Remembering Requires Action

Jewish Lessons

How important is it to remember? Incredibly important. I am not talking about remembering where I put the keys or every detail from the high school prom. They are important, and can be annoying when forgotten, but they are not incredibly important.

Incredibly important is when you are building a national consciousness and shared history. This is something the Jewish people are incredibly good at. Engraved into our common memory are the Exodus from Egypt, the receiving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai and the destruction that was the Holocaust, just to name a few. We have stories, songs, family feasts, and communal gatherings to mourn and celebrate.

This week’s Parsha, Va’yera, tells the story of the Akeda, the Binding of Yitzhak. It is the story of devotion, of sacrifice and of change. The rams horn, shofar, sounded on Rosh HaShanah and Yom Kippur, remind us of Yitzhak being saved and call us to reassess our ways and repent. The sound of the shofar is a reminder that reverberates in our souls. Observant Jews read this story every morning as part of morning prayers, and it is brought up often in the liturgy, as a reminder to the generations and to Gd of the roots of the Jewish people.

We are at a point now where it is incredibly important to remember. We must remember the massacre that took place almost a month ago including all of its atrocities. The stories, the pictures, the video footage lay before us exactly what happened and who carried out these atrocities.

I bring this up because there is an information war going on and part of it is working to blur, distort and erase what happened. The people who are doing this are the same people celebrating the actions of Hamas and calling for more. We are all responsible to make sure they lose this war. That means shutting down attempts to whitewash the horrors. I am inserting a strong article by Caroline Glick about this issue, Why are the October 7th Atrocities being denied. That means sharing information and/or correcting those who are in doubt or misled. If we leave this up to the media, the war is lost. Our actions have real consequences on Israel’s ability to wage war against Hamas. We should also remember that this is not just Israel’s war against Hamas but that of all decent peoples.