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It’s Jewish memory season, and this week’s parasha, Parashat Emor, focuses on the Jewish holidays that we celebrate today as a recollection of events in our past. But what happens when Jewish memory starts to feel like destiny, and what does it mean for our sense of agency when history seems inevitable?

On this episode of TEXTing IRL, Elana Stein Hain and Hartman Institute President Yehuda Kurtzer examine the power and dangers of historical analogy and the ethical responsibility that comes with reading today’s events through yesterday’s stories. This conversation asks how Jewish memory can inform moral choice without foreclosing it, and how to hold uncertainty without giving up responsibility.

A full transcript of this episode is available below.
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Jewish Responses to Poverty: Charity, Loans, and Prevention Transcript

Note: This is a lightly edited transcript of a conversation, please excuse any errors.

Elana: Hello everyone. Welcome back to TEXTing IRL: Ideas for Real Life, where we wrestle with the big dilemmas of our time, through the lens of classical and modern tour texts. I’m your host, Elana Stein Hain, and we’re recording on April 14th, 2026. 

Before we get started, if you listen to or watch this show, it means you care about how we face big dilemmas in the Jewish community. We’d love to hear from you more directly. So we put together a short survey. It’s quick and it really helps us understand what’s resonating, what’s challenging, and what you want more of you. Feedback shapes how we think, plan and grow this podcast. So if you have a few minutes. Please fill out the survey by scanning this QR code or by clicking the link in the show notes. Thanks for listening and for watching, and thanks for thinking with us. 

When Israel and the US launched a massive coordinated attack on Iran just a few days before Purim, many viewed the holiday as a lens for understanding this moment. It was just a redux of the Purim story, this time with a modern day Persia.

The Jewish calendar, along with the collective memory and feelings that it’s meant to trigger is really potent, and Jewish memory is seldom only about the past. True, it invites us to honor the impact of our collective experience, but its potency actually lies in the lessons that it teaches us about everything from the possibility of overcoming challenges to understanding what went wrong and trying not to repeat to what it means to be part of a covenantal arc of history and how that obligates people to other human beings and to God. In short, Jewish memory is meant to join the past to the present. 

But what are the ethics of attempting to read the present in light of the past? What role should our collective Jewish memory play in the way Jews experience the seismic events of today? And given how much we are living through right now, what new memories are being created during these tumultuous years, and how might we mark them for ourselves and for future generations? 

This week’s Torah portion, Emor, with its focus on the Jewish Holidays, is a perfect site to think about the role of Jewish memory, as, of course, the Jewish holiday calendar is explicitly connected by both biblical and rabbinic tradition to events in our Jewish past. Moreover, the modern day commemorations of Yom HaShoah, Israel’s Memorial Day Yom Hazikaron, and Israel’s Independence Day, Yom Haatzmaut that all fall during this season push us to continue to consider these questions more urgently. And in fact, we’re taping today on Yom HaShoah, Holocaust Remembrance Day. So memory is on our minds. 

I’m so delighted today to welcome my colleague and friend, Dr. Yehuda Kurtzer, co-president of the Shalom Hartman Institute, Yehuda’s book, Shuva: The Future of the Jewish Past, is such a thoughtful meditation on the role of the past in our present, and specifically the role of Jewish memory in charting our path forward. So I’m really looking forward to thinking these issues through with you, Yehuda. Welcome to the show.

Yehuda: Thanks, Elana. I’m happy to be here with you.

Elana: So I wanna start by grounding us in the Torah portion, because the truth is, you know, Leviticus, Vayikra 23, it’s a lot of agriculture when it comes to the calendar, but there is a beautiful, sneaky moment towards the end of that chapter that goes right into Jewish memory. 

We’re talking about the holiday of Sukkot. It says, “basukkot teshvu shiv’at yamim,” you’re gonna live in booths for seven days, all of the citizens of Israel will sit in booths. And then here comes the Jewish memory catalyst, “l’ma’an yedu doroteichem,” so that your future generations will know, “ki basukkot hoshavti et Bnei Yisrael,” that I settled you in booths, “b’hotzi otam m’Eretz mitzrayim, when you were leaving Egypt and traversing the desert, “ani Adoni eloheichem,” I’m the Lord your God. 

