Holding onto your culture and beliefs can be a challenging thing when that culture and those beliefs do not reflect what is expedient, what is remunerative, and what is safe under a particular government. Written in part to and for the exiles in Babylon, this week’s passage from Deuteronomy encourages the Israelites to remember and uphold their teachings and traditions. At a time when who was in power reflected the strength of that nation’s gods (a belief that isn’t too hard to scratch up today), the idea that a god of a defeated and exiled people is still powerful and has teachings and traditions to follow, that there’s still an operational covenant here, is very much against the dominant culture’s opinion and practices. “But take utmost care and watch yourselves scrupulously, so that you do not forget the things that you saw with your own eyes and so that they do not fade from your mind as long as you live. And make them known to your children and to your children’s children..” (Deut. 4:9b-10a) These words are reminders of how powerful the memories we cultivate can be. How we remember matters. That we remember matters. That we share these memories, these faithful promises, matters.
We don’t have to seek very far for evidence of memory as a powerful counter-dominant-cultural force. People who deny that the Holocaust ever happened, or genocide of First Nations peoples, or the atrocities of chattel slavery are, unfortunately, quite vocal and good at utilizing social media to spread mistrust and cultivate “alternative facts” (lies) to create different appreciations of history and discount truth and truthful traditions and memories. Attacking the trustworthiness and memory is a common discrediting tactic, whether we are talking about someone sharing experiences of sexual or racial violence or something as simple as a person denying responsibility for something they did in fact do. As Timothy Snyder observes in On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century: "Believe in truth. To abandon facts is to abandon freedom. If nothing is true, then no one can criticize power, because there is no basis to do so. If nothing is true, then all is spectacle. The biggest wallet pays for the most blinding lights.” Controlling how and what we remember is part of how authoritarianism works in controlling and changing the populations they govern. Part of that control is activating three of our seven primary affective neural circuits (as described by neuroscientist Jaak Panksepp, The Archeology of the Mind): the fear, anger, and grief circuits. Panksepp also finds all mammals have care, play, seeking and wanting (what he calls lust) circuits, giving us a shared 7 affective circuits that change our bodies and our brains, depending on how we activate and move those energies. When fear, anger, and grief are primarily activated, we tend to be less able to think imaginatively, to be less curious and able to feel wonder, and struggle to practice caring (love, compassion, forgiveness, nurturing, thankfulness, generosity) or to play.
Among the exhortations to remember our faithful promises and covenant with the Holy is a reminder that despite all the evidence to the contrary (exile, for example, or in today’s environment, rising hate crimes and climate change) that the Holy is compassionate and caring (Deut. 4:29-31). In other words: remember the Holy and activate those other circuits (care, play, seeking wonder and thanksgiving, wanting goodness for our neighbors and strangers as for ourselves) that we need to counteract the freezing, fleeing, fighting, and fainting that can dominate us when fear, anger and grief are primarily aroused. When we’re living with so much activation of our fear, grief, and anger circuits, it is easy to find those experiences directing so much of the meaning we are making in our lives. It takes work in the middle of troubling times to activate the care and play circuits and to orient our seeking and wanting circuits to seeking out wonder and wanting goodness for all. And for most of our lives, there will be troubling times. There will be people seeking to abuse power. There will be losses of those we love and of our own abilities. There will be changes in our environment and threats to how we would like to live. And yet…there are also goodnesses, mercies, blessings, even if that’s something as simple as shade on a hot day, or a song that lifts our hearts, or a stranger meeting our eyes and giving us a warm nod that lets us know we are not yet abandoned to the violence that is around us.
Remembering our faithful promises, even as we struggle with grief and anger and fear, even as violence spreads and affects us and those we love, even as we bear witness to more and more suffering, calls us back to the freshness in every moment and every day of what it is to have faith. “It was not with our fathers that this Lord made this covenant, but with us, the living, every one of us who is here today” (Deut.5:3). Repeating that promise as living right now with us the living empowers us to hold fast, to turn away from the lures of expediency and from the way fear and terror can be manipulated to have us give our obedience to worldly authorities that will not, in fact, make us any safer, no matter what they promise from the midst of fear. As the laws and traditions are summarized, we are reminded that there are a multitude of ways to demonstrate our freedom and our faithfulness even when we live in proscribed circumstances, such as not bearing false witness against our neighbors and not stealing (Deut.6:17). From an untested perspective, these might seem like small promises, but in a culture when bearing false witness might mean trading your survival for someone else’s, the stakes are high indeed.
Resisting tyranny and the spread of hate and violence is part of our spiritual and heart inheritance. Yes, we human beings can suffer enough fear, anger, and grief, enough trauma, to react unthinkingly and as a mob or as individuals and commit terrible acts. And yes, we human beings can also choose to cultivate the care and play circuits, and shift the energies in our seeking and wanting circuits toward what can reduce fear, anger, and grief for all, to what eases suffering and brings forward blessings, thanksgiving, connection, resilient and compassionate community, awe and wonder for the sacred, and the freedoms of choosing love, justice, equity, and well-being for all. The way probably won’t be easy, but what is worthy so rarely is easy. And we will probably be called to change, to learn how to calm our bodies and minds amid terrifying times, to learn how to work even better together to meet tyranny and hate and find a different way forward, to learn how to cultivate diverse communities that attend to and value all their members. How do we wish to be remembered? As the people who firmly faced down tyranny and hate? or as the people who quietly wish to sweep their compliance with tyranny and hate under the rug of denial? As the people who permitted their neighbors’ families to be torn apart and children not to be provided services or for basic rights to be denied? Or as the people who insisted that everyone, no exceptions, is offered rights and decency and compassion? Will we be the people who remember the painful truths of history as well as the sweet ones? Will we be the people who create a legacy for the future that offers dignity and truth?
