In the wake of Kristallnacht and Remembrance Day, I have been thinking about the practice of remembering.

Remembering can go two ways. It can be a terribly destructive exercise or remembering can be a declaration of freedom and healing.

Some remembering is like picking the scab off an old wound. The pain and grief of the original injury are brought to the surface only to be aggravated with renewed destructive energy.  Ancient injustices, wrongs, betrayals, and sorrows are recited with as much intensity as if they had happened yesterday.The litany of my suffering plays over and over in the dark little prison of my mind, poisoning the present and destroying my hope of freedom in the future.

When I cling to the brokenness of my history, I create an identity out of my suffering. I become the person who has been wronged, the person who has been betrayed, let down, hurt by life. The stories I tell myself give the events of my past paralyzing power in my present, even though the actual events they narrate may have taken place in the dark recesses of history. It is hard to avoid the pain of a thorn clasped in my clenched fist.

Are forgetting, repressing, and denying the only alternative to destructive remembering? Is there a way to remember difficult realities without allowing those memories to continue to paralyze the present? What kind of remembering has the power to bring freedom and healing?

The key to healthy remembering resides in my awareness that my true identity does not reside in anything that happens or has ever happened in my life. I am not the things I have done in the past, or the things that have been done to me. I am not defined by my behaviour in the present or by the way people respond to me.

When I am remembering in a healthy way, I look at the events of my past, feel their pain with compassion, but at the same time stand aside from those events almost as if they had happened to someone else. What I call my “history” is really just my story, the story I tell myself about what has taken place in the past. When I recognize that my “history “is all interpretation, I begin to be able to re-frame my past with a different more liberating narrative.

Healthy remembering has nothing to do with forgetting or denial. I do not need to forget or deny my past, because my history no longer has the power to define or control my life. Remembering past pain offers a path to freedom as I see through the painful realities I have experienced to the light of truth that knows these horrors say nothing about the person I am.

I begin to see the suffering of the past as the means by which the incrustations that have obscured the luminous reality of my deepest self are being slowly chipped away opening me to the deeper reality of my true being. The pain I have known becomes a tool that loosens the obsessions of my life that have obscured my awareness of the steady strength that resides at the heart of my life.

As I cease to define myself by my past, I begin to open to the unchanging and unchangeable steady reality I call God that is the solid ground of my being. My need for self-protection begins to ease as I discover that the strength within me is stronger and more real than anything I have ever experienced. I am free to remember in order to benefit from the lessons of the past but without continuing to give those difficult circumstances power in my present.

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In her short, but grim memoir The War From Within, Sophie Goetzel-Leviathan recounts her time in the Warsaw Ghetto, then the months she spent hiding in a basement on the Aryan side of the city before being captured and interned for nineteen months in Bergen-Belsen.

At the end of her memoir, written just months after her “liberation”, Goetzel-Leviathan writes,

Should I say that I would be glad to erase those years, or shout I say I regret their passing? I do not know. True, they brought bitterness, pain and torment, but perhaps they made us richer; perhaps they taught us to treasure life more than ever. There have been moments when death was so close to us that we thought our lives had come to an end. There have been weeks and months in which we were dazed, in which we lived without feelings, and almost as if we were dead. We thought we could never laugh, never rejoice again, but two months of feredom have brought us to life. We can rejoice! Our hearts are sensitive to sadness, happiness, and love.

Life lies ahead of us. Unfathomable, inscrutable life pushes us forward on its constant, immutable course. From somewhere deep within me Goethe’s words surface into the present moment. Only after all our experience and all our sufferings, do I realize their greatness:

For as long as you do not have
this: ‘death and birth,’
You are but a gloomy guest
On the dark earth.

Sadly, judging by what I am able to glean from the google translation of her German Wikepedia page, Sophie Goetzel-Leviathan’s optimism about he future was not entirely fulfilled.

On 23 June 1945 Sophie emigrated to Palestine with her husband David where they settled in Haifa.

There, Sophie took the name Goetzel-Leviathan. Since she suffered from severe depression that could not be cured in the following years, her daughter Miriam grew up on a kibbutz. Two years after their divorce in 1946, David remarried and in 1950 he and his new wife moved to the United States. Sophie Goetzel-Leviathan never escaped from depression and died in Jerusalem in 1994.

For some people the memories of the past seem impossible to  let go. But there are always more or less healing ways to remember. To whatever small degree we are able, we will experience greater freedom and life if we are able to remember in ways that bring light and hope.