In a class given on the 26th of Kislev, 5747 (1987), Rav Ginsburgh’s delved into the question of how memory works. Based on a seemingly unremarkable comment by Rashi on Pharaoh’s dreams, he uncovers one of the most important pieces of the puzzling question of why we remember and why we forget and whether or not we can strengthen our memory. Over the years, the Rav has revisited this question, and many of his further insights can be found in his book The Twinkle in Your Eye: Kabbalistic Remedies for Preserving Youth and Memory. However, this particularly deep and revealing insight is being published here for the first time.
The Torah warns us against forgetting certain things—the Giving of the Torah at Mt. Sinai, the Exodus from Egypt, God Himself, the war with Amalek—and it commands us to remember others. The first time someone met the Ba’al Shem Tov, he would ask him, “What do you remember?”
Most people think that memory is just a function of whether we remember some past event. But as we will now see, according to the Torah, memory is more complex and involved.
PHARAOH’S DREAM
We are all familiar with Pharaoh’s dreams, the dreams that catapulted Joseph to greatness. There is a very special Rashi regarding the first dream that holds an important key to understanding the way that memory works.
In his dream, Pharaoh’s saw seven cows, beautiful and sturdy rising from the Nile. Then seven other cows came up, ugly and gaunt; they swallowed the seven sturdy cows and Pharaoh woke from his dream. Later, when Pharaoh related the dream to Joseph, he added some more detail, he says, “but when they had consumed them, one could not tell they had consumed them, for they looked just as bad as before. And I awoke.” The question that we want to ask is, what is the difference between the cows merely swallowing the other cows and Pharaoh’s addition that after they had swallowed them, you could not see that anything had entered their stomachs?
On the initial description of the gaunt cows swallowing the sturdy cows, Rashi, who explains the plain meaning of the Torah, writes:
And they ate: This indicated that all the joy caused by the years of plenty would be forgotten in the days of famine.
What then is the meaning of Pharaoh’s addition that you could not tell they had swallowed anything? That simply means that the years of plenty themselves would not be remembered. There is no recollection left of the plenty.
A PLAY IN TWO ACTS
So, we see that the memory of the plenty goes through two stages before it is forgotten. The first stage, corresponding to the swallowing, is that the joy that was experienced during the years of plenty is forgotten. Only in the second stage are the years of plenty completely forgotten, corresponding to the swallowing being unrecognizable.
Let’s illustrate this. Imagine that you are someone living in ancient Egypt during those years of plenty. Once the famine starts, after two years, say, you can still remember that just a couple of years ago there was plenty, but you can no longer remember the joy and happiness that accompanied them.
Rashi’s comment teaches us an important principle about memory and forgetfulness. What Rashi is explaining is that the first step in forgetting is not to forget the event that happened, but to forget the feeling associated with that event. This is referred to as the swallowing. Only after the feeling has been swallowed do we forget the event itself.
IMPORTANCE OF PASSION WHEN LEARNING
Take another example. We all learn Torah, but how well do we remember what we have learnt? Suppose you sat in a class and learnt something new. How can you remember what you learnt? If you can recall the feeling you had while you were learning, then you can easily recall what you learnt! Within all knowledge that we learn there is an experience of acquiring the knowledge. When we forget knowledge, first we forget the experience and feeling we had while acquiring it, and only then do we forget the knowledge itself.
The corollary of this is that the more drive and passion you have to learn, the more easily you will retain and remember what you learnt. But if while sitting in a class you have no interest in what is being taught, you will almost certainly forget what you heard. We find this idea strengthened by the meaning of “knowledge” (דַעַת) in Hebrew. The first time this word appears in the Torah is with respect to Adam and Eve, “And Adam knew his wife Eve.” Knowing means connecting. Adam connected with his wife Eve. If there is no feeling connecting us to the event or to what we are learning, no knowledge of it will be retained.
PRIDE AND MEMORY
One might ask, what causes us to forget the drive and passion we felt for learning? The Torah tells us, “[if ] your heart grow haughty [fill with pride] you will forget....” Pride and self-centeredness cause us to focus on ourselves instead of on the experience and feeling of connecting to an event or a person. One of the foundations of Torah and all of Judaism is that we have a memory of not only the past, but of the future as well. As Rebbe Nachman teaches, every day we need to be able to remember the World to Come, even though this is ostensibly something that has yet to happen. But pride causes us to forget. Every memory is a connection and making a connection depends on passion and joy. Even if there were a drive and passion to connect in the moment, if later the person focuses on himself and feels prideful, he will forget the passion and the memory will be erased.
Returning to Pharaoh’s dream. When he dreamt of the cows swallowing each other, there was no need for him to see that the swallowing was unrecognizable because if the feeling is lost, it goes without saying that forgetfulness will set in. Pharaoh implicitly understood that if the feeling—in this case, the joy of the years of plenty—is swallowed, the years of plenty themselves will necessarily be forgotten. But when Pharaoh shared the dream with Joseph, he assumed that Joseph did not know this, so he explicitly explained what he had felt during the dream: first came the swallowing which then led to the event being unrecognizable!
