Ki Teitzei: Remembering and Forgetting
According to the Alter Rebbe, Rabbi Schneur Zalman of Liadi, remembering Amalek is one of the “Six Remembrances” that God tells Jews they should remember each day. The remembrances are a mixed bag of miracles, gifts, and painful moments in our history, but none are as devastating as Amalek’s attack, about which we receive puzzling instructions in this week’s parsha (Torah portion):
17 You shall remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you went out of Egypt,
18 how he happened upon you on the way and cut off all the stragglers at your rear, when you were faint and weary, and he did not fear God.
19 [Therefore,] it will be, when the One your God grants you respite from all your enemies around [you] in the land which the Eternal, your God, gives to you as an inheritance to possess, that you shall obliterate the remembrance of Amalek from beneath the heavens. You shall not forget!
- Devarim 25:17-19
Amalek did the worst possible thing to us. He took advantage of us when we were tired, raw, vulnerable and scared. He represents the trauma that so many of us carry from times when we were too young or too powerless to fight back against people that hurt us. Why would that be something we want to remember? And what does it mean to both obliterate the remembrance of Amalek and remember him every day?
1. Remembering/forgetting is a way of being in touch with stored trauma,
I want to suggest three possible explanations:
2. Remembering is a way of illuminating resilience, and
3. Remembering is a way to prime the heart for compassion.
I. Remembering and Forgetting: The Legacy of Trauma
One of the reasons we may be told to remember Amalek is because some part of us already does. The trauma from the Amaleks of the world has been stored in our bodies and our hearts. Rather than become aware of it, most of us habitually repress
these memories and/or we live within them like a layer of cloud that prevents us from seeing clearly or living freely. Those who suffer from PTSD persistently, painfully relive their trauma, feeling the victimization and the fear over and over again long after the incident is over.
In his article, “Amalek and 9/11: Remember to Forget!” Rabbi Brant Rosen writes that this week’s parsha is similar to a form of treatment for PTSD – exposure therapy. Exposure therapy is a way to expose PTSD sufferers directly to their trauma - either through talking about it, or through a mixture of talk and somatic re-living of the event with the help of the therapist. Slowly, the traumatized person begins to gain control over his/her memories by allowing the pain and the fear to express themselves in the light of day, rather than stay hidden in shadows. Rosen writes,
“[I]t occurs to me that our regular reading and discussion of the Amalekites’ attack represents a kind of “spiritual exposure therapy”… [B]y telling the story, we seek to “blot out” or liberate ourselves from the painful, crippling impact of these memories. In a sense, this commandment bids us to eradicate the aspects of our collective traumatic past that ultimately serve to keep us enslaved and imprisoned.”
When we bring our attention to the pain stored in our bodies, we liberate it. We allow our bodies to let it go and forget it. This needs to happen over and over again, which is why we must remember to forget every day. Gradually, over time, Amalek might become just a memory in the mind and not a trigger in the body
II. Remembering Resilience
Every time we remember Amalek, we also remember that we survived. We made it to the other side. When I am facing a difficult time in my life, one of the most helpful things for me to remember is that I made it through painful, wrenching events of the past. Mary Oliver’s line in the poem “Heavy” says it beautifully:
That time I thought I could not go any closer to grief without dying, I went closer, and I did not die.
Somehow, we did not die, and so we can make it through the next hard thing. This is resilience. This is what changes us from victims to survivors.
III. Seasoning the Heart
One of my meditation teachers, Shoshana Cooper, once gave a talk in which she talked about the trauma that she carried around for most of her life – the suicide of her father when she was a young woman. Despite spending a large portion of her life processing her grief, she said that she could still feel herself carrying it through the decades as she grew older. One day she met with a peace activist from Rwanda. This young woman had survived the genocide in that country, suffering unspeakable violence. She had lost everyone she knew and loved. In the aftermath, she dedicated
her life to peace-building efforts. Shoshana described how being around this woman felt like being in a “parking lot” of expansive space, filled with compassion for the suffering of others, born of a deep understanding of that suffering. Shoshana described feeling like she could park her “trauma car” in this woman’s “parking lot” of a heart, and feel held, contained and healed.
Remembering Amalek, or truly understanding our trauma, enables us to become “parking lots” for the pain of others. This is not the same thing as saying bad things happen to us for a reason. They don’t – they simply happen. Nevertheless, we can take and use the bad things that happen to us to season and tenderize our hearts and help others. We “obliterate” Amalek by using the pain he caused to bring more light and healing to the world.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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