The J Street Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet (representing 1000 North American Rabbis and Cantors) invited 17 thought leaders including Israeli journalists, hosts and commentators of “The Promised Podcast” (TLV1), leaders of Israeli peace NGOs, American Jewish academics, Israeli and North American rabbis, cantors, rabbinic students, and cantorial students, to respond to the question – “What do you wish for Israel in the New Year.” The following individuals offered their thoughts:

Rabbi Bradley Shavit Artson – Bradley Burston – Noah Efron – Sarina Elenbogen-Siegel – Rafi Ellenson – Don Futterman – Cantor Evan Kent – Rabbi Sandra Lawson – Rabbi Andrea C. London – Rabbi Michael Marmur – Max Antman – Jessica Montell – Rabbi John L. Rosove – Chemi Shalev – Sam Sussman – Rabbi David Teutsch – Sarah Tuttle-Singer

I hope you will find meaning in these offerings and share them with your friends.

L’shanah tovah!

See – https://jstreet.org/j-street-high-holiday-reflections-5782/#.YSZb7tNKhhF

The California Recall election of Governor Newsom is an attempt by California “Trump” Republicans (a large number, but far too few to actually be able win the Governor’s office in a regular election) to take over the Governorship by means other than the regular 4-year election, scheduled in only one year.

This Recall Vote is costing the California tax-payer a whopping $276 million, money that instead could have helped reduce college debt, or given young families a child tax credit, or assisted homeless Californians, or given support to the food insecure among whom are many children, or given raises to fire-fighters, or done a hundred other important things to help strengthen the social safety net in this era of Covid, climate change, and economic hardship.

The expenditure of such a large amount of money is completely unnecessary and ought to be defeated handily by every reasonable voter and certainly by California Democrats. If we don’t like Governor Newsom, then wait a year and vote for another candidate in the regular primary election season.

This ridiculous Recall Election is just more of the disheartening Republican “Trump-style” election voter-suppression politics that could be won by a Republican reactionary if Democrats and Independents do not vote in the numbers relative to our voting strength throughout the state.

Here are four things to do with your mail-in ballot:

1. VOTE “NO” on the recall effort;
2. DO NOT VOTE FOR ANY ALTERNATIVE CANDIDATE even if you vote “NO” on the recall generally;
3. Send in your ballot ASAP;
4. Tell all your voting-age family and friends through social media to VOTE NO. There is no guarantee that Democrats will win this election despite our massive demographic edge unless we actually vote.

Sitting out this election is not an option!

I have written before on why I love “The Promised Podcast” out of Tel Aviv each week broadcast on TLV1, and today I double-down on why I hope you will download the App and listen especially to this week’s episode called the “Ash, Dust & Compassion” Edition.

Each week three very smart, articulate, and thoughtful American olim to Israel including host Noah Efron (teacher of science at Bar Ilan University), and commentators Allison Kaplan Sommer (a regular Haaretz journalist covering the American Jewish community), Don Futterman (Director of the Moriah Fund and a leader in turning around under-performing low income Israeli elementary schools), Ohad Zeltzer-Zubida (a literature critic for Haaretz), and  Miriam Herschlag (the opinion and blogs editor at The Times of Israel) reflect on three of the most important issues confronting Israel in any particular week.

I remember thinking to myself years ago that I needed to read Tom Friedman in the NY Times each week in order to know how to think about matters large and small confronting America, Israel, and the Middle East. I now listen to “The Promised Podcast” for the same enlightenment concerning Israeli affairs.

Today’s program was an extraordinary experience as a listener. For the first time I can remember (I’ve been listening for years weekly), Noah took the entire podcast time to reflect on the significance of the 40^th anniversary of the first song appearing in Israel on the theme of the Holocaust. Noah is a superb writer and today he was illuminating on the meaning and significance of the Shoah for survivors who came to Israel in the early years after the liberation and Israelis in those years, the intermediate years initiated in part by Menachem Begin when he was elected Prime Minister in 1977, and the growing division in Israeli society on how to respond to the call “Never Again” especially vis a vis Israel’s relationship with the Arab world and the Palestinian people and leadership.

