By Rabbis Michael Leo Samuel and Bernhard Rosenberg
Elie Wiesel said that to forget the dead is to kill them a second time. He also said that no commandment in the Bible is repeated as often, or as insistently, as the call to remember. Forgetting, he warned, makes us accomplices. Memory, in our tradition, is not a mood. It is a mitzvah. And a mitzvah is something you do. It is not passive. It answers. It refuses to let the dead be edited out of the world.
Three years ago this morning, Hamas and those who ran in behind them filmed themselves. They filmed the murder. They filmed the rape. They filmed families burned in their houses and children taken from their beds. More than twelve hundred people were killed. More than two hundred and fifty were dragged into Gaza. The cameras were theirs. The denial came later, from people who had already seen the film.
Weeks after that day, Ahed Tamimi said aloud what the slogans usually hide. “We will slaughter you,” she said, “and you will say that what Hitler did to you was a joke. We will drink your blood and eat your skull. Come on, we are waiting for you.” That is not a land dispute. That is not a cry for justice. It is the old boast that Hitler did not go far enough.
Before Israel had buried its dead, the war on memory had already begun. Palestinian assailants and their Western enablers filled university quads and city streets, chanting from the river to the sea — a code for the disappearance of the Jews — some of them marching while the killing was still going on. No sooner was there a grave to stand beside than the story was turned inside out.
Our Torah already knows this voice. “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way, when you came out of Egypt… you shall not forget.” Amalek did not meet an army. Amalek struck the weary and the stragglers, the ones at the back who could not keep up. The commandment that follows is not “feel strongly.” It is remember, and because you remember, do not let the name of that attack be washed clean. Memory that stops at a sigh is not the mitzvah. The mitzvah is to keep the fact from being rewritten as its opposite.
That is what we watched happen to the posters. A child’s face on a lamppost is a small act of memory. To tear it down, to shred it, to rage at the paper because the paper says a Jew was taken — that is an act against memory. First the face goes. Then the claim that there was a victim goes. Then the murderer is renamed the aggrieved. We have heard that reversal spoken as a public language, in universities, in newsrooms, in streets.
October 7 was aimed at civilians as civilians. It was filmed as a boast. It was celebrated in the language of slaughter and blood. Then it was denied by people holding the footage. The obligation that follows is plain. Say the names of the murdered. Say the names of the taken. Refuse the word “genocide” when it is used as a curse to invert a war of self-defense. Do not let a slogan do the work of forgetting. Repetition is how forgetting is manufactured.
Israel buried its dead. It brought home its hostages, the living and the dead. It does not need a lecture on courage from those who spent the day of the massacre organizing a march. What it needs from the rest of us is harder than sympathy. It needs us not to become the instruments of its erasure.
Wiesel was right. If we forget, we are guilty. We are accomplices. Memory, here, is a form of alliance. Forgetting is abandonment. And abandonment dressed up as conscience is a very old garment.
We say “never again” easily. The tradition is less comforting. It says: remember. And because you remember, do not stand aside. Do not let the truth be taken down from the wall.
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Rabbi Dr. Michael Leo Samuel is spiritual leader of Temple Beth
Shalom in Chula Vista, California. Rabbi Dr. Bernhard Rosenberg is rabbi emeritus of Congregation Beth El in Edison, New Jersey.