What Stories Do We Tell?

“B'sefer chayim, berachah v'shalom ufarnasah tovah nizacher v'nikatev…”

“In the Book of life, blessing, sustenance and peace, may we and the whole people be remembered and recorded.” This is the theme, presented with haunting and suppliant melody, which dominates the High Holy Day season. In one regard it is, admittedly, a quaint, almost child-like idea. Some surely think of this like we think of, lehavdil, Santa Claus, writing down who's naughty and who's nice. There is, too, in this image a little hint of finger wagging, moralistic clucking and tut-tutting, almost like the babysitter saying, “Watch out because I'm going to write down everything you do and tell your parents.”

But our Rabbis were not fools, and they did not intend to describe the Creator of Heaven and Earth as the Great Nanny in the Sky. In fact, G-d's writing in the Book of Life is a profound image, an invitation to human dignity, indeed, our ticket to a life of eternity.

For what the metaphor truly means is that everyone is remembered, for better and for worse. Everyone's existence is indelibly etched in the mind of G-d. There is no person, and no action, that is irrelevant or insignificant. We are all characters in the greatest, most all-encompassing, book ever written. A pretty amazing thought, wouldn't you say? But more amazing still is the fact that G-d is, for the most part, only a scribe. We, the characters, are also the main authors. We get to write our own stories! Whatever is found in the Book of Life, we put there!

And these are stories that will be told forever, since they will remain forever fresh in the mind of G-d the story-teller. For what is Torah, after all, if not the greatest story ever told? The reason G-d made human beings was because he loves stories—and without human beings, there would be no good stories to write and no one to appreciate them. G-d stretched out beyond himself to listen, to record, and to react. And thus, from the beginning of time, man, created in the image of G-d, has also been a story-teller. The great wisdom of the ages, the flower of all human civilization, has been transmitted through stories. And what are stories, if not the shapers of our view of the world?

Who we are is determined by the stories we tell, just as surely as our fate is determined by the stories we create, and that G-d writes down for us.
So what stories do we tell? Are they stories about our three favorite characters— “me,” “myself,” and “I”? Or are they stories about something more important—us? Are they stories that merely transfer information, or are they stories that inspire us to transformation? Are they stories about irrelevant incidentals that quickly fade, or are they stories that could be, should be, told forever?

These, my friends, are crucially important questions to ask today, because we live at a time when stories and story-telling are changing, and not necessarily for the better. We live at a time when words, ideas, and stories, instead of conveying discrete thoughts worth hearing, and worth gathering together to hear, are instead becoming mere drops in a tidal wave of information that sweeps away everything in its path. It is not, to be sure, that people have stopped telling stories; or that the stories they tell are somehow inferior. But, because of the unique qualities of the time in which we live, the whole enterprise of storytelling is at risk, and with it the whole aspect of stories as our contact with eternity.

Traditional stories are the transmitters of communal identity. Ruth-Ann and I once had the opportunity to participate in an interfaith conference with representatives of most of the world's major religions. One day we were sharing our lunch with a group of Hindus. We quickly turned to the subject of how young Hindus in America are able to hold on to their Hindu identity. Do they have an assimilation-or-continuity problem like we do? You bet they do. And how do they deal with it? Their immediate and unanimous answer to that question was: “Young Hindu people hear the stories told by their parents and grandparents. And that tells them who they are.”

So profoundly true. Unfortunately for us, though, stories that tell us who we are, that allow us to share something with our fellows, and in particular between the generations, are the rarity today. Instead, the stories being generated today are so idiosyncratic as to be incomprehensible.

At academic conferences, for example, people with PhDs in the same field cannot grasp the lectures and papers delivered by their colleagues. The specialization and, one might say, jargonization, are simply too extreme. I remember asking an art history professor if he read Art News magazine. Surprisingly. he said no. Why? I asked. “Because I can't understand it,” was his reply.

