Memories, Chazarah, & What We Know By Heart
A crossroads of what is grasped, what is conveyed, and what scatters...
What will become of all the memories? Are they to scatter with the dust in the breeze?
Lyrics to a song on one of the few cassette tapes that frequented our car rides when I was young. Most of the music we were allowed to listen to was Jewish. Or classical music. There was one Jewish series of cassettes, which consisted of all sorts of covers of mainstream rock or pop songs that were changed to speak to various aspects of Jewish history and Jewish life. So basically, a bit of plagiarism. It’s funny to be older now and to have references for all of these songs. Elton John’s A Candle in The Wind, Bobby Pickett’s The Monster Mash, and many others were all very different to me back then.
But after blowing up my family chat trying to find this song- it turns out it was on a different cassette tape than the funny covers. Memories was a song about a Holocaust survivor and what happens to their memories as the last survivors pass away. The lyrics tugged at my baby heart and I’d go into premature existential crisis listening to the words and wondering where, in fact, where do all these memories and lives go?
I was looking for one of my own memories this week- someone I met many years ago was slipping from this realm and I wanted to try and remember something about her. In searching some related words in the “all inboxes” feature of the email search in my phone, I stumbled upon an old 20,000 word manuscript for a memoir that I wrote twelve years ago. For what it’s worth I’m so glad I haven’t published anything like that yet. There’s something to getting older and becoming more embodied before that sort of expression. But anyway, I speed-read through it, reviewing memories and stories I’ve recounted over and over and something struck me. I have already forgotten so much. Some of these stories that come up and get retold regularly, are ones I had once written freshly with vivid detail and so much of that is completely gone from the recollections I can access now. Which begs the question, what are memories and stories even for? I know there is science out there that speaks to this dilution of truth and details as soon as something happens- our memories of each experience and encounter (even right afterwards) are slightly warped- through the lens of our interpretation; some details missed, others amplified. It’s like that game of telephone, when you try and say something exactly as it was just told to you, but cannot fully grasp it. It makes me wonder about the power of stories- however imperfect- but the telling and retelling of them keeps the essence of something alive.
Something we say in Jewish culture when someone dies is, “may their memory be a blessing.” May we be able to remember them. And may these memories be a blessing for us in-and-for-the world we still occupy here and now. So another fitting blessing for someone in mourning is, “may your memories of and with them stay vivid in your mind.” Because in this way, if memories remain sharp and details stick around, these stories and their essence can be preserved. I think about how each week in synagogue we read a portion of the Torah. These readings are spaced out so that the entire Torah is completed each year, and once we finish the year’s cycle we immediately begin it again. We start the first reading of Bereishit directly after finishing V’zot Habracha, during the same Shabbat. Over and over and over again in synagogues all over the world the same words of our history and heritage are repeated. The telling and retelling of the same words throughout generations to preserve the stories. When I was in grade school we would learn a full day of dual curriculum- always Jewish and Hebrew subjects in the morning and secular subjects in the afternoon. And part of the Jewish homework was chazarah. Review. Because repetition ensures less would be forgotten by the next day. By the next year. By the next decade. By the next generation.
Lately, I’ve been called upon by friends and loved ones to help support various cycle of life events that they’re going through. Birth, death, marriage, and everything in between. This sort of undertaking is one I’m reverent about- especially when some of this in depth Jewish education I had can be dusted off and brought to life for such important moments. But in preparation for each event, I’m reminded how much I’ve forgotten. I was leading a blessing at a wedding meal a few weeks ago and fully said the wrong words out loud in front of all those people. I sometimes have to google search for details of matters or history that used to be something I knew by heart. It’s been 20 years since I’ve been fully immersed in these teachings and daily routines, so of course it’s less immediate. But what’s really cool is, somehow even without Google as backup or weekly study, the essence of all these practices and stories are still very much there. And I get to spin new forms of meaning for myself and for the ones I love.
