Reform Reflections: Remembering and forgetting

Last Shabbat I was in Vienna. The Shabbat before I was in New York. It is a great relief and a great distress to be back home in Jerusalem. The relief is understandable: this is where the people I love most in the world live, and in any case I regard it as a rare privilege to be part of this city and this country. The distress, of course, is a direct result of the horrific events Jerusalem has witnessed in the last few days.

In New York there were only two subjects on everyone's lips, and between them they managed to push Obama/Clinton into a distant third place. The first issue is the state of the American economy, the sense of an impending recession, perhaps even a crash. The second is of a quite different nature. It relates to the spectacular decline of the Governor of the State of New York, a man who until a few days was a paragon of virtue, a fearless legislator devoted to rooting out corruption and prostitution.

These two preoccupations have each added to a sense of instability and uncertainty. It is as if everything we thought of as stable and unwavering is now vulnerable and frail. It's a kind of macro-economic gloss to the key themes of the month of Adar and the season of Purim - everything you thought was one thing is in fact its opposite. It is those with the ability to imagine such absurdity who are often best equipped to cope with it. It's the ones who can't find perspective in times of instability who end up jumping out of their Executive Suites.

In Vienna the themes of remembering and forgetting, so central to Purim, are never far away. Experts on Austrian society suggest that it is by no means clear to what extent the legacy of the Nazi era is being confronted and processed by a new generation. The fact that the conference of the European Region of the World Union for Progressive Judaism which I attended co-incided with the seventieth anniversary of the Anschluss only accentuated the question of collective memory and collective amnesia. One of the delegates at the conference, a rabbi in our Reform congregation in Kiev, told of how his father had been amongst those to liberate Vienna with the Soviet Army, and of his feeling of returning to the city as a citizen of a post-Soviet society. It was moving and thought-provoking, and a reminder of the unpredictable upheavals of human history - surely yet another Purim motif.

Purim is a time for forgetting, but it's worth remembering what it is we are meant to forget. The controlled oblivion mandated by our tradition for this festival is meant to bring us some temporary relief from the problems which beset us. It is meant to highlight the absurdities and inanities of life. It is not a license to forget who we are.

Few would argue that we do indeed have many problems, and many enemies. The atrocious slaying at the Mercaz Harav Yeshiva was a reminder of this brutal truth. Those who died had hoped to celebrate the new month of Adar II, and their joy was turned into a bloodbath.

Many of those who shouted "Death to Arabs" and wrecked cars and property in the village of Jebl Mukaber on Sunday were not reacting primarily to the horror of the murders. They hold these views and approve of these behaviors all year round, and they were exploiting an outpouring of sorrow and anger to give a platform for their attitudes. When we Jews forget who we are and how we are meant to live in the world we do a disservice to all those who have gone before us. I do not pretend to know how we should respond adequately to the killing of these students, or to the incessant missile attacks on Sderot and elsewhere. I don't actually know how to break out of this cycle of attack and retaliation, and how to attain a positive dynamic of empowerment and dialogue. But there is one thing I do know: behaving like a barbaric mob is not the way. It is to forget who we are, and it is forbidden every day of the year.

As so often in recent years - after the Dizengoff bombing, after Baruch Goldstein - Purim this year has a bitter taste, and is fraught with difficulties. I myself will have trouble reading the sections of the Megillah which deal with the killing of Haman's extended family and many others, when I know that somewhere there are Jews reading the words literally and ready to interpret the text with rocks and sticks and insults - and maybe with even worse weapons.

But with all these difficulties, let's not allow our Purim to be hijacked. It can actually do what all the crazies have forgotten: it can help remind us who we really are.