“Remember us for life” and Marcel Proust

On page 40 of your siddurim, exactly where we are in the service, we have just read these words at the top of the page: “Remember us for life, O you who desire life” (without necessarily understanding what they mean).

But above all we heard those words resonate in the voice of Daniel Levy, who for so long led the High Holy Day services and was the hazan of our community.

I wanted to hear his voice, and no other, for this passage of the liturgy, because for me, in my head, those words are bound to his voice, to his own singing. It is a little like one of my Proustian madeleines of Tishri.

When I became a rabbi and began to officiate in our dear community, eighteen years ago now, I remember very well that Daniel Levy would tell me that for him those words resonated in the voice of Daniel Farhi, because he had heard Daniel sing them for years. That was his own madeleine.

I suppose that for many of us the liturgy of the festivals of Tishri performs exactly this madeleine function: it leaves indelible traces in our consciousness, and through repetition, year after year, it also gives us a strange sensation of passing time.

So tonight, it is precisely about time that I want to speak to you.

I told myself this was the best moment of the year, Rosh haShana, the day we call the head of the year, the day supposed to be the anniversary of the creation of the world, the beginning of time, to consider with you the notion of time in Judaism.

And as Hillel would say, im lo akhshav eimatai, “if not now, when?”

After all, tonight is Rosh haShana of the year 5787, 11 September 2026. It is a particular date, a date that carries memory for many of us.

I imagine that across the Atlantic, at this very moment, my American colleagues are polishing their Rosh haShana sermons, and in my view there is not one rabbi among them who has not planned to speak about September 11. And I too would like to take a moment's detour through that date.

Twenty-five years ago exactly, a quarter of a century. Many of us remember exactly where we were at that moment, at that precise instant, when we learned that an attack had just struck Manhattan and that the towers of the World Trade Center were collapsing.

In the blast and in their fall, we know today, a whole world and a whole era came down as well.

Many people have said since that 11 September 2001 marked the entry into another century, and into another era of our history, like a dramatic turn that hastened the end of an age.

Twenty-five years later, the event appears as the end of one world and the beginning of another.

A parenthesis, but I must confess that as a child I was always fascinated by the way school taught us the succession of eras. In history class a teacher would say, for instance: “Antiquity ends in 476, with the fall of the Western Roman Empire, and then the Middle Ages begin.”

In my small child's head, I always pictured a fellow waking up one morning in 476, opening his shutters, looking out of the window and saying to his wife: “Darling, that's it, Antiquity is over, as of today it's the Middle Ages. Put on something nice, we're off to light a bonfire.”

Of course, things never happen that way. History, and the names we give to time, are always a reconstruction after the fact, a sort of afterwardsness of memory that allows us, much later, to recognise that a turn began at a certain moment, and that we have changed eras.

It is always after the fact that we recognise, in collective history or even in our personal histories, that we are no longer the same, that we have changed time.

In our modern societies we picture time as a linear structure: the past behind us, the future ahead, and we walk with progress in its direction.

A little like that little fellow from my childhood. Apologies to those who do not have the reference, it is a classic of my generation, a character very well known in the seventies. When I was a child we all watched a programme called La Linea. It was a very simple cartoon: a little man drawn on a line by an invisible cartoonist, who walked along making little noises in a comic gibberish, in a very high-pitched voice, punctuating his way. Sometimes the line he was walking on was interrupted; he would complain and grumble until the cartoonist drew the continuation of his story, a mountain to climb or a path to take.

And indeed, it seems to me that this path told our perception of time perfectly: a past behind us and a future facing us. There are obstacles sometimes, but we advance in the right direction, often grumbling, like that character.

And then, growing up, I learned Hebrew, what a strange idea. And I learned in that language that time unfolds in an entirely different way.

In modern Hebrew the past is called avar and the future atid, but biblical Hebrew, the Torah, uses very different terms to speak of time.

A brief lesson in biblical temporality.

