember from youth. The article was written by David Simon, and features a kind of t’shuvah, a repentance he feels he must make because of an incident from childhood. When David Simon was a boy growing up in the Washington, DC suburbs he was a huge fan of the baseball team then known as the Washington Senators. The original Senators notoriously had not won much—their last pennant was in 1933—and had moved to Minnesota, and the expansion Senators who replaced them weren’t any better. The old slogan about Washington was true: “First in war, first in peace, and last in the American League.”
But Simon was a Jewish kid growing up in the area, and for a couple of years the Senators actually were pretty good. Their powerful offense was led by slugger Frank Howard and a first baseman named Mike Epstein, whose nickname was—I am not making this up—“SuperJew.” In Simon’s recollection, it’s Opening Day, and Mike Epstein is batting against Oakland A’s pitcher Vida Blue, and he writes of his childhood fandom for Epstein, “Is there a hero more tailored to my existence? Is it possible to overstate the sociocultural and psychological import of a power-hitting Hebrew playing first base for the Washington Senators, the hometown team of a slap-hitting Jewish runt from Silver Spring, Maryland? Surely Mike Epstein, standing astride my childhood like a colossus for all the Chosen, is a personalized gift from the God of my fathers.
“To whom I now pray: ‘Dear God… if you let Mike Epstein hit a home run right now I will never, ever skip Hebrew school again.’”
It is Opening Day of baseball season, and what could be more fitting than a Jewish home run to start a new year filled with promise?
Simon continues, “Whereupon the very next pitch is launched into the rightfield upper deck of Robert F. Kennedy Stadium… The Opening Day crowd cheered wildly because maybe, just maybe, this is the year… to begin the great Exodus from Egypt and [baseball] bondage.
“And here, now, comes the worst and most frightening image in this sequence of memory: the vision of that mop-headed boychild, arms above him cheering wildly, looking at his own image [in the mirror] as his moment of delirious joy evaporates into near Biblical loathing and terror.
“What did I just promise God?
“Oh.
“No.”
Simon continues:
“Within three weeks I was again cutting Hebrew school… hanging with friends, creeping down… to play basketball at Rock Creek Park…and a little more than a month after that thrilling Opening Day, Mike Epstein, my favorite player, was traded to the Athletics. And by the following season my entire hometown baseball franchise, the Senators, was shipped to Texas.
Simon goes on to talk beautifully, and Jewishly, about his efforts to somehow exorcise the demons created by his long ago boyhood sin, attributing his team’s failures to succeed to that vow taken so cavalierly and broken so soon by his 10 year-old self, and blackening not only his memory but the fate of his favorite franchise forever.
So finally, a few years ago, Simon calls up Mike Epstein, long-retired ballplayer and now also a retired businessman, and tells him the story.
And Epstein says, “Never happened… No way.”
Simon says, “What?”
And Epstein adds, “I never hit a home run off of Vida Blue, and I never hit a home run on Opening Day. You got it wrong.”
Simon says, “But I remember it.”
“Never happened,” Epstein repeats.
And when you look it up, as you can these days on the Baseball Reference website, you see that’s actually, factually true. This incident that tormented him for half a century never occurred. But by God, for David Simon it was such a clear memory! It really happened! It influenced his life and, just a little bit, his faith.
Only it didn’t. It really never happened.
Eventually, against all odds, after several long conversations, Simon somehow convinces Mike Epstein to join him in Washington, DC to be honored at a Nationals’ ballgame—only the game gets rained out. God clearly has a sense of humor. And then two days later, on Yom Kippur, Simon and Mike Epstein go to shul together in suburban DC and whatever atonement Simon has to make for that long ago vow, he makes. Strangely, a few years later, after a 95-year drought of World Championships in DC baseball, the Washington Nationals win the World Series, albeit without a single Jewish player.
It’s quite a story. I mean, this well-regarded national sportswriter had a vivid memory for half a century that is flat out wrong.
So what’s the deal with memories? Are our memories actually unreliable?
My friends, Rosh HaShanah has four names: Rosh HaShanah, of course, the head of the year; HaYom Harat Olam, the birthday of the world; Yom Teruah, the day of the shofar blasts; and Yom HaZikaron, the Day of Remembrance. Memory Day, if you please.