Now, some people talk about Passover as, you do strange things so that the children will ask. Well, I can think of few things that are stranger than Sukkot. You’re sitting outside when it just started getting cold, and you’re basically saying, we want to trigger memory. 

So when we trigger that memory, Yehuda, I mean, you build a beautiful Sukkah. I’ve seen it. Right? When we trigger that memory, that’s clearly not only about the past, don’t you think? 

Yehuda: No, it’s definitely not. And, and you alluded to this in, in your opening, in your framework when you talked about the covenantal arc of history, what the Torah, I think understands—and actually, the Torah has a weird understanding of human condition that science is actually only catching up to, which is well, which I’ll, I’ll mention, I’ll say something about that in a second. 

What it understands is that our relationship to the past is not like a sequence. It’s not like these historical events that we talk about now as though there’s some enduring value of just talking about these things. This very text that you cited is weaving together, past, present, and future because it’s subjunctive in the future. You will talk about those events in the past, but for now you have to be in the present. 

And the reason I alluded to kind of modern thinking about this is, only in the past, you know, half century or so have biologists and neurobiologists come to understand that events of our past are not historical events that happened to us, that sometimes we remember and sometimes we don’t, they can actually transform genes. They actually live in our trauma, you know, has a, can have epigenetic endurance, which means that like the events that happen to our ancestors can actually live physically within ourselves. 

So even, even the notion of like past, present, future is kind of screwed up, like we, we actually, there’s something very different about the biblical tradition and now increasingly about biology, which says past, present, future, are always kind of intertwined with each other. 

Elana: Wow, so it’s funny, recently I actually, I saw this study, I saw the scientific study on that epigenetics, meaning that sense of, yeah, the trauma lives in your genes. And I posted it somewhere and every Jew I know wrote duh. Meaning, why are you, meaning, it’s Yom HaShoah, right? Duh. Of course. 

But I’m also taken by what you’re saying about, in the time when the ritual is created, there is a future tense perspective. It’s not, we are experiencing this now and therefore we are going to remember it for ourselves. There’s already a sense of the need to pass on. Which I think is really deep. 

Now I, I’ll say that even though this particular verse is not giving us, you know, Exodus as a paradigm in as explicit a way, I mean, it’s all over the Bible. Meaning, Exodus is the paradigm for future redemptions, and I think more than that, in Rabbinic understanding, and, you know, Jacob Neusner, the, the Rabbinics scholar, he, I don’t know if he coined the phrase, but I first heard it or I first read it from him, “paradigmatic history,” where basically what you have is, the same things keep happening over and over again or something that echoes or rhymes, and so you have things in the Talmud like, oh, in the month of Nissan we were taken out of Egypt and in the month of Nissan, our future redemption will happen. Or on the ninth of Av, these five things happen throughout history. Right? There’s a a desire to kind of consolidate or, or make, create paradigms here.

And that’s really what I wanna talk to you about today, ’cause we gotta talk about the ethics of that. It, it can be incredibly empowering. It can also be incredibly dangerous. So what do you make of it? 

Yehuda: Yeah. So as you said, Neusner said “paradigmatic time.” Jonathan Sarna is the one who says all the time history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. And it has certain Jewish implications. That’s what you talked about earlier about, oh my God, this happened, this invasion of Iran takes place right around Purim time, I’ve seen a version of this story before—and we know that’s not really true, right? Like, it’s not the same story. Right? It’s not true in that sense.

Elana: They’re not the same people.

Yehuda: They’re not the same people. And like it’s—

Elana: It’s a diasporic story. Meaning, there are a lot, there’s a lot here. Nobody invaded anyone. 

Yehuda: And did the Purim story really ever happen? Like there’s a lot, right, that you could, you know, talk about. 

