The Fondness of a Forgotten Youth

The interplay of memory is part and parcel of everyone's life experience. There are things we forget, there are things we remember, and there are things others remind us of. 

My grandfather, my mother's father, used to quip in his old age that there's a benefit to forgetfulness; he can watch the same episode of "Law and Order," and every time it feels like new. 

Paranthetically, I once asked him if he had to teach any masechet, which one would it be, and he answered Sanhedrin, because he always liked systems of law, and how they can make society better. 

Recently, I had to grapple with memory, and its very essence, because, Yocheved, our oldest, was jealous of Rina, our youngest daughter, because I was carrying her on my shoulders. Yocheved asked, "How come you never carry me?" to which my wife responded, "But when you were Rina's age, Abba also carried you!" to which she said, "But I don't remember it! I want to remember him carrying me." 

In many ways, in its most unadulterated form, progress in life hinges on forgetfulness, because if we were too saturated or enmeshed, in too palpable of a level in the past, then we couldn't move on to the next stage of the present, and thereafter, the future that lies ahead. Thus, progress, moving on, entails that we winnow out that which is least important, perhaps, so that we can move beyond it and make decisions, forge new experiences and shape what is over and beyond the horizon. 

In the Parsha of Ekev, it is with that very interplay that Moshe Rabbeinu so dazzlingly broaches a future in which he, nor their parents, will be there to guide them. He reminds them of what Hashem did for them, and the struggles it also presented at the time to their fathers who had to encounter the barrenness of the desert, in which they only had Hashem to rely upon. 

The children who would go into Israel never had to experience manna for the first time, in an unprecedented way - and so, Moshe tells them, Hashem gave your parents manna or miraculous bread, that fell from Heaven, to "afflict them, and starve them," and perhaps even deprive them of the joys of harvesting and threshing and cooking and individual culinary pursuits - so that they could know that "not on bread alone does man subsist, but on the very word of God."

It was a generation whose exploits and struggles would have been forgotten, but Moshe Rabbeinu and Hashem, took it upon themselves, as loving parents to convey the collective, historical memory, the same way a father or mother reminds a child of their first words, or something embarassing they did, or something that shapes them as redolently as any memory they could remember on their own.