song, and its emphasis on personal connection to the narrative, contribute to its therapeutic potential.
Our remembrance of redemption demonstrates how trauma is never inevitable and how traumatic memory can be transformed into a remembrance that unites. Memory as the Torah understands it is anything but a passive activity. We are who we are in no small part because of how we choose to let our memories affect us. This is a choice every one of us faces when confronted with our traumas. The remembrance of past redemptions tells us not to choose fear and isolation but to choose empathy and the connection to the covenantal community. Our current pain, as with our past trauma, must teach us to connect to the other and not to distance ourselves from them. It teaches us to choose the path of processing trauma and not to hold onto it. Every emigration is traumatic yet the Torah is telling us not to focus on the trauma but on the possibility.
Martin Herskovitz, from Rehovot, Israel, is a Spiegel fellow at Bar Ilan University and a poet. His book of poetry Son of the Shoah, and his endeavor Creating Memory deal with the creation of a personal and emotional narrative of Holocaust remembrance that facilitates grieving and the processing of intergenerational trauma.
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