So often when we have a profound experience or beautiful day, we say “I’ll never forget it.” This is a common caption on instagram or something we proudly declare to our friends. And sometimes I get a bitter cynical feeling when I see this, because I know how much vivid moments can fade, but what I’m realizing more and more, is that memories are part fact and part feeling. The look on a person’s face when they spoke certain words to you, the way your body or belly or heart felt in a particular moment, times of expansiveness or constriction, times of connection or isolation. Maybe these feelings are something that can be tapped into in ways we don’t need to quantify.
I took my first real piano lesson a couple of weeks ago. Since I was 6 years old, this has been a deep wish of mine. I remember (yes, by memory and by confirmation of old diaries) my best friend having weekly piano lessons with her teacher Maddie who had long red fingernails. My best friend hated piano lessons, and I was envious of them. We couldn’t afford piano lessons and though my mother tried her best to teach me what she knew from her childhood music books- it really wasn’t enough. They tried hiring a high-school student from my older sister’s school to teach me, and she taught me one rolling left hand chord before she got engaged and couldn’t teach me anymore. So the piano became the companion of my heart- I’d sit and teach myself by ear. I remember buying the sheet music to the Titanic theme song and laboring over it until I could read and play it. But eventually I gave up on the formal aspect of learning music, and started writing melodies on the piano. Maybe it’s wrong to say “writing.” A certain feeling would hit me and I’d go into an almost trance-like state and my fingers would move and a melody would appear. There are only three pianos that this magic would happen for me on. One is my childhood piano, and the first melody that came to me was after finding out about the sudden death of my older half-sister’s father in 2009. I was overcome with sadness for my sister and didn’t know how to show up or what to say. I sat down and music came out of my fingers for her. I don’t know if I ever even played it for her, but I know that I can sit down and play it now. Each of the melodies that came in this way are what I refer to as “feelings.” They’ve never really had lyrics, and they always showed up without me trying very hard, and when they did I’d play them over and over again until they were ingrained in my body. My own version of chazarah, my own method of capturing memories in feeling.
6 years ago, my mother was moving and she paid for my childhood piano to be moved from the east coast to my house here in Portland. On it, sits the Shabbat candlesticks that my mother’s mother’s mother gave to my mother for her bat mitzvah. They sit on a ceramic blue platter that my mother made with her own hands. Above the piano sits a ledge shelf, and a whole slew of old photographs of our ancestors- mine and Adam’s. These are the people who are long gone, and who I still randomly text my uncle or Adam’s mother about, to get the facts before they are scattered with the dust in the breeze. It’s ironic how much I cling to the stories and details of these ancestors' lives despite the fact that we don’t have children. Sometimes I wonder why I need them and where they will go if I’m the only one asking. On the music desk of the piano, sits a photo of me as a baby- likely a little over one year old- sitting at this very piano.
I have a customer who periodically still comes to visit since moving from Seattle. She says she drives down to Portland for her hair appointment, and will always come to the shop when she does. A couple of years ago we got into a conversation about music and I told her I’ve been dragging my feet to start piano lessons. A few months ago, she told me she had just bought herself a saxophone. We decided that we’d be accountability partners for committing to lessons. And the last time she visited, I said earnestly that the next time I see her I will have found a teacher.
Pluto moved into Aquarius last month and apparently this means it will have to do with my daily work habits and health routines. For me, I think this means finally using the sauna and cold plunge that sits in our backyard regularly, sitting in my new writing room each morning even if I haven’t yet found the perfect rug or overhead light (because let’s be real, I don’t use overhead lights, anyway). But it also means sitting at my piano and toiling over something I’ve long wished to commit to. It’s knowing that habits are not built by perfection, but by showing up and making space for them just a bit more often. It’s reviewing, refining, redefining, remembering, and tending to the essence alongside the details.
What will become of all the memories, are they to scatter with the dust in the breeze?
What if what’s scattered in the breeze becomes something new. What if it emerges with my fingers on the keys. A stroke of insight. A recollection that will never be fully grasped but somehow always conveyed. Beyond the structure and reason and data is an energy that never dies.
