A year to October 7th, both body and mind turn memory into a battleground – and a mirror of our public conscience, or lack thereof.
“We will dance again.” Mia Schem inscribed these life-affirming words, above the date “7.10.23,” onto her left arm after having been kidnapped from the Nova festival during Hamas’ “Al-Aqsa Flood,” and released after 55 harrowing days in captivity. Once getting her tattoo, Schem realized that the inked “7.10” resembles the Hebrew word סבל (“suffering”).
Whatever suffering the surface area of our skin can recall, our mind remembers more, from fateful to mundane. The sheer volume of human memory is exceptional: 2.5 petabytes of data, the equivalent of unhealthy 300 consecutive years of watching TV.
But the uniqueness of human memory is not merely quantitative. It is qualitative. We recall ideas, symbols, and icons, including, well, celebrated “icons”: Jennifer Aniston seems to strike a nerve, or at least a neuron. Using the so-called concept cell (or “grandmother cell”), our brain can focus on the meaning of the subject (person or idea) and remember it, even when its context changes.
Has the memory of October 7 been reduced to a concept, a Hell cell? Have we confined it to keep on living outside? Not for now, not for most. Reliving that day throughout the past year, Oct 7 turned, for many Israelis, into our nightmarish Groundhog Day, frightfully facing our shadow, a most painful, collective, eternal return. To make things worse, the deadliest day for the Jewish people since the holocaust started a bloody war that seems end-less in terms of time and telos alike: At what point can it end? And what exactly is the point? The 101 Israeli hostages, dead or tormented, still held by Hamas in Gaza, are our collective “room 101.” As in Orwell’s 1984, they embody our worst fear – of being abandoned, of abandoning our own.
Human memory is exceptional in another sense: it involves choice. While most of our choices shape the present or make plans for the future, willful memory chooses the past. Granted, not all memories are volitional. Despite our best efforts to let go, many painful memories linger. Schem’s act of remembrance may unearth a “tattoo for trauma” exchange: for each memory seared in our mind against our will, we’ll consciously opt to etch another on our skin. Though I know of no quantitative study juxtaposing trauma and tattoos, I expect to find a correlation between the two. Tellingly, like Schem, scores of Israelis chose to mark the memory of Oct 7 on their flesh – lest they forget?
Choice permeates collective memory. While personal memory is typically unconscious, public memory is an intersubjective (socially conscious) process. It prescribes awareness and invites choice. Sometimes, as when the “internet remembers,” it may amount to a cacophony of echoes. At others, when a more coherent group recalls, the very act of jointly constructing memory confirms the existence of the collective identity behind it. There is a “we” that wants to remember things in a certain way.
We can, moreover, deliberately mold the memory into a meta-narrative to which we subscribe, factually and morally. Ultimately, what and how we remember speaks more of our present than our past. Memory is a mirror, and collective memory mirrors our public conscience or lack thereof.
The “Oct 7 massacre” designation itself is a work of a willed collective – indeed, political – memory. This is how most Israelis, and many worldwide, choose to remember this day. Hamas, however, calls it the “Al-Aqsa Flood” operation (Arabic: عملية طوفان الأقصى). The invocation meshes mythic memory, old and older. The flood story in the Bible gets a telling twist in the Quran. It is Noah, not God, who instigates the flood (طُّوفَانَ), for he has been preaching submission (إسلام, Islam) before God in vain – few cared to listen. In his righteous rage against the sinners, resentful Noah urges God to eradicate humanity. God happily obliges, so much so that Noah’s disobedient wife and son are likewise drowned. The lack of human or divine empathy for nonbelievers echoes in the Quran’s take on another tale. There is no mention of Abraham (or Lot) repeatedly pleading with God to spare Sodom and Gomorrah.
Drowning the Zionist sinners may have been the wish not only of Hamas but of its many supporters, not least in liberal campuses, who have designated October 7 a day of liberation, celebration, even exhilaration, and – in another twist of political memory – the mark of genocide, not by Hamas, but by Israel – against the Palestinians. (I'll go deeper into these in future posts.)
Israelis, too, have consistently debated the meta-narrative of Oct 7. As I write these words, one national memorial service is completed, and another just started. The hostages' families organized the former, civic, service; the government orchestrated the latter. Israeli TV channels (except channel 14, the government’s propaganda machine) fully broadcasted both, trying to splice the split Israeli self - to no avail. (Read comments to the image below to glimpse how noxious Israeli discourse has become.)