Elana: There’s a lot, lot riding on the comparison. So I, I think there’s kind of two levels here. One is, what is kind of legitimate for Jews to do, or natural, even before you get to legitimate, what’s natural for Jews to do? And I, I think that, I think I, I want us to have some generosity and empathy towards our own people for the impulse to look at history and say in Jonathan Safron Foer’s framing, what does it remember like? 

Like what—I kind of feel like I’ve seen this before and it might have been because I heard this story from my grandparents, and it might be because it, it brings back resonances of Leviticus 22, right? Like, that’s okay. That’s actually okay. And it’s actually a beautiful feature of being Jewish is that our sense of stability is rooted in a kind of continuity with the past. We feel tethered to our family, our, our history, our story, our tradition through those memories. 

And I, I wrote about this in the week after October 7th, with some ambivalence, because right after October 7th, you heard all of this language of “pogrom.” It’s a fascinating piece of language. Like we, we haven’t had pogroms in a long time, but this kind of look and feels like one, even though, actually, it was, as we understand, way worse than any pogrom in history, vastly more violent than what we think of the worst pogrom of all time.

And, and of course people came to attack that, which we can talk about, of like, don’t make analogies between those pogroms and this, for very important reasons. But I felt it was important to say before you say don’t do it, try to understand why Jews have that impulse, to see a relationship to the past and the present, validate that that helps us feel like we’re in a big story. And then you can engage with the question of what’s different and what’s the same, because you don’t want to allow that, that impulse to see your present in the past, to then dictate what the future looks like. 

And our colleague Yossi Klein Halevi was very insistent on this, very cautious, like, the minute you start talking about this really as a pogrom, you miss out on the main difference between then and now, which is— 

Elana: Jewish sovereignty. 

Yehuda: —in every other period of Jewish history, there was no October 8th. You have no army that’s capable of responding. So that’s the caution. But there is some validity to just the impulse, the interpretive impulse that gives us a sense of security and who we are as a people.

Elana: Yeah, it’s, you know, it’s a funny thing, because when we talk about remembering tragedy, it feels different to me than when we talk about remembering success. Meaning, I, I think they both carry the danger of doing things that are making decisions that are really faulty because you’re just working with some sort of inevitable framework.

Yehuda: That’s right. That inevitability is very dangerous. 

Elana: But I’ll tell you the difference of the, the remembering success I feel is actually necessary. Meaning as a Jew, and I’m gonna say as a person of, of faith, I, I actually do, experiencing that experience, that as some covenantal arc between God and the Jewish people and remembering that is actually really important to me. 

So I, I’m not even thinking about it just as something utilitarian, I’m thinking about that as, it’s a value. And I’m sure, by the way, people who think about tragedy in that way would look at me and say, yeah, it’s actually a value for me to think about the tragic—right? Meaning it’s, it’s helps us be part of a bigger story. But I also think there’s something, it’s, it’s an epigenetics. It’s, it’s the identity of who we are. And I think there’s values in there and not just utility. I think there’s values in there.

But I, I know that it’s very hard for people to go from making comparisons to being able to see differences. And so I wanna look at a couple of examples in Tanach, in the Bible, where that Exodus story, which becomes such a paradigm for everything else, actually gets a little bit slowed down. So I’ll give you an example, right? 

When you look in the book of Isaiah, you know, the end chapters, 40 and on, it’s all comfort, right? So it’s, it’s gonna promise you redemption. And so in Yeshayahu chapter 52, I’m so taken by this pasuk that basically tells them, look, at the end of the day, there is an inevitability about your continuity, right? And that’s part of the belief, that’s part of the faith, right? It doesn’t help me with my own life, but it helps me with the bigger picture. But it’s not gonna look the same.

So the, the pasuk goes as follows. The verse goes as follows, “ki lo bachipazon tetzei,” you’re not going to leave in haste, you know, with your shoes on, and your belt buckled the way this narrative of the Exodus is told, “uvimnusah lo telechun,” and you’re not gonna leave running the way that you did. And then the verse says, because God is there and picking you all up from lots of different places, implying that it’s going to be a very long process, meaning God has to pick you up from here and pick you up from here and pick you up from here.

