Of course remembering is a quintessential Jewish trait, but let’s not forget about forgetting
In ‘Fractured Tablets,’ Mira Balberg examines the Mishnah and finds a more forgiving nature in Jewish law
A 14th-century edition of the Mishnah. Photo by Wikimedia Commons
By Benjamin Ivry September 26, 2023
Fractured Tablets
By Mira Balberg
University of California Press, 300 pages, $35
Sometimes scrutinizing ancient Jewish law reveals not just strictures and admonitions, but also benign acceptance and humaneness.
Such is the conclusion of Fractured Tablets, Mira Balberg’s new book about the Mishnah. A mishmosh of sometimes contradictory legal opinions about different aspects of Jewish life, the Mishnah was compiled over 1,800 years ago. Fractured Tablets implies that the quintessentially strict self-reprimand in Psalm 137 (“If I forget you, O Jerusalem, let my right hand wither”) does not express the whole story. Leniency also played a role in Jewish guiding of the forgetful.
Balberg states that Jewish memory lapses of all kinds, pertaining to facts, texts, ritual observance, and even the Torah, were expected by rabbis of late antiquity. They believed that as imperfect humans, Jews would inevitably misremember details among the myriad of responsibilities associated with being an observant Jew.
Previous scholars have implied as much, like Nachman Krochmal, a Galician Jewish theologian who counted three major forgettings by Jews of all the laws and ordinances regulating religious observances. For Krochmal, these included the traditional notion that the Torah itself was forgotten by the Jewish people during the Babylonian exile before it was recovered through the efforts of Ezra the Scribe.
Yet, even apart from such grand events during great historical upheavals, Jews have failed to recollect meaningful aspects of Yiddishkeit.
The Book of Numbers describes Israelites as so prone to amnesia that they are advised to “make tassels on the corners of their garments throughout their generations and to put a blue cord on the tassel at each corner” to remind them of the Ten Commandments that must be followed.
Jews might forget specifics about everything from general laws of kashrut to how many drops of milk make a meat dish treyf if they fall into it accidentally. Or they might somehow lose sight of the fact that Shabbat exists. To avoid these mishaps, earlier generations of rabbis offered urgently well-meaning advice.
Among homespun counsel in the Mishnah and elsewhere about how not to fall into this quagmire was to abstain from being angry. Even closely observing someone else being angry, or someone who was dead, might cause forgetfulness.
Similarly, eating too many fancy meals, or too many olives, might obliterate hours of study from the mind, according to Jewish lore. As a balm for the burden of remembering all sorts of ways to not forget, the Mishnah reminded readers centuries ago that Moses the prophet was a prototypical absent-minded Jew.
In the Book of Exodus (25:31-40), God instructs Moses to make a lampstand of pure gold. But according to the Mishnah, Moses forgot the specific instructions and required repeated reminders from the Lord about just what to fashion and how to produce it; finally the Supreme Being gave up and advised Moses to hand over the responsibility for handicrafts to someone with better mental retention.
As Balberg notes, the Midrash description of Moses’ amnesia was “not incidental, but almost pathological.” So if a Jew as distinguished as Moses could be seen as “almost dim-witted” in his misremembering, later generations would be able to empathize with his struggle and not consider him a remote, inimitable paragon. Forgetfulness, whether in the time of Moses or generations later, was a fact of Jewish life and part of ritual observance as well as rabbinic culture.
This same allowance for forgetfulness was also demonstrated by rabbis when congregants did not live up to a perhaps impossible ideal. If someone ate a meal but forgot to say the blessing for the food and continued daily activities, two interpretive schools of the Sanhedrin or rabbinic court disagreed on the best remedy. One group of scholars, the House of Shammai, suggested that the offender should return to the site of the meal and recite the previously omitted blessing. Meanwhile, the House of Hillel decreed that the absent-minded diner should just say the blessing wherever the omission became clear. According to this less exigent recommendation, any time while digestion still continued would be acceptable for repairing this lapse.
Also on the subject of digestion in the Mishnah is rabbinic wisdom about what to do if one forgets to remove tefillin before going to the toilet. The prescribed way to cope with this unfortunate profanation expresses precise instructions with gastroenterological verve.
The types of forgetting envisaged by authorities quoted in the Mishnah can be extreme, amounting to what the Israeli philosopher Moshe Halbertal has termed “borderline cases.” Some almost seem to rival in outlandishness the neurological case studies of Oliver Sacks, author of The Man Who Mistook His Wife for a Hat.
So the Mishnah elucidated what should be done if a man has agreed to a marriage contract for one of his daughters, but forgets which daughter. Or if Jews become entirely oblivious to the fact that incest is prohibited.
Balberg reminds us that some of the weirder examples mentioned in the Mishnah do not necessarily mean that such forgetfulness occurred often in real life. Instead, they are theoretical exercises, purposefully bizarre, to inspire students by being memorable as springboards for virtuosic problem-solving.
More humdrum examples depict forgetting as a ready excuse for erring, inviting relatively lightweight reparations. In a later era, according to one tale, Rabbi Levi Yitzchak of Berditchev, a Hasidic master, saw a young Jew smoking a cigarette in the street on Shabbat. The rabbi’s first question was whether his interlocutor had forgotten that smoking is forbidden on the Sabbath day. Denying that his memory was flawed, the young man replied instead that he was deliberately disobeying the rules. Whereupon the rabbi lauded the sanctity of the Jewish people, who include individuals preferring to admit that they have sinned rather than tell a lie.
As Balberg concludes, this kvelling in the possibilities of forgetfulness in the Mishnah validated the existence of rabbinical interpretation. Given the repeated absent-mindedness of Jews in all eras, rabbis have served as vital reminders about how to follow all aspects of Jewish life.
This would also explain why in the Mishnah, amnesiac Jews are offered so much potential restorative advice. For even if we forget what the Mishnah is, there will remain historically justified hope that consciousness of Jewish ritual and tradition may one day be restored.
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