Noah interweaves his commentary and narrative with the words of survivors during the Eichmann trial and since, and in the themes expressed in Israeli popular music (of which he is an expert) beginning with Hannah Senesh’s “Eili Eili” and through to contemporary Israeli popular and rock.

Every English-speaking Jew (and others who wish to understand Israel today) would profit by listening each week to The Promised Podcast. It is that good.

Few people I have known in my life have had more of an influence on my thinking and focus as a Jew, rabbi and Zionist than Rabbi Richard G. Hirsch (1926-2021) who passed away on August 17, 2021. An extraordinary human being is not hyperbole when speaking of him. We can credit Rabbi Hirsch with instilling strength in the Israeli Reform movement and around the world, with building significant Reform institutions in the United States and Israel, and with inspiring thousands upon thousands of people over his more than seven decades of Jewish and Zionist activism and leadership.

I first met “Dick,” as all his friends knew him, in the summer of 1973 in the Library of the Hebrew Union College in Jerusalem. Rabbi David Forman, of blessed memory, then the Assistant Dean of Students for the 1^st year Reform Rabbinic Program in Israel, gathered my class together to meet Rabbi Hirsch. I quickly knew, as I sat listening to him, that I was in the presence of a great man.

Already at that time, Dick had established the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington, D.C., inspired Kivie Kaplan, a wealthy friend to donate an old four-story embassy building on Massachusetts Avenue in which Dick set up shop and drew in other Jewish organizations to pursue their work on behalf of human rights and civil rights. He befriended virtually everyone of consequence in the nation’s capital including President Lyndon Johnson, then Israeli Ambassador Yitzhak Rabin, every significant interfaith leader including Dr. Martin Luther King who he gave office space in the RAC building whenever he came to DC.

A provocateur by nature, quoting frequently in Hebrew and English from the Biblical Prophets and Rabbis of the Talmud, Dick recognized that the Babylon-Jerusalem mythology of Jewish history in which wealth, power, and prestige was invested primarily in Jewish communities outside the Land of Israel had to change. Dick sought to transform that historic mythology into what he called the “Broadway-Off-Broadway metaphor” in which Israel became central to the survival and well-being of the Jewish people and the Diaspora communities, though important, were satellites circling the central planet of Jerusalem and the Jewish State.

As President of the World Union for Progressive Judaism representing the Reform movement worldwide, Dick moved the international headquarters of our movement from New York to Jerusalem, and he raised the money necessary to purchase the land next to the Hebrew Union College on King David Street and build the international center of Reform Judaism there. He justified his efforts saying that for Reform Judaism to be an historic movement it had to have its center in the Jewish State.

Born in Cleveland, Ohio in 1926, Dick loved the Hebrew language from the time he was a boy and set his mind to become a fluent Hebrew speaker. He entered the Hebrew Union College at a time when the first-year program was not based in Jerusalem. So, he went on his own and studied at the Hebrew University.

One summer he directed an American Jewish summer camp and met his beloved wife Bella who had come from Israel to teach and work with the staff and children. Bella was born in the former Soviet Union. They quickly fell in love and married. Within three and a half years they had four children. Recognizing that without Israel there would be no future for the Jewish people, he and Bella made aliyah in 1972 to live and make a contribution to the Jewish State.

In Israel, Dick set about pursuing the fulfillment of three goals, all of which he achieved: to move the international headquarters of the World Movement for Progressive Judaism to the heart of Israel in Jerusalem, to affiliate the Reform movement with the national institutions of the Jewish people (i.e. the Jewish Agency for Israel, the World Zionist Organization, and the Jewish National Fund), and to “root ourselves in the soil of the Jewish people and in the soul of the Jewish people” by creating facts on the ground.

Dick had a lot of help in Israel and among his friends internationally in pursuit of these goals, but he was the motivating force, the intellectual spark, the charismatic initiator, and the irrepressible creative builder. Today the Israeli Reform movement has an expansive campus on King David Street near the famed King David Hotel, has ordained more than 120 Israeli rabbis, has built two kibbutzim, close to fifty synagogue centers throughout Israel, the Leo Baeck School of Haifa, the Israel Religious Action Center in Jerusalem, pre-Army educational and social justice programs for post-Israeli high school students, and countless Kindergartens and schools strategically placed throughout the State.

