I understood, finally, why women could hold factory jobs and even be \u201cforemen\u201d during WWII and yet be confined to the \u201chousewife\u201d role as soon as the war ended.\u00a0 I understood how women could be incredible and daring pilots during that war and as soon as the war ended, the idea of a woman pilot became laughable.\u00a0 I understand now how black women could be the preeminent mathematicians who drove the space program yet have the doors to academic math programs closed to them.<\/span><\/p>\n These events are there in our history, but they have never entered our collective memory.\u00a0 Memory is about meaning.\u00a0 Memory is active.\u00a0 One participates in memory, Yerushalmi says, in two powerful modes: ritual and recitation.\u00a0 During the Jewish Passover Seder, one recites the biblical passage that begins, \u201cMy father was a wandering Aramaen\u2026\u201d\u00a0 <\/span>My<\/b> father–first person.\u00a0 My <\/span>father<\/b>, not my mother.\u00a0 The yearly recitation and ritual is more powerful than the fact that, obviously, mothers as well as fathers left Egyptian slavery.\u00a0 In fact the whole story of\u00a0 the redemption from Egyptian slavery is a memory.\u00a0 Historically it\u2019s not even recorded. But the memory of this event, the ritual of it, the telling of it, is the one of the foundations of Jewish identity.<\/span><\/p>\n Jewish practice was not interested in history for a long time.\u00a0 In fact the actual study of history and historiography are new to the Jewish culture.\u00a0 History, as history divorced There is a command by God in the Bible. \u201cRemember…Do not forget.\u201d Black people have been killed and harmed by police officers for centuries, but white America continues to labor at forgetting those deaths.\u00a0 Without ritual, commemoration, recitation; with only written history, events fade and disappear.\u00a0 They become short paragraphs in obscure history papers.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n This last year must be remembered.\u00a0 We must commemorate what we all have lived.\u00a0 We must recite the truths about racism, about the acts that were committed–as well as those that were further revealed–, and the heroic resistance to those acts..\u00a0 The country needs an annual Day of Reckoning where we gather in ritual and recite the tale, acknowledge the sins we have tried to forget, and then pledge to remember.<\/span><\/p>\n <\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Memory and Historiography–the writing of history–are two forces that stand in opposition for the heart and soul of a people.\u00a0 Of the two, memory has much more power than history.\u00a0 I learned this from a small book I read in … Continue reading ![\"\"](\"https:\/\/sites.smith.edu\/religious-spiritual-life\/wp-content\/uploads\/sites\/126\/2019\/11\/Rhonda-Shapiro-Rieser.jpg\")
from faith and ritual, only began to be studied in the 1800s says Yerushalmi.\u00a0 To this day, Holocaust Memorial Day is not recogn<\/span>ized in the Ultra Orthodox community.\u00a0 In fact, the only post biblical holiday that exists on their Jewish religious calendar is Chanukah.\u00a0 And even then, the rabbis saw to it that Jews ritualized and recited the a-historic miracle of the single cruz of oil burning for eight days, not the historic military victory of the Maccabees over the Greeks.\u00a0<\/span>What is also essential in memory, writes Yerushalmi, is forgetting.\u00a0 It is easy to forget that which is not ritualized and recited.\u00a0 Martin Luther King does not have to enter the memory of white America if there is no yearly Martin Luther King day with a recitation of his deeds and the times in which he lived.\u00a0\u00a0<\/span><\/p>\n