The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

The Torah content for these two weeks has been sponsored by Judah and Naomi Dardik in loving memory of Rabbi Moskowitz zt''l, who taught his students to pursue truth by asking questions, who modeled love of Torah and learning, and who exemplified living a life of the mind.

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Artwork: Memory Leak, by Karl Kopinski

The Role of Episodic Memory in the Three Weeks and Tishah b'Av

Although this is technically 1-page long, I reference a bunch of other articles I’ve written. Ordinarily I wouldn’t rely on the reader’s familiarity with my previous content, nor would I expect them to read it. However, the goal of this article is to capture where my mind is at going into the Three Weeks. Since I find myself picking up where I left off, I have no choice but to reference these past ideas.

We have commenced the three weeks of mourning during which we reflect on the national flaws that led to the destruction of the two Temples and our present exile. Last summer I wrote a 1-page article about how the Three Weeks, the Nine Days, and Tishah b’Av are designed to induce “metaphysical trauma” on a national level. I wrote another 1-page article about how such trauma is necessary for national teshuvah. I wrote a third 1-page article explaining how the Tishah b’Av liturgy is designed to facilitate this type of teshuvah-from-trauma. I concluded by stressing the importance of allowing ourselves to really feel the unpleasant emotions awakened by our reading of Eichah and the kinnos in order to tap into the trauma which will “awaken our hearts and open the paths of teshuvah” (Rambam, Laws of Fasts 5:1).

This year I believe I have found a new way to induce the aforementioned trauma. This past week I wrote an overview of EFT (Episodic Future Thinking) and a follow-up article on how this technique can be integrated with halacha. Towards the end of Chapter 2 of Imaginable (pp.37-38), McGonigal introduces the following thought-experiment:

I want you to try one more time travel experiment with me. Imagination works both ways in time. So let’s take a ten-year trip in the opposite direction … I want you to picture in your mind’s eye a day more or less ten years ago today. Where would you have been on a typical day? What would you have been doing? Can you picture what you might have been wearing? Who were you with? What were you excited about ten years ago? What were you worried about? What life goal were you working toward, or what life problem were you trying to solve?

It might not be easy to recall all these details at first. Keep working at it. Like episodic future thinking, episodic memory also requires you to stretch your imagination – if only because you’re retrieving memories and reactivating thought patterns you haven’t used in a while … At the Institute for the Future, we call this technique “looking back to look forward.” It’s another excellent strategy for unsticking your mind. As the historian and activist Rebecca Solnit has written, “When you don’t know how much things have changed, you don’t see that they are changing or that they can change.”

As is true of all McGonigal’s exercises, the goal here is not to achieve factual accuracy, but to “learn to control your imagination” (p.33). By practicing episodic memory with your actual past, using your imagination to recall those lived experiences in rich detail, you will become proficient in simulating future experiences with a higher degree of realism.

Halacha obligates us to practice episodic memory on at least one occasion: Pesach night. “In each and every generation a person is obligated to see themselves as though they, themselves, left Egypt” (Hagadah). As a source for this injunction, Rambam (Laws of Chametz and Matzah 7:6) cites: “you shall remember that you were a slave” (Devarim 5:14). In other words, we are commanded to remember events that didn’t actually happen to us as if we lived through them. The intellectual objectives of the Pesach seder cannot be achieved without this use of the imagination.

Likewise, the vividly horrific descriptions of the tragic events depicted in Eichah and the kinnos are also designed to facilitate episodic memory – provided we are willing to take that extra step. For instance, instead of merely reading Kinnah #17 and reacting to the depiction of Jewish women being forced to cannibalize their own children, we should use our imagination to simulate what it might be like for us to live through a time of such starvation and desperation that we are forced to engage in the unthinkable. Will this exercise be traumatic? Yes. And that is precisely the point.

The final chapter of Eichah begins with a plea: “Remember, Hashem, what happened to us; look and see our disgrace” (Eichah 5:1). We know that Hashem sees everything and never forgets anything. Thus, when we beseech Him to remember and see, He expects us to do the same. And unless we do so on a visceral level, then we will not be moved to national teshuvah.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you.

If you would like to sponsor a day's or a week's worth of content, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone.

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  Email me if you'd like to be added to my WhatsApp group where I share all of my content and public shiur info. 

Tishah b’Av 5781: An Approach to the Blasphemy in Eichah and Kinnos

This week's Torah content is sponsored by the Reznik family in dedication to the loving memory of Silvia Tanzer (Sora Hesha bas Chaim Moshe) and Irving Tanzer (Yisroel ben Yechezkel).