Every two or three years over the course of my congregational rabbinate, I brought my congregants to Israel to learn and meet Israelis and people across the political and religious spectrum. Dick was one person I wanted my people especially to meet. The hour he spent with us each time is still remembered by everyone who sat at his feet and hung on his every word. A gifted story-teller who weaved classic Biblical and Talmudic text as well as Zionist thinkers and historical figures into his remarks, Dick linked effortlessly his personal story within the greater story of the Jewish people.

Dick was the author of two books, both of which are worth reading: From the Hill to the Mount – A Reform Zionist Quest (Gefen Publ.: Jerusalem, 2000) and For the Sake of Zion – Reform Zionism: A Personal Mission (URJ Press: New York, 2011).

I loved Dick. He was one of my most important Zionist mentors. I love his son, Rabbi Ammi Hirsch of the Stephen S. Wise Free Synagogue in Manhattan. Dick loved that Ammi and I are dear friends and whenever I spoke with Dick not only did he remind me how much he appreciated Ammi’s and my friendship, but that we Reform Rabbis have a sacred and solemn duty to the Jewish people to teach and motivate our communities to understand that Progressive Zionism is the social justice movement of the Jewish people, that to be a Zionist is not some narrow tribal cultish avocation, but rather the expression of our people’s unique mission to be purveyors of meaning and justice as well as advocates for a safe, strong, and secure Israel as the homeland of the Jewish people.

Dick was a friend to so many of us. He fought the good fight always, and he will be remembered not only by his family as a patriarch par excellence, but for the movement he inspired, the institutions he created and built, and the thousands he touched.

Eich naflu hagiborim – How the Mighty has fallen.

Zichrono livracha – May the memory of this righteous and great man be remembered for a blessing.

This blog is also posted at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/israel-is-broadway-the-diaspora-is-off-broadway-rabbi-richard-hirsch-zl/

Here is a talk that Dick delivered in 2016 – worth watching – https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Q6AsMvUBV-E

 Opinion by Eugene Robinson – Columnist  – August 12, 2021

“It’s time to entertain the possibility that President Biden, Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer and House Speaker Nancy Pelosi actually know what they’re doing and are really good at their jobs.”

Eugene Robinson of The Washington Post never gilds the lily. If you are feeling deflated as this new strain of the Delta Variant surges and our kids and grand-kids prepare to return to school without yet being vaccinated, or if you are shaking your head in exasperation at the posturing and political pressures being exerted by both the moderates in the Democratic Party and Progressive Democrats, or wondering how a $3.5 trillion package (or even a reduced compromise package) is going to gain 50 Democratic votes in the Senate in a reconciliation bill and then pass in the House with only a few more Dems than Republicans, or fearful of the increasingly destructive capability of the climate crisis everywhere, or furious about the refusal of some Democrats to eliminate the filibuster in the Senate, or feeling worried that the country is being thrust backwards into the era of Jim Crow, or feeling powerless in the face of the other maladies facing America and the world – some perspective that Eugene Robinson offers is a welcome respite.

One other thing I would add to Robinson’s applause lines for Biden, Schumer, and Pelosi is that they seem strategically to be tackling one huge matter at a time but working on all of them simultaneously. Word is, for example, that Schumer has a committee working on a new voting rights package that can gain 100% of the Senate Democrats and that there may be a way that the most conservative Democrats will agree to side-step the filibuster on matters that deal specifically with the threat to American democracy that voter suppression poses in federal elections.

Weariness affects us all, and after five years of dealing daily with Trump’s malignant narcissism and right-wing irrationality, the January 6 insurrection, and that forty to fifty million Americans may well accept a fascistic coup against American democracy, it’s understandable that so many of us may feel deflated, exhausted, and desirous of turning away from active political engagement. Thankfully, the Democratic leadership is working hard and I, for one, trust them as I do so many people working at the state and local level to preserve the best of America.