It has long been pointed out that Francis Bacon was probably the last person in history to have mastered the sum of human knowledge in his time, the last person who could be said to have “understood everything.” That is a feat that would be impossible for anyone today, simply because the volume of information is so great. But who could have dreamt of a time when people who are experts in the same field couldn't even communicate with each other? Much less with anyone else?

There is simply no common body of knowledge, no common language. James Billington, a Librarian of Congress, knows a thing or two about knowledge and information. He refers to our current situation as “the Tower of Babel syndrome.” “It's significant,” he says, “that we call it the Information Age. We don't talk about the Knowledge Age.” Much less the Wisdom Age. He went on to say that, “Our society is basically motion without memory. Which, of course, is one of the clinical definitions of insanity.” Motion without memory—if ever there were a condition antithetical to all Jewish experience, it is this. We are, or at least up until recently have been, the ultimate in motion, by definition “wandering Jews.” And yet what commandment has been more widely fulfilled than the commandment “zachor”—“remember”?

And this points to another difference between the classic, traditional story and the Information Age story. Classic stories were meant to evoke reflection. They were to be told and retold, meditated upon, become “twice-told.” If there is one thing that Judaism has always emphasized, it is the value of reading, and rereading, and again rereading, our sacred texts. We read through the Torah on a yearly basis. We repeat our studies of Mishnah and Talmud almost to the point of memorization. We read commentary after commentary on the same passage.

But that certainly isn't the way the world works today. On the Information Highway, anything slow enough to be reread will become road-kill. Putting it into its simplest form: we couldn't possibly read once all of the E-mail we get. Rereading? Who rereads anything? Who even thinks about it?

The problem with the Information Age is not, let me make clear, that the information being generated is somehow unimportant or, worse, necessarily false. The problem is simply that the volume of information is so huge that it is completely unmanageable to us as individuals, and to society as a whole. To mention one example, there was a wonderful project, called Project Guttenberg, that put 10,000 classic texts online. There's only one hitch. This computerization process could never catch up with the explosive creativity of our time. The Library of Congress gains 10,000 new books every two weeks. By the time the virtual library has been expanded by 10,000 books, half a million new books had been published.

By way of contrast, consider this: In 1472, the library at Queens' College in Cambridge, England—arguably the intellectual capital of the world in its day—had precisely 199 books.
All of which are to some extent on their way to being forgotten. It has been pointed out that a person might surf the web for hours and not find anything written before 1995. For all the enormous memory capability of even the simplest computers, the fact is that the internet, when viewed sociologically, is inherently destructive of memory.

It is also inherently destructive of certainty. I remember my first contact with the Internet. It was when I was writing articles and giving lectures about, among other things, the Middle East. I remember typing in the words “West Bank” in my Internet search engine—the first time I ever used the thing—and receiving the message: “the first twenty of 1,293 entries appears below.” And I remember very clearly the panic I felt. I took my job as journalist and lecturer very seriously. If I was supposed to convey the truth about the situation, then I was supposed to know the facts. Any one of these 1,293 entries could have contained facts I needed to know, facts that were in the public domain. I couldn't know which ones, though, until I read all 1,293 entries. But then it would not be possible for me to write a timely article, since, by the time I'd finished writing the article there would be new facts and new articles to read, and by the time the article was published, more facts and articles still.

And this paradox is true for every single journalist, lecturer, expert and pundit at work today. Consider, therefore, this simple reality: everything you hear and read is based on data so incomplete that the overwhelming bulk of information has not even been read, much less examined and analyzed. There is zero time for checking facts or for thinking things through.

So all in all, where do we find ourselves and our stories in this wonderful Information Age? With a collection of stories too idiosyncratic to be understood, much less shared; with computer memories approaching infinity, but with human memories measured in days if not minutes; with a sea of new stories too vast to be read, too turbulent to allow quiet reflection, too fast moving to make room for such quaint concepts as accuracy and truth, much less completeness and expertise.

