We Jews have memories going back thirty six hundred years, and today, on Yom Kippur, we review our collective and personal memories, and ask God to do the same. Yet, what we choose to remember, or not, is a complex process.
Memory can be selective.
It can play tricks on us. In her novel, Stones From the River , Ursula Hegi tells about the town butcher, Herr Immers, who, in 1918, traded twenty pounds of sausage for an officer's uniform. He had himself photographed in this uniform, even though he had been, to his great shame, medically unfit and unable to enlist in the Kaiser's army. With the passage of years, he would come to believe that fabrication, and it would be unwise for his wife and customers to remind him otherwise. It was like that with many other events, and it took courage for the few, who would preserve the texture of the truth, not to let its fibers slip beneath the web of silence and collusion which people, often with the best of intentions- spun to sustain and protect one another.