While no Israeli (that I know) suggests Oct 7 was not a massacre, some also see it as a metaphysical omen that opens the gate for their own flood-like “miracle period” of messianic settlement. Rather than taking responsibility and asking for forgiveness for his role in fostering Oct 7, Israeli PM Netanyahu took the opportunity of the one-year commemoration to propose changing the war's name to “Revival War,” likely thinking of his own political survival/revival. Still, other Israelis stress that however nefarious Hamas is, it was effectively aided through omission and commission by Israeli leadership and security apparatus. Hamas butchered, raped, and kidnapped people – forsaken by their state, not least its revived premier.
Meta-narrative is thus not just a mnemonic technique; it tells us what the memory (should) means, often in the form of an imperative. Such is the meta-narrative of the Holocaust. We do not merely remember it; we affix its memory with meaning and a mantra: “Never again!” This imperative also reveals that collective memories can be in flux and suspense, for Oct 7 both boosted and undermined the “Never again” precept. The massacre reminded so many of the holocaust – it did happen again. Should we now then append “Never again!” with another (bracketed) “again,” and turn the exclamation point to a question mark?
If we find it hard to choose, others are often keen to choose for us. Human memory is interactional, shaped by people who may be invested in our memory – and amnesia. Our memories are often false, facts eclipsed by fears, desires, and inherent cognitive limitations. These make memory an easy prey for manipulation. Some manipulations are simple enough. If I tell you a story full of words like lullaby, dreams, pillows, and blankets, you may well be convinced I said, though I didn’t, “sleep.”
Making us forget may be easier still. Indeed, we do much of that work on our own – especially as we move in time and space. For example, timewise, between the ages of 6 and 8, we lose 20% of our early childhood memories. Spatially, the “doorway effect” undermines our memory: when you leave a room, whatever you want to remember (e.g., objects, what you were thinking about, or supposed to do), you will forget these 2-3 times more often than if you stayed in the room – and the effect works even when we imagine such a transition. It is not the work of the doorway itself, of course, but the change of settings, especially under working memory load. After all, the “doorway effect” is likely an evolutionary precaution. When we pass from one setting to another, our mental faculties better focus less on things past and more on dangers to come.
Self-designated custodians of collective, political memory may readily take advantage of our malleable memories. I cannot make you age faster, but I can lead you through a doorway – real or imagined. This may be Bibi’s plan, turning Lebanon and Iran into a doorway away from Oct 7. After all, Israel’s war against Hamas has turned into a Whac-A-Mole: as long as Israel refuses to foster a viable substitution for Hamas, the IDF’s military feats will be wasted – Hamas will surface again and again. The recent, more effective IDF campaign against Hezbollah may help the current government give Israelis the gift of Eternal Sunshine. Israeli ministers already enjoy some spotless minds; they seem to feel nothing of the guilt that survivors of the massacre are walking with.
To shirk guilt and its underlying sense of responsibility, some may try to force forget, sometimes by defunding memory. Israel’s 2011 Nakba Law is a clear case in point: Trying to veil, through legislation, the fact that Palestinians see Israel’s establishment as their catastrophe. The hubris is manifest: We cannot only shape the future but also recreate the past. And as always, other people are here to remind us: You are not God.
Another hubristic step down memory lane finds a paradox: political memory is a failed attempt to forget the future – our inevitable death, like Proust's Madeleines that made him “cease to feel mediocre, accidental, mortal.” By internalizing and eternalizing fleeting moments (e.g., skins as “sites of memory” through ‘permanent’ tattoos), political memories defy death in the bosom of an immortal collective’s pledge: “never again/forget.” Yet forgetfulness and death will transpire. The politics of memory cannot avoid the crushing, existential “memento mori” of our lives.
As for me, personally, while I never wish to forget, and I lack the switch to turn feelings off, I have my reflections, like those just above, which allow me to contain and channel feelings and, well, feel better. Except now I don’t, for I sense I may have over-contained and channeled the suffering of others beyond the cell of my own people.
A couple of months ago, Facebook notified me that linked to an Instagram account I know nothing of, my Facebook account is suspended with no actual way to appeal. I felt somewhat aggrieved but mainly relieved, slightly if forcefully released. Of the many memorable images and words gone from Zuckerberg’s realm, one old pic I used as my Facebook homepage background somehow lingers now in my mind. Ten years ago, almost to date, I visited Ireland for a lovely philosophical workshop, and decided to spend a rainy day hiking alone along a cliff. I don’t remember where exactly or what I was thinking about, the workshop was about conscience, but at some point, I turned a curve, and the sun was out.
At an early point in Genesis, in a rare moment of introspection and perhaps of a guilty conscience, God pledged “Never Again” to flood Earth and set himself a reminder: the rainbow. If we wish so much to become godlike, perhaps we should follow His most humanlike moment, behold the heavenly tattoo to remember the flood, and make a better covenant between us—the fallible, frail, and free humans that we are.
*השראה לדברים הגיעה בין השאר משיחה בעברית בנושא.
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