The $3.5 trillion package really is too big to fail as is the Infrastructure Bill that just passed the Senate, and the free unencumbered right to vote is far too important not to take decisive action.

That said – read what Eugene Robinson writes.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/opinions/2021/08/12/democrats-achievements-biden-pelosi-schumer-infrastructure/?utm_campaign=wp_week_in_ideas&utm_medium=email&utm_source=newsletter&wpisrc=nl_ideas

A collection of twenty diverse essays by leading Reform rabbis, educators, and thinkers that highlight their personal encounters with God in everyday life.

Note: The following is the press release for a wonderful new volume of personal reflections about the experience of God and the holy. I was one of the contributors and was asked as well to read through the entire volume during the editing process to offer thoughts and suggestions. I was inspired and moved by these articles, and I urge those of you interested in the variety of doors into the holy and the experience of God to purchase this book, especially now in the month of Elul before the High Holidays.

New York, NY – August 2021 – CCAR Press, a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis, is honored to announce its newest publication, Because My Soul Longs for You: Integrating Theology into Our Lives. The book is co-edited by Rabbi Edwin C. Goldberg of Congregation Beth Shalom in The Woodlands, Texas, and Rabbi Elaine S. Zecher of Temple Israel in Boston. It includes an introduction by Rabbi Joseph A. Skloot, PhD, the Rabbi Aaron D. Panken Assistant Professor of Modern Jewish Intellectual History at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion in New York.

Because My Soul Longs for You responds to one of the most enduring human questions: Where can we find God in our lives? The book’s answer is that holiness can be found in everyday experiences. Contributors discuss how they welcome the Divine presence into their lives in ways that both align with and depart from the traditional ideas of how to encounter God. Among others, the authors explore moments of connection that arise from praying, studying Jewish texts, writing poetry, cooking food, playing music, taking part in acts of service, engaging in physical activity, meditating, and developing interpersonal relationships.

“Instead of asking ‘Do you believe in God?’ Rabbis Zecher and Goldberg ask the more fruitful ‘How do you experience God?’” said Rabbi Angela Buchdahl, Senior Rabbi of New York City’s Central Synagogue. “Their book compiles the transformative experiences of twenty souls who share their encounter with the Divine. Through their stories, we access new language for understanding how we might discover God in our lives, and perhaps realize that God has been with us all along.”

The anthology brings together a diverse group of rabbis and teachers. Among them are Rabbi Anne Brenner, LCSW, a professor at the Academy for Jewish Religion in California and a psychotherapist; Rabbi Rebecca L. Dubowe, the world’s first female Deaf rabbi; Ilana Kurshan, a teacher at the Conservative Yeshiva in Jerusalem and the author of the award-winning memoir If All the Seas Were Ink; Rabbi Hara Person, Chief Executive of the Central Conference of American Rabbis; and Rabbi John L. Rosove, Senior Rabbi Emeritus of Temple Israel of Hollywood and national co-chair of JStreet’s Rabbinic and Cantorial Cabinet.

“This book is not only phenomenal, it is also phenomenological—it relates to the ways in which God is experienced rather than simply conceptualized,” said Rabbi Dr. Michael Marmur, Associate Professor and former Provost at Hebrew Union College–Jewish Institute of Religion, Jerusalem. “These highly reflective and courageous essays evoke the biblical image of a graceful animal thirsting for water at the brook. So the soul longs for God, experienced in various life situations and described with both beauty and honesty. Because My Soul Longs for You places the soul where it belongs—in the lives and experiences of persons.”

“We think of prayer and study as ways to engage with God, but what about cooking, writing, and making art? Where can we find spirituality in the midst of fear, grief, and conflict? This book brings together some of today’s most creative Jewish minds to answer these questions and many more,” said Rafael Chaiken, Director of CCAR Press. “We hope it will encourage readers to find personal practices that strengthen their own connection to God.”

Because My Soul Longs for You: Integrating Theology into Our Lives is available on CCARPress.org.