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Artwork: Doom Blade, by Matthew G. Lewis

Tishah b'Av 5781: An Approach to the Blasphemy in Eichah and Kinnos

“[Hashem] has drawn back His right hand from before the enemy” (Eichah 2:3) “[Hashem] has bent His bow like an enemy, with His right hand set like a tormentor” (ibid. 2:4) “My Lord was like an enemy” (ibid. 2:5)

First Hashem is described as withdrawing His protective right hand, allowing the enemy to attack. Then He is depicted as taking up arms and joining our enemy in its assault. Finally, Hashem, Himself, is identified as our enemy. What insight do these pesukim offer? What is the significance of this progression?

The answer is that this is actually a regression. The first pasuk is the accurate perspective: when we turn away from Hashem, He withdraws His protection, leaving us vulnerable to our enemies. The second pasuk reflects a warped view of Hashem, in which He is characterized as committing treason against His own people. The third pasuk is the worst distortion of them all, in which Hashem is the enemy of the Jews.

Why would Eichah cater to distorted portrayals of Hashem? The same may be asked about the kinnos (liturgical lamentations), which are replete with harsh, inappropriate, even blasphemous statements of this nature. How are we to make sense of such statements? What are we to think when reciting them?

When we suffer a horrific catastrophe – whether the destruction of the Beis ha’Mikdash, or the Holocaust, or even a personal tragedy – there are parts of us which feel that Hashem is like a malicious enemy. This is false, “for He does not afflict maliciously, nor cause the hearts of men to suffer” (ibid. 3:33). It is tempting to think that knowledge alone is the solution – that we can simply supplant falsehood with truth. This approach will not succeed. If we neglect to address these misguided parts of ourselves on their own terms, we will succeed only in driving them underground, where they will continue to affect our minds and hearts in an even more insidious manner. Instead, we must acknowledge that we have these parts of ourselves. We must give expression to them, allowing them to say what they think and feel what they feel. Only when they feel seen and heard will they be receptive to truth. Only then can the healing begin.

Anthony de Mello’s analogy in Awareness: the Perils and Opportunities of Reality illustrates this point:

This reminds me of this fellow in London after the war. He’s sitting with a parcel wrapped in brown paper in his lap; it’s a big, heavy object. The bus conductor comes up to him and says, “What do you have on your lap there?” And the man says, “This is an unexploded bomb. We dug it out of the garden and I’m taking it to the police station.” The conductor says, “You don’t want to carry that on your lap. Put it under the seat.”

The distorted conceptions of Hashem carried by our inner parts are like bombs we carry on our laps. To uncritically embrace these false views as true would be to detonate the bombs. We must seek knowledge of Hashem, led by our tzelem Elokim (intellect) and guided by Torah. But that is not enough. If we dismiss, deny, or “exile” the parts of ourselves that harbor these false views of Hashem, all we’re doing is taking the unexploded bombs and putting them under our seats. This is worse than keeping them on our laps, insofar as we convince ourselves that we’ve eliminated the threat when all we’ve done is hidden it. All it takes is for the bus to be jostled in the wrong way, and these hidden bombs will explode.

There is a third option: to acknowledge the bombs we are carrying, to accept our precarious state, and from that place of awareness, apply our knowledge to diffuse them. This is the intent of Eichah and kinnos: to make us aware of and feel the distorted perspectives we harbor, to accept and feel the precarious metaphysical danger we are in, and from that place of visceral intellectual recognition, to help us “unburden” these misguided parts of ourselves through knowledge and teshuvah and the light of truth.

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If you've gained from what you've learned here, please consider contributing to my Patreon at www.patreon.com/rabbischneeweiss. Alternatively, if you would like to make a direct contribution to the "Rabbi Schneeweiss Torah Content Fund," my Venmo is @Matt-Schneeweiss, and my Zelle/Chase QuickPay and PayPal are mattschneeweiss at gmail.com. Even a small contribution goes a long way to covering the costs of my podcasts, and will provide me with the financial freedom to produce even more Torah content for you. 

If you would like to sponsor an article, shiur, or podcast episode, or if you are interested in enlisting my services as a teacher or tutor, you can reach me at rabbischneeweiss at gmail.com. Thank you to my listeners for listening, thank you to my readers for reading, and thank you to my supporters for supporting my efforts to make Torah ideas available and accessible to everyone. 

Be sure to check out my YouTube channel and my podcasts: "The Mishlei Podcast", "The Stoic Jew" Podcast, "Rambam Bekius" Podcast, "Machshavah Lab" Podcast, "The Tefilah Podcast"  For the full guide to all of my Torah content, click here.