Our Inner Pinchas: Remembering What We Forgot

There are many who have written and proclaimed, that we have forgotten who we are as a country, as a society, and as many of our most popular pundits have said, even as a civilization at large.

The thing is, assuming these popular columnists (both left- and right-leaning) themselves have, in diagnosing the society at large, excluded themselves from this collective amnesia, who is their target audience? If their readership is excluded as well, then that leaves only those who forgot. If so, then what is their frame of reference in reading this?

The Torah portion of Pinchas captures a similar moment in history. A crisis was unfolding in the wilderness encampment, and the leadership had gone silent. The notion of the infallible and reliable leadership of Moses suddenly compromised—“Moses forgot the law”—rendering him momentarily incapacitated and unable to exercise decisive leadership, might have brought up a national sense of existential leadership akin to what was experienced in the story of the Golden Calf.

Regardless of what is being written and spoken, I know many of us might feel the same sense of abandonment, surely in different ways, but the end result must feel the same all around. Being abandoned by what or who we expected to always be there for us, to support and guide us, to lead us, that is no longer there, can be deeply traumatizing. The sting of betrayal however, eventually gives way to the greater reality of fear and loneliness itself.

However, like the episode in this week's story, comes the realization that even the most challenging times are ripe with opportunity. Every void left by the conventional “Moses” resources can be mourned and yearned for nostalgically; or it can be filled by the little guy, by each of us run of the mill Pinchas people who choose to forge ahead and not cave to despair simply because a writer in the newspaper told us to. We can choose to “remember” what Moses forgets.

Also, there’s this. I believe that by and large, the people on both sides of this country's vast ideological divide, are good and honest and kind at their core. I don’t think there is a collective forgetting of “who we are as a nation,” etc., that is not shaped by the ways we have forgotten who we each are at our own core. Seeing others from a lesser place in our own selves has freed us to think less of others.

The Hebrew text describing Moses forgetting the law, “Nisalma Meemenu” can also be interpreted as “He hid himself from him” or “he hid himself from others,” or even from his own self. In this interpretation there is a shift from forgetting the protocol or “what to do” to a forgetting of one another as a result of a “hiding” or “concealment” of an original core self. The concealment or forgetting of who we were to our own selves leads us inevitably to a forgetting of the way we used to be present for others.

In this portion we are reminded of the power of recapturing the lost memories of who we might have been at our best. In doing so, we suddenly remember how good that must have felt to those around us as well.

In a world where this forgetfulness seems rampant, we would do well to remember that there is no collective universal memory. The world “remembers” only what we forget. It can just as easily remember what WE remember.

If so many of us have forgotten or misplaced our inner “Moses,” we can each as individuals deploy our inner Pinchas to track down and remember that lost or forgotten soulfulness.