And I actually, I wanna let that sit on an ear of somebody who says—and, and somebody said this to me. I was in Florida and somebody said to me, she goes, I know the Jewish people will continue because, and she said, “netzach Yisrael lo yishaker,” the eternal one of Israel doesn’t lie. This person is not a religious person. I said, that is, you know how wild that is to say? She said, I know that it will continue. I just don’t know what it’s gonna look like. And I, I wanna think about that for a minute. People who live in that strange space.

Well that’s very beautiful because it kind of, it has the potential to help us resolve the problem. Like, what we’re describing here is the Bible tends to have an approach to history that suggests that things move in cycles, right? And that could allow you to be looking for signs all the time. Like, oh, I, now I understand. I’m at this part of the story, now I’m at this part of the story, and then it’s all just gonna kind of happen inevitably. And what that does is it takes away human agency. Right? What is actually different that requires my own intervention?

And it also pretends as though everything is kind of predictable along a certain sequence. So if this happens, therefore the next thing is going to happen. And the modern problem, of course, is that we don’t tend to believe anymore in the same kind of cyclicality of history. We have a greater sense of understanding of our own agency, as you know, Danielle Allen, the the scholar at Harvard likes to say, it’s not true that the arc of history is long, but it bends towards justice. There is no inevitability in the arc of history. It only bends towards justice if humans play a role in bending it towards justice. 

So to notice that it’s already in the, the prophetic tradition that Isaiah is saying, don’t expect that this like, oh, that we just naturally go through this cycle of destruction and redemption, you’re actually gonna have to be prepared for totally wild different presentations of it. I think that opens up a pathway for Maimonides, for later thinkers to say the Messianic era won’t look like what you think it’s gonna look like because you think there are replicable patterns in history. You have to play a very different role in the story and you have to be open to the possibility that history won’t, won’t exactly follow the same patterns that came before. It’s a really useful caution for us. 

Elana: Well, so it’s interesting. Let’s talk about caution, but let’s also talk about how that liberates a little bit, right? Meaning if things are inevitable, right? Let’s, let’s take, let’s go concrete for a minute. Some of the things that people are using Jewish memory to think about, right? So it’s inevitable that we’ll beat Iran. It’s inevitable that we’re in 1930s Germany, in America and Canada. It’s inevitable. I’m just, I’m saying, it’s inevitable that this, Zionist project is actually going to be, God forbid, the downfall of—notice I say “God forbid” at that one. God forbid, I mean, Iran, I’d be happy for us to beat Iran, but God forbid on the other one as well.

But, you know, this is the third Commonwealth and it, it could fall because of all the immorality, et cetera. The inevitability of that. So you actually have to be liberated from that in order to make responsible choices, right? Like otherwise, just go home, go to sleep, just go home, go to sleep, right? You have to be responsible. You can’t just—by hook or by crook. 

Yehuda: I, I think that what you’re basically saying, Elana, is that if you, if you believe in the, in the, in that cyclical narrative of history, you’re kind of obligated to be in a permanent phase of short-term pessimism and long-term optimism. The short-term pessimism is, yeah, this version of something will probably be destroyed, right? Like we had a good run in America. But if I just look at the patterns of Alexandria and Germany and Spain and England and Greece and all these other places that were Jews were destroyed, it doesn’t ever stay forever. So it’ll probably go through some fear, period of destruction, and then we will find ourselves on the redemptive arc on the other end.

But I think what you’re saying, which I also feel a deep resistance towards, is like, stop with that teleology. There’s no natural, it doesn’t have to happen that way. Just because there are interesting analogies between the Jewish community in America and ancient Jews of Alexandria doesn’t mean that we’re about to be destroyed in a pogrom the way that ancient Alexandria and Jews were, just because Israel is rehabilitating the notion of a Jewish commonwealth in the land of Israel. Doesn’t mean that because the first one was destroyed and the second one is destroyed, the third is destroyed. It takes away so much of our capacity to actually shape a different narrative of history and leave aside a little bit the redemption story. Just build it, be in it, create it, right?

