One of my current interests is study of the Hebraic/Judeo-Christian principles that influenced our founding fathers as they laid the foundations of the United States of America.  One theme is the paucity of true history in our primary and secondary educational system.  Care to join me?  Later . . .

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks obm repeatedly amazes me by his comments while he lived on Biblical scripture that are so germane to today.  As was said at the unveiling of his tombstone, [worthwhile] “Jonathan Sacks had the uncanny ability to look at the world around us, whether it was politics, popular culture, religion or technology – anything in fact – and derive a moral lesson for us all.”

The title “We Are What We Remember” of this week’s archived essay grabbed my attention. The concluding paragraphs summarize the three pages, available in full here.

Rabbi Sacks wrote:

In the past few years, a spate of books has appeared in the United States asking whether the American story is still being told, still being taught to children, still framing a story that speaks to all its citizens, reminding successive generations of the battles that had to be fought for there to be a “new birth of freedom”, and the virtues needed for liberty to be sustained. The sense of crisis in each of these works is palpable, and though the authors come from very different positions in the political spectrum, their  thesis is roughly the same: If you forget the story, you will lose your identity. There is such a thing as a national equivalent of Alzheimer’s.

Who we are depends on what we remember, and in the case of the contemporary West, a failure of collective memory poses a real and present danger to the future of liberty. Jews have told the story of who we are for longer and more devotedly than any other people on the face of the earth. That is what makes Jewish identity so rich and resonant. In an age in which computer and smartphone memories have grown so fast, from kilobytes to megabytes to gigabytes, while human memories have become so foreshortened, there is an important Jewish message to humanity as a whole. You can’t delegate memory to machines. You have to renew it regularly and teach it to the next generation. Winston Churchill said: “The longer you can look back, the further you can see forward.” Or to put it slightly differently: Those  who tell the story of their past have already begun to build their children’s future.