In the Torah, time is called zeman, from the root leazmin, which in Hebrew means “to invite.” Time invites itself into our lives.

On one side there is indeed time past and, on the other, the time to come.

But the past in biblical Hebrew is called kedem (when the Torah is returned to the ark we say hadesh yamenou kekedem, “renew our days as of old”).

Kedem is the past, what happened before. But literally, kedem or kadim means “facing oneself,” “in front of oneself.” Kedma, “forward.” The past is therefore what is in front of me, not behind me.

And guess what the future is called in the Bible? When the succession of times is evoked, the end of days, the distant future, the Bible calls it aharit hayamim. And literally, ahora in Hebrew means “at the back,” “behind,” the day behind. The future is therefore what stands behind us, and not in front of us.

I do not know whether you sense this paradox, or more exactly this counter-image. We are used, in our modern societies, to thinking of the past as behind us and the future as ahead of us. But biblical Hebrew does exactly the opposite and tells us: the past is before our face, while the future is behind our back.

It is a little as though you took the image of the little man of La Linea I mentioned a moment ago, that little fellow on his line on his way toward his future, grumbling, and you now pictured that instead of advancing toward the future he is walking backwards: he is turned around in such a way that he has his past, kedem, facing him, while he advances backwards toward a future, aharit, that is still at his back.

I do not know whether you can picture it clearly.

For those who have references other than the cartoons of the seventies, I would like to mention a rather well-known philosopher, Walter Benjamin, who theorised this in a famous image.

In one of his works he interprets a painting by Paul Klee called Angelus Novus, the image of an angel with outspread wings and wide-open eyes. Benjamin writes this: the angel of History has his face turned toward the past. There he sees all the catastrophes piling up, ruins upon ruins. He would like to stop time and repair what has been destroyed, bring the dead back to life, but a violent storm drives him irresistibly toward the future, to which he turns his back, while the debris piles up in front of him.

The image is very strong. I invite you to look at this painting as soon as you can after Rosh haShana, and to meditate on this representation of time, on this idea that we advance backwards toward the future while the past, before our eyes, reminds us of so much pain and so much mourning, of its destructions, towers collapsing, worlds collapsing, recent traumas, devastations we cannot manage to repair. The wind of History carries us toward a future we cannot see, since it is at our back.

You see, two visions of time stand opposed here: the modern linear vision of a past behind us and a future within our field of vision, and a rather tragic Benjaminian vision of a painful past we have no chance of repairing in the future.

Why tell you all this today, if not to invite you to consider a third voice, a third possible way of looking at time, which is none other than the one offered by the date of the Jewish calendar we are entering: the vision of time, made in Rosh haShana.

At Rosh haShana the rabbis refuse both the vision of a linear time of progress in which the past lies behind us, and the tragic vision of a future over which we have no hold. They propose a third model, incredibly revolutionary and pertinent, which is called the model of teshuva.

They tell us that at Rosh haShana, like the angel of History, we do indeed face our past: everything that was prevented, broken, destroyed, everything in ruins, everything laid waste, everything we did not know how to say, or to be, or to do. But unlike Benjamin's angel, they affirm that there exists a possibility, literally, of teshuva, of turning ourselves around, not toward the past (since the past is facing us) but toward what is to come, toward the future, and of looking at the way our awareness of the past will allow us to change that future.

And it is then that we can begin to revisit the words on page 40. We can begin to ask why that sentence is so critical, why it must resonate tonight, and why, from generation to generation, it is so well read and so well sung, yet so badly translated and so badly understood.

Zokhrenou leHayim, “Remember us for life,” says the siddur.

But in reality that is not at all what this verse means. Zokhrenou does not mean that.

The root of the word zokhrenou is extremely well known: it is the word zekher, which in Hebrew is translated as memory or remembrance. But in Hebrew, zakhar means above all the masculine, male power. What is the connection, you will ask? It is simple: for Hebrew, memory is exactly like the masculine, the seeding force in the world, what potentially comes to fertilise the present so that something may grow in it.

