As today is the last day of Sukkot (Festival of Booths), I wondered how does one retain the memory of an event that occurred 3500 years ago?
Sukkot commemorates the release of Israel (and others) from bondage in Egypt and Yahweh’s protection of them as they traveled to the Promised Land. Can you name another event that is over 3000 years old that is memorialized by so many people?
Most of history fades and we fail to learn from the past.
Young people today are not taught the past and therefore are doomed to repeat it. They embrace socialism because they are taught that capitalism is wicked – ignoring that capitalism is responsible for the life of relative ease and wealth (as compared to everyday life before the great innovators of the industrial period . . . that only happened in countries that embraced capitalism) and that socialism has always lead to extreme poverty and genocide.
We are not talking ancient history. The evils of Hitler (12 million killed), Stalin (30 million killed), Mao (70 million killed), and Pol Pot (2 million – one-third of his population!) were all committed less than 100 years ago. The evils of Castro, Chavez, and the Kims in Korea still exist today!
It is not that it hasn’t been done correctly, or by the right people, planned societies always fail because a central government cannot plan for every individual. Where they do not fail is in the accumulation of wealth and power in the people who administer the government. This is where the appeal comes from – those that cannot earn a fortune by producing goods and/or services that people want can grow rich by forcibly making you do what they want and buy what they want you to buy.
The people fleeing other countries and flooding across our border are not hoping we embrace socialism, they risked their lives and suffered great hardship to escape the effects of socialism in the countries they came from.
The contrast is best made by the photo of the two Koreas at night.
One embraced socialism and the other embraced capitalism. They are the same people with the same customs and history, but one manifests freedom and prosperity while the other manifests oppression, poverty, and hunger (except for the elites, who live and eat well).
Democrats are fervently trying to destroy and/or tarnish the history of this country so that people cannot make learned decisions about their future.
When Democrats state that America’s original sin is slavery, they want you to think that America was the only country that embraced slavery rather than acknowledging that every country at the time embraced some form of slavery (including the people that inhabited the land that eventually became the USA). Many countries, including some in Africa, still embrace slavery.
Democrats state that the Constitution legalized slavery, but they fail to acknowledge that the U.S. Constitution, which did not ban slavery, did ban the importation of slaves, which was an important first step to the abolition of slavery.
Democrats fail to acknowledge that slavery was abolished in the Northern, Republican states (the Republican Party was formed to abolish slavery) and that over 600,000 people would have to die in a civil war to force the Southern, Democratic states to free their slaves.
When Democrats state that Republicans want to suppress the Black vote through voter integrity laws, they fail to acknowledge that Republicans passed the Constitutional amendments that gave newly-freed Blacks the right to vote (with zero Democratic votes), while Democrats formed the Ku Klux Klan and enacted “Jim Crow” laws to suppress the ability of Blacks to vote.
Destroying statues of Civil War leaders is important to them because they are a remembrance that Democrats fought to maintain slavery. They want to obliterate the remembrance of their history of absolute authority and accumulation of wealth through the efforts of others.
How is this different from the Chinese model of today?
The elites want you to embrace China because they make the cellphones (and most other items) you cannot live without. The elites want to emulate China, because the Chinese do not have to run for election in order to rule.
Before they can do that, they need to ensure you do not know of the atrocities, both past and present, of the Chinese Communist Party (like using slave labor to make many of the items our youth cannot live without) – atrocities that will be replicated in this country (and every country that adopts authoritarian rule) if we do not learn from the Chinese, Nazi, Soviet, Korean, Cuban (and many more) models.
How do we promote the memory of things and events . . . especially ones we have not lived through? Do we have to live through troubled times in order to remember what troubled times are like?
This is impractical, dangerous, and often ineffectual.
People often have false memories of something that happened in their life. Even large groups of people will have the same false memory, which is called the “Mandela Effect”.
Blogger Fiona Broome coined the phrase “Mandela effect” in 2009. While attending a conference, she discussed the tragic passing of Nelson Mandela in the 1980s. Many people she spoke to also recalled the South African president dying in prison, and some even remembered watching news coverage of the event on TV. But Mandela was very much alive at the time of the conference, and when he died four years later in 2013, he was a free man.
According to Broome, the Mandela effect is defined as a false memory shared by multiple people. Though it seems like a freak occurrence, instances of the phenomenon are fairly widespread. Do you remember the Berenstein Bears from your childhood? How about the movie Shazam starring Sinbad as a genie? Or the iconic Star Wars (1977) line “Luke, I am your father?”
Psychologists blame the Mandela effect on the way our brains record and retrieve information. Memories aren’t perfect snapshots of moments as they occurred in real life. When we recall something, we may only have access to part of the true story, so our brains pull relevant information from different memories to fill in the gaps.
https://www.mentalfloss.com/article/649001/what-is-the-mandela-effect
One would think that especially traumatic event would reinforce memory, but this is not necessarily the case.
Many soldiers suffer from Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder (PTSD) because of the horrific nature of war. After Desert Storm, I suffered from ‘night terrors’ from the events I witnessed in combat. I had vivid recollections of the battle at the Jalibah airfield, but decades later, my brother found a paper online that I wrote for the Infantry School about my unit’s involvement in the battle.
