“I’ve got a grand memory for forgetting, David.” — Kidnapped, Robert Lewis Stevenson (1886)

We often heard our parents say “Yemach Shmo V’Zichro!” [Erase their name and memory!]

It was their dismissal of Jew-haters in general, as well as personal friends who had betrayed them.

They talked the talk and walked the walk, not speaking of them or even mentioning their names. We found it humorous, at best quaint, at worst antiquated. We mocked it behind their backs. We had more pungent epithets to dismiss our enemies. We found our obscene imprecations more satisfying, the F word more cathartic than the Y word.

Fast forward six decades. A ubiquitous social and personal psychiatric problem is pernicious pertinacious obsessions. Whether our enemies are public figures or private acquaintances, we can be consumed by our hatred of them. Holding onto it is as effective as swallowing poison to kill our enemy.

Anger and peace are mutually exclusive.

If we won’t be happy till they are dead, their existence becomes our life-sentence punishment.

What can we do? We can’t ethically or legally murder them in reality, but we can in our minds. Yemach Shmo V’Zichro.

If we determinedly never utter their name, in time, we think about them less. If we skip any article about them, we look forward to reading the paper again. If we come across them, but don’t look at them, much less speak to them, their presence can’t ruin an occasion for us.

In the process, we not only “kill” them, but more importantly, we stop torturing ourselves.

Friends might try to dissuade us. They claim it’s our civic duty to address objectionable public figures. They do that to assuage their own anger. They want to discuss our private adversaries, ostensibly to make peace. In reality, it is to satisfy their own schadenfreude (shades of Freud:) )

A prominent client’s ex-wife published a memoir about him. When anyone asked his thoughts about her revelations, he responded honestly that he never read them (though she “considerately” hand-delivered him the galleys.)

They asked him: “How can you not?”

He replied: “Why would I?”

They had no answer. He did.

If a friend inadvertently slights us, a miscommunication or oversight, a one-time aberration, of course we should address it to remediate the situation. If however, it’s a repeated pattern (modifying a quote misattributed to Mark Twain): “Abuse me once, shame on you; abuse me twice, shame on me.”

This is not “Forgive and Forget”; this is “Erase.”

Christian tradition is “Forgive” our enemies, no matter what. Jewish is, forgive those who beg forgiveness, exhibiting confession, contrition, and offering remediation {Hodaah, Charata, Teshuva.]

We forgive as in Yaiush, abandoning expectation of restitution. That doesn’t mean exculpating the abuser.

“Forgetting” is antipodal to learning. Intelligence is defined by learning from our mistakes to avoid repeating them. We don’t want to forget that touching a hot stove (or individual) will burn us.

What about our natural desire to punish those who hurt us?

Natural is not necessarily healthy (e.g., Arsenic.) Vituperatively confronting someone, how often do they beg our forgiveness?

The answer is, approximately… Never!

At best, they ignore us, increasing our frustration, making us appear (deservedly) foolish. At worst, the situation escalates, possibly irreversibly. The only thing we raise is our blood pressure.

On the other hand, our extrusion punishes them, whether they care about us, or not.

A head-nurse had been traumatized years earlier discovering her surgeon fiancé was dipping his scalpel elsewhere. Learning he was transferred to her unit, she knew he would try to gash her again.

Sure enough, as soon as he arrived, he walked into the conference room as she was conducting morning-rounds with her staff and embarrassingly interrupted her: “I expect you will be professional enough to not allow our previous personal relationship to interfere with my work here.”

Her staff were incensed; he smirked.

She smiled: “No problem. I’m sorry, what’s your name again?”

As he slammed the door behind him, her staff laughed and applauded.

When our parents practiced Yemach  for the most traumatic memory, refusing to discuss the Holocaust, the term PTSD – Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, had neither been coined, nor acknowledged.

Revealingly, now that we understand it better, we try to erase traumatic memories by many different therapies [cognitive-behavioral, electroconvulsive, pharmacological, hypno-, gaseous (Harvard Medical School experimented with anesthetic gas Xenon.)] The popular Jim Carrey -Kate Winslet film Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind references medical memory repression.

Indeed, it seems to be our heavenly natural reaction. Survivors of severe traumatic accidents have no memory of them. They remember entering the intersection, not the collision, the plane plummeting, not the impact, being tossed in the air, not landing. The physiological explanation is that the trauma prevented the memory from being Incorporated; perhaps it is also an evolutionary, or divine, advantage.

I recall psychoanalysts claiming Holocaust survivors’ greatest trauma wasn’t the result of what they experienced, but because they refused to talk about it. I sat quietly in the audience trying (unsuccessfully) not to roll my eyes, (successfully) not yelling at them: “Let’s see if you still feel that way if someone exterminates three generations, your entire family, in front of you!”

In retrospect, our parents’ approach wasn’t as antiquated as we had thought. Indeed, they were ahead of their time.

The less we obsess over the wrongs done to us in the past, the more we can relish the present. The more we adhere to erasing their name and memory, the less they can continue to hurt us.

Seminal architect colleagues, Ludwig Mies van der Rohe and Philip Johnson famously advocated “Less is more.”

The same might be true whether erecting a new edifice, or a new chapter in our lives.

Shalom Asch wrote: “The power to forget is a necessary condition for our existence.”

The ability to forget is truly grand, David.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)