Each of these names has symbolic and ritual significance, and each is enshrined in our prayers with beautiful settings in words and music. Every aspect of Rosh HaShanah is important. Surely, then the Day of Remembrance, Memory Day, Yom HaZikaron matters a great deal indeed. After all, on Rosh HaShanah, Yom HaZikaron, we are commanded to remember our deeds in the past year and to repent and atone for the things we have done wrong.
But what if our memories aren’t actually true? What if things we remember aren’t real and didn’t happen the way we remember them?
Just what the heck is memory good for if it’s unreliable?
We have been discussing memory in my house of late, and I’ve learned a lot about it from my wife, Sophie, the psychologist; I think I remember most of it...
Our perception of memories is that they are like papers we stick in cardboard Pendaflex files, hard copies of things that happened to us or experiences we had, stored away in big cabinets in our brains, to be called up out of the storeroom when we need to reference them. That is, we have paper files in our brains somewhere labeled “grade school graduation” or “first kiss” or “Where I was on 9/11” or “that time I ate a habanero pepper” or “my son’s bris” or even “My bar mitzvah suit.” And when we want to remember that moment, we open up the file and pull it out and, poof, there it is, vivid and unchanged from when it happened.
As we shift from those old paper files to a fully digital age of cloud storage, the funny thing is that the icons we use to indicate the places we store things mimic the old obsolete file folders and cabinets. From the Xerox Star system to the Macintosh desktop to Microsoft Windows to your Google Drive or icloud storage, you can still see all your information in “files” that open up just like the old file folders in the metal drawers did.
Memories are just like that, right? Stored away ready to be recalled at any time.
Only it turns out that in recent years cognitive scientists have discovered when they studied the brain that that’s not true. The way memory works is much more interesting than that, and infinitely more subjective. When we first form a memory, new connections are created in our brains. Still, every time we try to remember something our brains must actually re-create that memory nearly from scratch. In order to have a “memory” that is close to the original, the most complex organ in our bodies has to gather a bunch of data from different parts of its internal structure. There are packets of information stored all across neural networks in our brains that are retrieved and brought together to recreate the memory afresh. It a little like the phrase in our morning service, b’chol yom tamid oseh ma’sei v’reisheet, every single day God continually creates the work of creation; similarly, we have to continually create our own memories.
That’s perhaps why certain stimuli—a scent or a phrase of music or the taste of a particular flavor—will trigger a sudden recollection. Only that recollection has to be remade in your brain, and often it’s not quite the same as the events it recalls. Our memories are colored by later experiences, influenced by things we have heard or seen, changed by other people’s stories about the same event.
That sensitivity to sensory experience—say, the smell of parsley and hard-boiled eggs reminding you it’s Passover, or the smell of creosote after a rainstorm making you feel young again, or the taste of a Madeleine cookie dipped in tea reminding Marcelle Proust of his childhood country house and starting him writing “The Remembrance of Things Past”—these are not hard and fast memories written in stone or even on paper. They are reinventions of the experience freshly formed between our synapses out of chemical and electrical impulses and arrangements of nuerons. And it turns out that they are not particularly reliable. What is it the Eagles sang, “Some dance to remember—some dance to forget”? Memory is a kind of dance of neurons and neurotransmitters in order to remember.
The great psychologist Oliver Sacks tackled precisely that problem, exposing the remarkable mechanisms by which we fabricate our memories, involuntarily blurring the line between the experienced and the assimilated:
“It is startling to realize that some of our most cherished memories may never have happened — or may have happened to someone else. I suspect that many of my enthusiasms and impulses, which seem entirely my own, have arisen from others’ suggestions, which have powerfully influenced me, consciously or unconsciously, and then been forgotten.”
Zchor Yemot Olam, remember the days of old, the Torah tells us in Deuteronomy—but just how do we really remember, and how accurate are those quite literally recreated memories?
Sacks continues, “There is… no mechanism in the mind or the brain for ensuring the truth, or at least the veridical character, of our recollections. We have no direct access to historical truth, and what we feel or assert to be true… depends as much on our imagination as our senses. There is no way by which the events of the world can be directly transmitted or recorded in our brains; they are experienced and constructed in a highly subjective way, which is different in every individual to begin with, and differently reinterpreted or reexperienced whenever they are recollected… Frequently, our only truth is narrative truth, the stories we tell each other, and ourselves—the stories we continually recategorize and refine. Such subjectivity is built into the very nature of memory, and follows from its basis and mechanisms in the human brain. The wonder is that aberrations of a gross sort are relatively rare, and that, for the most part, our memories are relatively solid and reliable.”