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About Reform Judaism Publishing and CCAR Press: CCAR Press is the official publisher of the Reform Movement and a division of the Central Conference of American Rabbis. Since 1889, the Central Conference of American Rabbis has been a center for lifelong rabbinic learning, professional development, and publishing for the 2,300 rabbis who serve more than 1.5 million Reform Jews throughout North America, Israel, and the world. CCAR Press publishes liturgical resources and texts on Jewish practice that serve its member rabbis, the Reform Movement, and the Jewish community as a whole. CCAR Press, through its trade imprint Reform Judaism Publishing (RJP), is the steward of the Reform Movement’s sacred texts, including its Torah Commentaries and prayerbooks. In addition to books, CCAR Press publishes CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly, and a wide-range of electronic resources, including e-books, apps, and Visual T’filah.

As I watch Members of Congress and the Administration deliberate on the massive infrastructure bill and seek the truth in the January 6 insurrection and attack on our nation’s Capitol as well as everything else they do, and as healthcare workers across the nation and world do everything possible to treat those with the Delta virus, firemen fight fires in the Pacific states, teachers deal with Covid while engaging their students in learning, and more specifically my rabbinic, cantorial, and synagogue colleagues as they embark in their preparation for the High Holidays at the beginning of September, I’m reminded of how much stress I once knew as a congregational rabbi and that so many people know as they work and serve others in the variety of ways that they do.

Gandhi offers these comforting words for you, I hope: “The best way to find yourself is to lose yourself in the service of others.”

For those reading this who feel overwhelmed in this season, I wish for you an ometz lev (a courageous heart), savlanut (patience), ahavah (love), and sheket nafshi (peace of mind).

An Israeli-Palestinian Rap song that ought to be heard by everyone who cares about Israel and the Palestinians and a way to peace – These two young men from different worlds but the same land have become friends and are planning a second project. Millions have already seen this video. Spread it around!

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=vuUxnfL9I_Y

“I live with uncertainty and doubt. But what I have learned is that doubt may be the most civilizing force we have available to us, for it is doubt that protects us from the arrogance of utter rightness, from the barbarism of blind loyalties, all of which threaten the human possibility.”

I recall these words often. They were spoken decades ago by my childhood Rabbi Leonard I. Beerman (z’l). I think of them (and him) especially when confronted with the rigid absolutism of others, be they followers of Donald Trump or religious and political extremists amongst my own people.

I thought of them this past Sunday morning when I learned that a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews carried panels into the pluralist egalitarian prayer space at the Western Wall of Jerusalem under Robinson’s Arch for the purpose of taking control of the space and disrupting a Conservative movement minyan on Tisha B’Av.

This prayer space, just south of the traditional Kotel plaza, was designated in 2016 after three years of negotiation that included all concerned parties for use by Reform and Conservative Jews, “Women of the Wall,” and any Jewish group of women and men wishing to pray together without interference by the ultra-Orthodox. To its great credit, the new Israeli government (with Reform Rabbi and Member of Knesset Gilad Kariv advocating for a reinstitution of the Kotel agreement) has agreed to build the plaza as intended in the 2016 agreement. It was cancelled in 2017 by former Prime Minister Netanyahu when he got political blow-back from his coalition including ultra-Orthodox political parties.

Tisha B’Av commemorates the destruction of the First and Second Temples in Jerusalem. Jews chant from the Book of Lamentations, pray, and try and make sense of contemporary Jewish identity and faith in the context of three millennia of Jewish history and experience. For Jews in Jerusalem, there is no more significant place to commemorate this holiday than the Western Wall, the retaining wall left standing by Rome after it destroyed the central institution of Judaism in the ancient world, the Temple.

But on Saturday evening, a group of ultra-Orthodox Jews decided not to allow a non-ultra-Orthodox Jewish group to pray anywhere in the vicinity of this site. They brought panels and set up a mechizah in the egalitarian prayer space, and when the Conservative movement participants began chanting Lamentations and praying, these ultra-Orthodox extremists drowned out the davening by screaming obscenities and vulgar insults.