Shortly after the war, I was assigned to investigate the fratricide that took place (which was a huge conflict of interest since my unit was one of the victims). At the same time, all the field grade officers had been brought together to discuss the events (but none of the people that were fired upon were invited). I knew a cover-up was taking place (which seemed odd since stupid stuff regularly happens in the ‘fog of war’).
I saved a copy of my report and submitted it to the Infantry school the following year because they had expressed an interest in printing it in the Infantry magazine. I thought there were some important lessons in the action, but the magazine never used the article, and I went on with life.
Many years later, when my brother posted the article online, I reread it with incredulity . . . I did not remember the facts as they were printed, but they must have been correct, because I wrote them down shortly after the event.
Memories are both wonderful and wicked. I have many, many fond memories of my life, siblings, parents, and friends. Not everyone has had such a blessed life and their memories evoke pain and tears. They wish to escape their memories and the torment associated with them.
Memory is very important. If you don’t learn from a bad experience, you may replay the dreaded events . . . repeatedly.
. . . when experience is not retained, as among savages, infancy is perpetual. Those who cannot remember the past are condemned to repeat it.
George Santayana, 1905
Though attributed to Sir Winston Churchill, who improved on the original quote, George first encapsulated the importance of memory.
I have an electronic photo frame that rotates through hundreds of digital photos I loaded onto it – photos of my wife and I and our children through the course of their growing up. Every one evokes sighs, smiles, and/or laughter as they prompt the memory of the moment.
So, it seems a trigger is important (says the infantryman).
Schools used to teach civics and personal finance. They’ve been done away with (not everywhere) in the more ‘woke’ schools to teach inappropriate sexual practices and racial condemnation. Children cannot remember what they have not been taught. This is not by accident.
Prayer and Bibles were outlawed in the schools in the 1960s in order to set the stage for a curriculum shift that is more amoral and hate-filled. Christian values generally conflict with those types of educational values.
The pledge of allegiance was done away with so that the new crop of up-and-coming adults would not be allied to the country of their birth, making change easier. Symbols are important to activating memories.
Parades, fireworks, and other events have been minimized or even cancelled. ‘The past is wicked, don’t celebrate it . . . let us change to something better.’ Instead of praising our forefathers and our nation for its virtues and learning from its vices, all must be condemned so that we can radically ‘build back better’ with no restraints from the vision and virtues of our founding and history.
Americans have coined numerous catch-phrases, like, “Remember the Alamo”, “Remember the Maine”, and “Remember the Titans”, but few know what they are supposed to remember concerning those phrases (Denzel probably remembers the third one).
I would venture to say that within a decade, “Never Forget” will be just another catch-phrase with no special meaning. Our govt has given the Taliban (the folks who gave sanctuary to Al Qaeda) hundreds of billions of dollars of sophisticated weapons. They have obviously forgotten.
Our Father wanted us to remember certain things and He set up triggers and systems to assist in that.
He wanted us to remember that there are no other gods like the one, true God, so after He showed the impotence of the many Egyptian gods through a series of plagues (each plague designed to show that each class of Egyptian god was powerless [an in-depth examination of the plagues can be found at the Berean Breadcrumbs website: Blood-in-the-Water and Fracturing-the-Faith-vol-5]), He directed the Hebrews to eat a specific meal on the night of the final plague . . . and to repeat the meal every year thereafter, on the anniversary.
Every year, for over 3500 years, millions eat a Seder meal and remember the supernatural deliverance of the nation of Israel (and the fellow sojourners) from the bondage of Egypt (Leviticus 23:5-8). Christians that participate also remember the Passover lamb that was sacrificed 2000 years ago to deliver us from the bondage of sin.
Every year, millions inhabit temporary dwellings for eight days and remember what Yahweh did for Israel in guiding, feeding, providing water, and protecting them in the desert for forty years (Leviticus 23:33-43). We also look forward to the day when Yeshua will lead us to a promised land that will protect us from the wrath to come.
Yahweh gave us His Law, but He personally voiced only ten of the commandments (Exodus 19:25 – 20:19) – ten that go a long way to helping man live with each other and with Him. Interestingly enough, the one Commandment that begins with the word “remember” is the one that Christians have been taught to forget
8 Remember the sabbath day, to keep it holy. 9 Six days shalt thou labour, and do all thy work: 10 But the seventh day is the sabbath of the LORD thy God: in it thou shalt not do any work, thou, nor thy son, nor thy daughter, thy manservant, nor thy maidservant, nor thy cattle, nor thy stranger that is within thy gates: 11 For in six days the LORD made heaven and earth, the sea, and all that in them is, and rested the seventh day: wherefore the LORD blessed the sabbath day, and hallowed it.
Exodus 20:8-11
If freedom is important to you, set up remembrances for you and your family to establish a heritage of freedom.
If security is important to you, learn self-reliance and learn to protect yourself (a bullet is faster than the response time from a 911 call).
If prosperity is important to you, teach and reinforce the values of ownership, trade, and entrepreneurship.
If the God’s Will is important to you, get in His book and learn what He has said to you. People who tell you it is a fiction or does not apply to you have their own objective. Your objective should be truth and your future.
If you’ve been taught your entire life (like I was) that the Old Testament, or even the whole Bible, was not written to you, then delving into its pages can appear to be intimidating.
A guide that can help (but not replace your own work) is my book, GRAFTED: Embracing Torah. At 58 years old, I looked for a simple guide to help me and when I couldn’t find one, I wrote one. The important thing is to get started – it is never too late.