We wandered into a shop there to browse and, not surprisingly, I noticed the swastika symbol on several items.
A few years ago, a local Hindu leader asked the question of whether the symbol, which means ‘well-being’ in Sanskrit, could ever be revived as a symbol of the good as opposed to a symbol of evil.
It may come as a surprise that the Coca Cola company sold a pendant in the 1920s advertising the brand, that featured ‘Drink Coca Cola, Bottles, 5 cents’ imprinted on the swastika.
I don’t recall any positive response to her suggestion. It’s unthinkable to us, especially at this time, with rising anti-Semitism here and abroad, to re-envision a symbol that came to be synonymous with the savage destruction of 6 million Jews and for allied armies to invade and re-conquer most of Europe to make sure the evil did not spread further around the world.
To even contemplate such a re-envisioning, we would have to accomplish willful forgetting. We’d have to re-condition ourselves when we see the symbol and detach it somehow from the way the Nazis used it.
There are two types of forgetting – one is accidental, and one is willful – and we find evidence of both in our Torah portion this week.
Accidental forgetting happens all the time – we get up and walk into the kitchen only to discover that we’ve completely forgotten what we needed to get or do. Most often this forgetting is not much of a problem since what we’re trying to remember is likely not so important that we cannot take care of it some time later.
Willful forgetting is something else – willful forgetting is an intentional way of revising our perspective on an event, really on anything, that completely changes our way of thinking about it. And this willfulness may well go against logic and what we’ve learned, or maybe haven’t learned, from our experiences.
Joseph, in our parsha, finds himself, awkwardly, in a situation both of accidental andwillful forgetting. What begins as accidental, or maybe better to say circumstantial, forgetting then turns into willful forgetting.
And as we discussed, the willfulness goes against all logic.
After Joseph interprets the dreams for his cellmates the baker and the chief cup-bearer, he asks the cup-bearer, sar ha’mashkim, when he goes free, to please make a good report of him to the Pharaoh so that Pharaoh will release him from jail.
Our reading will end today with this verse, “The chief-cupbearer did not remember Joseph, and he forgot him.”
Our tradition tends to read the two verbs as different types of forgetting – the Or Ha’Chaim teaches us that ‘did not remember’, in Hebrew, velo zachar, means he forgot Joseph’s name.
The words, ‘he forgot him’, according to Or Ha’Chaim, mean the following:
This verse also informs us that the chief butler subsequently forgot Joseph completely, he erased the incident from his heart. The Torah indicates that once one has decided not to remember something or somebody such a memory can be blocked out completely.
My thoroughly unscientific analysis is we tend to willfully forget, or try to forget, things that are painful. I find personally I tend not to stand around taking pictures during painful days and difficult events hoping to relive them. Of course, photography from wars, even the Holocaust, is important from a humanitarian point of view – we can only remember what we can see and hear, what we can experience, but for as many Holocaust survivors who choose to remember, to tell their stories, there are an equal number who never discuss it, who don’t make presentations, and don’t want to relive it.
Observers of the current wave of anti-Semitism, really the continuation of millennia of anti-Semitism, point to willful forgetting as a technique increasingly in vogue today.
I’d like to share with you some reflections from a recent article in the Guardian publication, an article written by Joe Mulhall (11/21/18)
Another fundamental difference between the nature of the alt-right’s denial and the denial of more traditional far-right movements is the lack of importance placed on the Holocaust. For many traditional far-right antisemites, the Holocaust represented the primary obstacle to the resurrection of their fascist creed. However, as a result of the increasing distance from the second world war and the young age of many alt-right activists, some perceive the Holocaust as ancient history…
For many young far-right activists the Holocaust is shorn of historical significance, diminished by time and absent from their collective consciousness, as it was not for previous generations throughout the postwar period. Far-right Holocaust denial is changing and if we are to be ready to fight back against those who seek to rewrite history for their own political ends, we have to understand how they are trying to do it…
We’re all on board as witnesses to anti-Semitism and the violence it produces – now after Pittsburgh, after Paris, and other tragedies around the world, we’ve experienced the violence and bloodshed ourselves, not that the hatred was ever old or fading into history for us.
We must raise the banner of willful remembering to push back against the tide of willful forgetting. If there’s ever been anything that all Jews of all ethnicities and movements can agree on, let’s hope it can be about this issue.
And may the bright lights of Chanukah, like the lights and colors of Diwali a few weeks ago, give us strength to stand strong even when darkness carries over into the light of day.
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