On the first of every Hebrew month for more than thirty years the “Women of the Wall” have gathered to pray quietly at the back of the Women’s section in the traditional Kotel Plaza. Most months hundreds of ultra-Orthodox men protested angrily. They threw chairs and coffee grounds onto the women despoiling their prayer shawls. They yanked Torah scrolls out of women’s arms. They insulted, cursed, condemned, and judged non-ultra-Orthodox Jews and Judaism.

I attended twice these prayer gatherings on Rosh Chodesh and in all my years I never witnessed an uglier and more disheartening scene in Jewish communal life. All the while, the women maintained their dignity and continued praying despite the deafening noise, crass insults, and attacks.

The irony of Saturday evening’s ultra-Orthodox calumny was poignant, but I wonder if these ultra-Orthodox Jews connected the dots. The rabbis of the Talmud explained that the reason the 2^nd Temple was destroyed by Rome was sinat chinam, groundless hatred between Jews. That lesson ought to have been learned over the last two millennia by every Jew. But, these Jews committed the same sin that tradition explains resulted in the destruction of the ancient Jewish community in the Land of Israel.

Anne Applebaum, a journalist, historian, and author of Twilight of Democracy and the Seductive War of Authoritarianism (Doubleday, 2020) wrote about the damaging authoritarian attitude that gives rise to political, ideological, racist, cultural, antisemitic, Islamophobic, homophobic, and misogynist fanaticism:

“Authoritarianism appeals to the people who cannot tolerate complexity. There’s nothing intrinsically left-wing or right-wing about this instinct at all. It is anti-pluralist. It is suspicious of people with different ideas. It is allergic to fierce debate. Whether those who have it ultimately derive from their politics, from Marxism or naturalism, is irrelevant. It is a frame of mind, not a set of ideas.”

I add to Applebaum’s thesis this – those who give themselves over to authoritarianism by nature lack curiosity and the willingness to learn from others and through their own mistakes. They refuse to embrace ambiguity, paradox, and uncertainty. They are closed to logic and imagination, to science and art, to an appreciation of the inter-connectedness of all things and phenomena. They are resistant to doubt and abhor risk. They choose not to recognize the legitimacy in the other’s narrative. They are presumptuous, arrogant, and often they claim to possess ultimate Truth. Out of fear and intimidation, many are all too willing to hand over responsibility to their illiberal and threatening leaders who speak on their behalf and act without reason or moral restraint. They tolerate the suffering of others, and they self-righteously justify themselves in their rectitude. They are illiberal, fiercely partisan, and passionately tribal. They worry not at all about the harm they cause to those outside their tribal camp. They are, in their minds, always right, never wrong. To them life is a simple choice between black and white. There are no grays in their world, only their way or the highway.

In our uncertain age in which so many feel unsafe, unsure, and afraid as a consequence of Covid, climate change, terrorism, war, economic distress, social unrest, immigration, multi-culturalism, disinformation, and conspiracy theories – it ought not to be a surprise that events such as what happened at the Kotel on Saturday evening, at the nation’s Capitol on January 6, in the increasing rate of gun violence, police brutality, racism, and antisemitism, that the gravitational pull towards authoritarianism should be growing in so many places in the world.

Thankfully – and this is important to remember too – there are millions of people everywhere who are resisting authoritarianism, who cherish living in a pluralistic, liberal, and democratic society and culture, who care about the well-being of others, who have not given in to despair, who maintain hope and act according to their better angels without giving in. We’ve seen this spirit of hope, compassion, and concern over and over again in recent years despite the growth of an authoritarian culture in America and elsewhere. We can’t forget that this too is a reaction to crisis and that so many of us do resist the demise of culture and society that authoritarianism seeks to exploit, dominate, and crush under its boots.

Living with uncertainty and doubt is an important virtue because it opens the heart, keeps us humble and curious, and fortifies us as we seek (and sometimes fail) to embody higher values and virtues.

