What matters in life
is not what happens to you
but what you remember
and how you tell it.
Gabriel
Garcia Marquez, Living to Tell the Tale
In
the opening verses of this week’s Torah portion God makes a scandalous
statement regarding the reason for the calamities of slavery, suffering and plagues
in Egypt:
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God said to Moshe:
Go to
Pharaoh; for I have hardened his
heart and the heart of his officials,
in order
that I may show these signs of mine among them,
and in
order that you may tell your children
and grandchildren how I have made fools of the Egyptians and what
signs I have done among them—so that you may know that I am the Lord.
Shemot 10
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וַיֹּאמֶר ה' אֶל מֹשֶׁה:
בֹּא אֶל פַּרְעֹה כִּי אֲנִי הִכְבַּדְתִּי אֶת לִבּוֹ
וְאֶת לֵב עֲבָדָיו
לְמַעַן שִׁתִי אֹתֹתַי אֵלֶּה בְּקִרְבּוֹ.
וּלְמַעַן תְּסַפֵּר בְּאָזְנֵי בִנְךָ וּבֶן בִּנְךָ
אֵת אֲשֶׁר הִתְעַלַּלְתִּי בְּמִצְרַיִם
וְאֶת אֹתֹתַי אֲשֶׁר שַׂמְתִּי בָם
וִידַעְתֶּם כִּי אֲנִי ה'.
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These
verses raise many ethical and psychological questions – the hardening of Pharaoh's heart, the campaign of plagues to show God’s power over Pharaoh - but it is the emphasis on storytelling which
is most fascinating to me in this verse. לְמַעַן תְּסַפֵּר - “In
order that you may tell” - what is
the power of this commandment that it is described as the raison d'être of the
exodus?
The
first chapter of Exodus posits that Pharoah’s first sin was not remembering. He
is the King who “did not know Joseph”. The inability of Egyptian culture to
hold onto its stories was the beginning of the slippery slope to an oppressive
society. For the Torah, not remembering is original sin. As Yosef
Hayim Yerushalmi’s Zachor: (and Yehuda
Kurtzer’s Shuva) put it: What matters in Judaism is not history
– a word that doesn’t even exist in Hebrew – but memory, zikaron. I
would claim, following Gabrial Garcia Marquez: what matters in life is not
history, but storytelling – “not what happened, but what you remember and how
you tell it”.
As
an antidote to Pharoah’s memory loss, the Exodus is framed first of all as an
act of storytelling. Indeed, our parasha flips the usual order of things:
Rather than claiming that history “happened”, and now we are faced with how to
tell its story (most accurately and objectively?), the Torah claims that history
happens in order that we have a story to tell: “I have hardened
his heart… in order that you may tell”. History happens for the story.
It
is becoming increasingly clear across academic fields that the stories we tell
– to our friends, our children, ourselves – are the determining factor in our worldview, decision-making
and happiness. Moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt argues
that the basic narratives we tell (the “sacred stories”) explain our political
and social instincts (and he’s good at telling that story in all the formats of
contemporary storytelling: book, OpEd, TED talk). Stories
determine political choices, but also intensely personal ones: figuring out our
own story, and the stories we tell of the world, are a crucial factor in the
professional and intimate choices we make in life.
Nowhere
is the need for storytelling felt more than in parenting. Storytelling is the
central drama of the Exodus story, and it is brought to the fore at the
Passover Seder, with its stress on the mitzvah of והגדת לבנך - what
story will we tell our children? The Haggadah, like the act of storytelling
– and like parenting - must be dynamic,
never frozen. The Rabbinic authors of the Haggadah wanted parents to each write
their own “Haggadah”. History has proven them right: the Haggadah is the book
with the most editions in world history (I cheated by writing
a Haggadah with my father, which I’m still not sure what my children
will do with. Jonathan Safran Foer beautifully described storytelling
to his child as the reason for making his own Haggadah. Edgar Bronfman is publishing his version this
year, and Haggadot.com invites each of
us to DIY. It’s never to early to prepare for Pesach…)
Storytelling
is not only distinguished from objective history or passive memory, it is also
distinguished from one-dimensional ideology. Stories are vessels for questions,
not certainty. In the annals of Jerusalem intelligentsia it is told that Gershom
Scholem would fume about the fact that SY Agnon, the Nobel prize winning novelist,
would never answer a question head on, especially questions regarding his
religious belief.
“Whenever I would ask him
about his faith, or any other pointed question for that matter, he would always
evade giving a straight answer and instead smile and say: ‘Let me tell you a
story!’
What
does it mean when one answers a question only with a story? Milan Kundera,
another great storyteller, suggests that the choice of genre – story/novel,
over assertion/manifesto - is an ideology in itself:
 |
| Milan Kundera |
A
novel does not assert anything; a novel searches and poses questions I invent
stories, confront one with another, and by this means I ask questions. The
stupidity of people comes from having an answer for everything. The wisdom of
the novel comes from having a question for everything...
The
novelist teaches the reader to comprehend the world as a question. There is
wisdom and tolerance in that attitude. In a world built on sacrosanct
certainties the novel is dead. The totalitarian world is a world of answers
rather than questions. There, the novel has no place.
In
any case, it seems to me that all over the world people nowadays prefer to
judge rather than to understand, to answer rather than ask, so that the voice
of the novel can hardly be heard over the noisy foolishness of human
certainties.
Milan Kundera, from Afterword:
A Talk with the Author an interview by Philip Roth reprinted in The Book
of Laughter and Forgetting, Penguin,
1981, page 237
The
commandment of “לְמַעַן תְּסַפֵּר - “In
order that you may tell” rings loud and clear in my ears. As we grapple with
the questions of our own lives, and equip others with the tools to do the same,
storytelling is in itself the most powerful answer. Talmud Torah, the
central Jewish practice of learning, is in essence engaging in the act of
constant storytelling – to ourselves and to others. The memories, the narrative
schemes, the twists of plot and the conflicts through which questions are asked
in stories, hold the key to redemption. It is through storytelling that the Promised
Land is achieved.