Elana: Well, so it’s, it’s, there’s two things. One, I, I would give a little. My asterisk is that I do believe that all good things come to an end at some point. I mean, I’m just being honest, meaning I really do believe that. But I think there’s a difference between being wary of the possibility and considering it to be inevitable. I, I think there’s a big difference between those two. I think it’s naive not to recognize the patterns, but I also think that it’s highly dangerous to think of things as fully—

Yehuda I, I get it, but I just—I, I get it. I just would say like, we have to have more abundant imagination when we think with the Jewish past about all of the available templates. Like when someone says to me, oh, this seems to be—the American Project, which was so unique in the second half of the century, seems to be declining, and they immediately go to Nazi Germany, I’m like, come on. Couldn’t it be more like, for instance, couldn’t be like more like America in the 1940s and 1950s, where Jews still experienced significant degrees of cultural and social antisemitism, but they weren’t being rounded up to camps? 

Like, that too is an act of Jewish memory. So you actually have to be kind of learned in Jewish history in order to be good at this Jewish memory business. Otherwise, you’re kind of lazy, right? You’re just looking for the one possible template, and it’s usually the worst possible one. 

Elana: That’s great. Meaning what I’m taking right now is, okay, it might look like a certain template, and by the way, it, it really does resonate that way, but it doesn’t mean that that’s where we’re going. Another is, no, you’re using the wrong template. You’re not even looking at the right template. So there’s, there’s a, there are layers here, I think, and it takes more than just a quick decision. A snap decision as to what it is. 

Yehuda: Correct.

Elana: You know, I wanna look at another way that the Tanach, that the Bible surprises us because I think this, there’s a moral dimension to this because we are so reasonably entwined in our own story. But it’s amazing to me that the Bible actually says, God didn’t just take you out of Egypt. God took other people out of other places. Like, get, get outta your naval for a minute and, and take a look. 

I mean, listen to this puzzle. Listen to this verse. It’s, it’s absolutely remarkable. In Amos, in Amos, “halo kivnei Kushiyim atem li, Bnei Yisrael?” the Jewish people, are you not like the Kushites to me? “Neum Adoni,” says, God, “halo et Yisrael he’eleti m’Eretz Mitzrayim,” I took the Jews out of Egypt. True. “U’plishitim mi Kaftor,” but I also took the Philistines out of Caftor. “Ve’Aram mi Kir,” I also took the Arameans out of Kir. 

And of course, by the way, the commentaries go wild. Some of the commentaries, they’re like, no, no, no. What it’s really saying is, did I take the Philistines out of Caftor the way that I took you out of Egypt? No. But the plain reading of the verse is, hey, I’m God, I can do it all. And I care about everyone’s story. I care about all the stories. You should care about the different stories, right?

Yehuda: I think it’s even bigger than that, Elana, right? The most we are supposed to claim even as a people that sees itself as God’s chosen people, is that we are playing a particular role in history as part of God’s much larger theological plan for the cosmos, and that it only happens that way because it doesn’t really work to have a universal.

So I’m gonna focus on the particular narrative of this people to achieve something larger. But God reminds us all over the place. This is one example in Isaiah, God reminds us of this, you’re an arrow in my quiver. You’re not the whole thing, you’re my functional tool. The book of Jonah reminds us of this. God has a bigger plan. 

So the, the fear here is of a certain kind of narcissism. The Jewish people become so convinced that the entire story of history revolves around our experience. And these are useful reminders of like, why didn’t the aperture see the bigger story like and, and become, and I know you think about this all the time—Religious Zionism can fall into this trap of like, the whole world’s story of redemption is about us. And you’re right to say, you know, that will narrow your, your point of view to just your version of a story. And everyone else gets left behind in the dust. And that’s so clearly not what the Torah imagines about the salvation of Israel. 