If classic stories were meant as a vehicle to bind us together, a source of “chayim, beracha v'shalom,” of “life, blessing and peace,” the Internet is by contrast a source of nearly complete atomization, fracturing any sense of shared past, shared present, or shared future. Keeping it really simple, the multi-lane Information Superhighway looks an awful lot like an accident on Rt. 287: a traffic jam with a whole bunch of people caught in the middle, away from home, going nowhere in particular.   Without a bathroom.   Hardly a happy prospect.

But there are other routes we can take. There is another kind of highway altogether, a transformation superhighway, to which we have immediate and unlimited access, if only we would make use of it. This is the highway composed of the great stories of our people. These are the stories of which theologian Thomas Moore was thinking when he wrote: “Whenever we speak, other voices are speaking through us. We never know the full resonance of our words, spoken or written, and it is from those mysterious depths that words take their power. The more we stand back and allow those other voices to be heard, the more fully we speak and the more powerfully we are heard.”

Allow me to repeat that last line: “The more we stand back and allow those other voices to be heard, the more fully we speak and the more powerfully we are heard.” Each of us carries within us the voices of others: of sainted parents and grandparents, of loving spouses and siblings, of innocent children. Through our words, our deeds, and our attitudes, in our hearts and in our discourse with others, we are constantly telling the stories of ages past. And more than that: each character we remember is in fact a part of us, shaping our life and our view of life. Whether we know it or not, we are constantly reading excerpts from G-d's Book of Life. As we gather together for the Yizkor ceremony, we ought to bear in mind that we are remembering people here who never made it, and never will make it, onto the Internet. Their lives are not and will not be recorded in cyberspace. They are people who have shaped us by their actions and teachings, but whose name is not written in any book except Hashem's. Is it not incumbent upon us to see to it that their page is read aloud, with clear voice and proud spirit?

This may be a debt owed, a debt that must be repaid. But do not think that it is a burden. It is in fact a blessing for us, our ticket to eternity. Because, my friends, when all is said and done, it is unlikely that anyone will remember any one of us hundreds of years from now. In fact, the longer we live in the cyberage, the less we will be remembered at all, the less, indeed, our existence will be noted even as we live. In the old days, we would say that our life is like grass—in the morning it grows, in the evening it withers. Today, we say instead that our life is like an unread E-mail—it doesn't matter how good the contents are, no one will get around to opening it before it automatically gets dumped from the system.

But by telling the stories of our own folk, the classic stories of our ancestors at the birth of our people, and the stories of the loved ones that we have been privileged to know in our own lifetimes; and by writing new stories that build on the stories of old, we participate in something that will not disappear after a few seconds in cyberspace. We participate in something that is not virtual reality but rather, when measured against the flow of time through the ages, the only reality. We create, by nurturing and sustaining our shared identity, a sacred collective being that does not die, that cannot die, that renews itself every time its story is told. My colleague, Rabbi Murray Stadtmauer, edited a charming collection of stories about his father, Simchah Asher Stadtmauer z”l. This collection was in the works for years, and was only recently completed. I asked Rabbi Stadtmauer what he thought of the project as a whole. He said that toward the end of his father's life, the infirmities of old age had put his father into a condition of almost constant pain. “The only thing that would make him smile,” Rabbi Stadtmauer said, “the only thing that would make him smile was when we told him the stories that he had told us when we were children.”

“The only thing that would make him smile was when we told him the stories that he had told us when we were children.” To retell the stories we were told as children, to make sure that our children learn them, to make sure that our elders know we are telling them, is, ultimately, the most important thing any of us can do. It is imitatio dei, the imitation of G-d, the greatest story-teller, at its highest level. As we rise for the memorial service in honor of our story-tellers of days past, we must dedicate ourselves to making our lives into stories worth being told. And then, my friends, then we can be assured, that “We and the whole people will be remembered and recorded in the Book of life, blessing, sustenance and peace forever.” Amen.

Rabbi Robert Wolkoff