It is with memory, according to our sages, as it is with biology.

Each time we evoke a memory, each time we call up a remembrance, we invite the past to plant a small seed in us, so that the present may grow.

This is why in the prayers we evoke Zekher maasse bereshit, the zekher of the creation of the world, or Zekher liTsiat Mitzrayim, the memory of the exodus from Egypt: not simply to remember a bygone event, a distant past, but because evoking that past event has the power to fertilise our present in a particular way, to enter into resonance with the unprecedented, so that a new creation becomes possible, so that a new liberation can be imagined.

To put it another way: the past in front of us, kedem, keeps coming back to visit us, invites itself into our lives, and seeds us.

You may be telling yourself that all this is very theoretical, philosophical talk disconnected from your present concerns. I understand, but I invite you to think about it differently for a moment.

Think for a moment about what has happened to us these last years, and in particular since October 7, in so many conversations we have had with those close to us and with strangers about the situation in the Middle East. I am sure that you too have had the experience of this zekher, of this past that comes and plants itself in the present.

For some among us, October 7 reactivated a far older past. It awakened the ghosts of our family histories, the memories of past persecutions, the memory of the Shoah, or the memories of the expulsion from North Africa, of exiles and old sorrows, of the nakba for Palestinians, of colonisation, of the Resistance or of collaboration: a past full of pain resurfacing before our eyes.

Exactly like Benjamin's angel of History, we have our eyes wide open on the ruins and on the mournings of our past histories, with the feeling that nothing can be repaired and that the future is unknown.

That past haunts us, and it obviously conditions the way we react to whatever arises in our lives, the way fear, rage, mistrust, anger, apprehension, the desire for revenge and so many other emotions guide us.

And then Rosh haShana arrives, and this season invites us to something else, and says:

Certainly your past haunts you and invites itself into your reading of the present, but remember that it constitutes a zekher, a possibility of growing your future differently, provided you know how to make teshuva: not to return to a dogma or to a strict practice, but to turn yourself around, not toward the past but toward the future. (Back to the Future: Hollywood really did steal everything from Judaism.)

At Rosh haShana it is given to us to let the past change our future, in the present.

And that is where the secret of the sentence on page 40 lies. When we say to God Zokhrenou leHayim, we are not naively saying “remember to keep us alive,” “above all do not let us die.” That would be too simple, and a little soppy.

No. We are literally saying to him: let the zekher, our memory of the past, orient our thoughts and our actions leHayim, in the direction of life, so that we choose life.

Let our memory, the remembrance of our sorrows and of our mistakes, which could condemn us to anger, to resentment, to vengeance or to the morbid, be summoned instead in the direction of life.

Let us be capable of doing exactly what Rabbi Nachman, the master of Hasidism, invited his disciples to do when he told them: remember your future.

That is the challenge thrown down to us, immensely difficult to take up in a time when pain and trauma prevent so many people from believing that a new time could arise.

Certainly, no one knows what this future is made of. The year that begins will be full of turns, of decisions, electoral ones among them. But nothing is sealed yet, and that is what we will keep repeating, on almost every page of the book.

It is given to us to change the future, and that is an immense gift: to believe that other voices, and other ways, will arise.

At the moment when I am preparing to leave the position of rabbi of JEM, held for eighteen years in the service of our community, I tell myself that one day a young rabbi, a hazan or a hazanit, will stand here and sing the Zokhrenou leHayim and say that they still hear my voice in their head. In my turn, who knows, I will have become a Proustian madeleine.

In the end, in his work, Proust did nothing other than explore everything I have tried to speak to you about tonight. He did it in sentences far longer and far more literary than mine, but page after page he sought to convince his readers that one can resurrect the past, search for lost time, not in order to lock oneself inside it but to create the possibility of another future.

May you be inscribed beSefer haHayim, in the book of life, leMaankha elohim hayim, for the greatness of a God, of something greater than us, of a beyond-us, that makes life the most sacred thing there is.

Shana Tova!