Elana: Correct. You know, we’ve spoken so much about how people use memory now and how they should or shouldn’t use memory now. Can we talk for a minute about the kinds of memories we’re creating now? Let you know, we, there’s a lot to capture right now, you know, and, and we can name the dates, we can name the 10/7. We can name when the hostages came home. We can, we can name all these things. What, what do you think about memory making, creating, some ritualizing, canonizing for the future. What do you think about that? Such as we’re in memory season. 

Yehuda: Yeah. Memory season. I have such deep ambivalences about it. I, I, on one hand, the, those who, who don’t ritualize the past even as it’s happening, lose the long-term battle. Like Hanukkah wasn’t inevitable. Some people decided early on they were gonna turn it into a religious holiday and attach those symbols and the blessings to it, and they won, and what would we be without it? So on one hand I understand that that’s a contest in real time. Who’s gonna create the right ritual that all of us are gonna then use? And that’s gonna be the canonical meaning.

On the other hand, like, it’s, this happened right in front of us. How do you pretend that something can immediately get transformed from trauma, personal experience, and history, which still has living consequences? We’re still fighting the same war, and then turn it into having some sort of canonical meaning.

So I, I know it doesn’t give that much clarity. I just. I kind of hope that people who are doing the ritualization and the meaning making are doing it with that kind of self-awareness and consciousness as opposed to a kind of, I need to make a monolithic set of meanings that have all of this loaded consequences. I don’t know, I just, I think this stuff is so powerful that we have to be careful around it. 

Elana: Yes, it’s it’s dynamite. It’s actually dynamite. 

Yehuda: It’s dynamite. 

Elana: It’s funny, you know, it’s Yom HaShoah, and on Yom HaShoah, what I often do is I look at micro-histories because you lose the macro in the macro of it. You lose the micro, you lose the, the same way you lose the specificity of this moment. You use lose the specificity and the question of how you recognize something on both a macro level and be able to tell the stories of individuals. I think that’s also a big question, because as, as a Jewish people, we have a lot of micro stories coming out, but I don’t think we know yet what the macro is, right? 

Meaning, so let’s tell those micro stories. Let’s tell those individual stories. Let’s, but. I’m not sure we know what this turning point is going to mean 5, 10, 15 years from now, right? And yeah, you’re right. There’s a competition in a way, implicit, not, not, you know, anything explicit that people are doing, but to try to figure out we need to hold it, we need, we need a container. “L’ma’an yedu doroteichem,” so that your generations will know. Everybody thinks in future tense, right? When you’ve survived something, that’s the way you wanna think.

Yehuda: Yeah. Although you’re, you know, when you, when you go back to the text that we started with, we don’t say, so that generations later will remember that your Uncle Marvin sat in a Sukkah. They talk about the collective experience. And others, we do distill from the individual to the collective, and I think that that’s inevitable, right? We, we are in a contest. We have been for 78 years now, 80 years, whatever it is, about the Shoah, whether the dominant moral lesson of the Shoah is don’t be a victim, don’t be a perpetrator, or don’t be a bystander. And the answer is, of course, all of those. But, but we’re dumb, so we fight about those differences.

And, and I, I admire what you’re asking us to do, which is to not fully collectivize the story by thinking more about like particular individual experiences, but we’re in it, and that’s gonna be the story of the people Israel. 

Elana: Correct. We’re gonna have both, but I want it to exist on both levels. You know, I think this is a great place to end with: We are dumb. We’re gonna end there. I, I truly appreciate, this is the pull quote from today. But in all seriousness, thank you so much for joining me today, Yehuda. I mean, you’re making the day that we’re recording so much more meaningful for me individually as a person.

Yehuda: Thank you. 

Elana: And I think you’re giving people a lot to think about that doesn’t feel just chaotic. And it also doesn’t feel inevitable. It feels like, okay, we can hold this uncertain place and this uncertain space. I’ll hold it together. Thanks so much. 

Yehuda: Thank you, Elana.