Not always though. Psychoanalyst Donald Spence makes a distinction between what he calls ‘historical truth’ and ‘narrative truth.’ Historical truth is what actually happened. Narrative truth is the story we tell ourselves about the same event, and sometimes it’s not so accurate. That’s why, as police and judges know well, eyewitness testimony is often inaccurate, shaped by preconceptions, later perceptions, popular media, emotions, adrenaline, and many other factors. Two eyewitnesses to the same event often tell quite different stories.
And that’s the memories of people whose brains work functionally well, without substantial memory loss. Oliver Zangwill, son of author Israel Zangwill, was a famous British neuropsychologist who investigated memory loss in brain-damaged patients. He was also a showman, and he owned a large, fancy fountain pen of intricate design. At the start of his first session with one new patient Zangwill showed him this unique pen. At the end of the session, he showed the patient the pen again and asked whether he recognized it; but the brain-damaged man replied, "No, I've never seen it before." Over the next 10 sessions psychologist Zangwill repeated this procedure, with the patient always denying that he had seen the pen before. Finally, in desperation, the therapist asked whether the patient recognized him. "Oh yes," said the patient, "Of course. You're the man with all those fountain pens."
This marvelous anecdote is about a man suffering from the memory loss occasioned by significant brain damage. Fortunately, we aren’t in that condition.
Or are we, just a bit? I wonder, at this time of year, if each of us can't tell a story of memory failure, from the past 12 months? Haven't we all, at one time or another, suffered a major memory lapse? Hasn't everyone here today shown a bit of significantly subjective memory over the year we have just completed?
We could be talking about any area of our lives. Because I'm afraid that none of us has lived up to all the promises we made last High Holidays. Anyone who pledged to live a life free of the faults exhibited in the previous twelve months—everyone who did that has failed, to one degree or another. Did you vow to control your temper? Undoubtedly you blew your stack sometimes. Did you promise to focus on your family, reorient your priorities toward your husband and children, to spend more time with your wife or your parents? Chances are it didn't quite work out the way you wanted it to last Yom Kippur. Perhaps you vowed not to commit lashon hara, not to speak badly about another person, not to gossip or slander another human being. But then you heard something juicy you just had to share, or someone did something rotten to you and you felt obliged to tell people all about it. You kind of forgot all about that vow.
These are human limitations; we have infinite capacity to change and improve, but strangely enough, we also seem to have a similarly infinite capacity to fail to remember what we are trying to change, and to screw up yet again. We are all human; we all fail; we all of us forget.
So how many people here made some kind of vow at last year's High Holidays? How many of you forgot those vows within a few days after Yom Kippur? How many made it a few weeks after Yom Kippur? How many of you lasted all the way to Chanukah? Yes, memory impaired, every blessed one of us. Subjectively remembering only what we think we should. Forgetful of what we committed ourselves to, and failing, yet again, to live up to the standard which we would like to establish.
If memory is essentially subjective, we are all gifted in the area of forgetting,
Perhaps the true meaning of Yom HaZikaron, the Memory Day of Remembering, if you will, is that it calls us to accurately and honestly try to remember just what we actually did over this past year. It pushes us to move from our subjective approach to something closer to historical memory. What did we do right? What did we do wrong? How can we strive to create better memories in 5782?
There is some help to be found here in our tradition on that score. For what we learn over these Ten Days of Return is that memory can actually be improved. Experts tell us that one of the best ways to improve memory is to carefully look back at events, examine them anew—I mean, they are new, in a way, aren’t they, each time we call them back?—and see if we have changed our approach to them. If we wish to change our behaviors, to truly transform our lives, we need to understand those memories as tools we can use to guide our future actions.
In fact, you can make a good case that this entire High Holy Day process is a way to cultivate that skill, to help us remember who we wish to be, and how we can become that person. It is a way to refresh those synapses that help us remember that we wish to create memories of kindness, generosity, respect, love, closeness, goodness. It is in this way that the famous dictum of the Ba’al Shem Tov can come true: Memory leads to redemption.
After a challenging year that many would like to forget, as we continue through the aseret yemai tshuvah, moving from this Yom haZikaron to a time of return, repair and renewal at Yom Kippur next week, may we each find ways to make our memories serve to inspire us to grow and change, and to make this a year of goodness. And may we create in 5782 memories that will bring only blessing.