This blog is also posted at the Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/living-with-uncertainty-and-doubt/

Being afflicted with Alzheimer’s disease is like walking into one’s office, going to a file cabinet, opening a drawer, and discovering that it’s empty. Thus did a woman describe her memory loss due to this awful disease. (‘Some Hope Is Better Than Having No Hope,’ NY Times Daily Podcast, 7/7, 2021). This Daily Podcast episode was inspired by the FDA approval last month of the new controversial, questionably effective, and exorbitantly expensive drug Aduhelm for people with early-onset Alzheimer’s.

I watched my mother suffer memory loss this way over the last five years of her life. Though her dementia was not Alzheimer’s, her experience was extremely frustrating for her and heart-breaking for me. Granted, she lived almost a century and enjoyed excellent health well into her early 90s, so one can’t complain – but memory loss at any age and in any degree is devastating.

The most startling moment for me in the development of my mother’s disease came when I met her one day for lunch at her assisting living home when she was ninety-five.

“Hi Mom,” I said as I approached her table. She’d forgotten I was coming and was already half-way through eating her lunch.

“Hello,” she responded.

“Did you forget I was joining you for lunch today?”

“I should know who you are, but I don’t?” She said.

I thought she was joking. When I told her I was her son John, she said: “You don’t look like John.”

“You’re kidding! Right?”

“You say you’re John, but you don’t look like John. He’s much younger than you.”

She apparently was remembering a much earlier period in her life and mine, when I was a teenager or a twenty-something.

We sat together, talked about nothing in particular, and I hoped that by the end of the hour she’d remember who I was. She didn’t. The next time I visited, her memory was back and she knew me immediately. I reminded her of what happened the week before. She didn’t recall my coming. Such is the nature of dementia – memory comes and goes.

Mark Twain said: “When I was younger, I could remember anything, whether it had happened or not; but my faculties are decaying now and soon I shall be so I cannot remember any but the things that never happened. It is sad to go to pieces like this but we all have to do it.”

Perhaps Twain was right but science holds out the hope that treatments will be developed to slow dementia and spare many of us the effects of this debilitating and humiliating disease.

The woman suffering from Alzheimer’s had worked for decades as a clinical social worker. After each client session she recorded notes from memory of everything that was said. In the early stages of the disease before she was diagnosed, however, she couldn’t remember anything that happened during her sessions. She complained about it to her wife of 45 years who tried to comfort her: “Don’t worry. It’s just aging. It happens to everyone. We all forget things.”

Yes, aging causes everyone to forget some things – a word here and there, the name of a book or film, even the names of friends. I experience some of that myself, but that isn’t dementia – yet. I confess, having watched my mother’s memory disappear that I worry that it will happen to me too.

Physicians proscribe many things we can do to maintain good mental health and memory: getting enough sleep (7-8 hours/night for older adults), keeping our weight down, eating less fatty foods, drinking daily two to four cups of coffee, eating chocolate (in moderation), exercising daily, staying engaged with work, learning a foreign language, playing a musical  instrument, creating art, listening to lectures, reading, joining a book group, writing, doing crossword puzzles, playing chess, Ma Jong, and Bridge – activities in which we’re intellectually challenged and compelled to focus our attention. Also, staying connected with family, friends, and community, and even flossing our teeth to prevent tooth decay and gum disease that neurologists claim is an antidote to the early onset of dementia. But, when dementia comes there’s really nothing ultimately we can do now to stop it before we fade away.

One other thing I think we ought to do before any of that happens – write our stories while we can, describe the most significant events and people in our lives, our memories of parents, grandparents, and mentors, of what’s been important to us over decades, and share them with our children and grandchildren, nieces and nephews, the next generation in our families. If your parents are still in this life, persuade them to write their stories if they’ve not done so already.

Memory defines who we are, and our collective memories are the essence of the culture we’ve inherited and carried forward, and so losing our memory is not only a catastrophe for us individually but for our community as well.

Simon Dubnov (1860-1941), the Jewish historian of the Riga Ghetto who perished there, put it like this: “Yiddin, Shreibt und farschreibt – Jews, write it down, write it all down” lest our children and those to come never know.

This blog is also posted at The Times of Israel – https://blogs.timesofisrael.com/when-i-was-younger-i-could-remember-anything-mark-twain/