Torah's Blueprint Against Amnesia

Recently, I listened to an episode of the Trevor Noah podcast featuring Tressie McMillan Cottom, and he said something that I have been marinating on for weeks.

If you only live in a time of something existing, it is hard for you to imagine a time before it existed and how much better life has gotten. And so you don’t think it’s meaningful anymore.

That observation perfectly captures our current moment in our society and what this week's Torah portion, Ki Tavo, warns us about: the spiritual and moral consequences of forgetting.

Moses instructs the Israelites how to behave once they finally enter the Promised Land. They'll have homes, fields, harvests, and comfort. Moses knows that comfort breeds amnesia. So he commands them: when you bring your first fruits, you must tell the story:

My father was a wandering Aramean. He went down to Egypt with meager numbers… we were oppressed… and God brought us out with a mighty hand.

Why rehearse that painful history just when everything is going well?

Because God knows what Trevor Noah knows, what we often forget: when life is good, we start to believe we earned it all ourselves. We think our comfort is natural, deserved, and permanent. We forget the struggle. We forget the pain. We forget the injustice.

And when we forget, we stop protecting those who are still suffering. The first fruits ritual teaches us that our abundance isn't just ours. It belongs to "the stranger, the orphan, the widow" because we remember what it means to have nothing. Memory creates obligation. Gratitude demands action.

The After Is Fragile: How Forgetting Destroys What We've Built

We are watching this biblical warning play out in real time as hard-won progress crumbles under the weight of collective amnesia.

Vaccines were so effective that people forgot what life was like before them. Polio, measles, whooping cough: diseases that terrorized previous generations became abstract concepts. And so today, increasing numbers reject vaccines entirely, claiming that Google searches are more reliable than scientists who've studied virology their whole lives. People don't understand what an expert is anymore, or what science even means.

The same pattern repeats across every front of human progress. Feminism won women the right to vote, own property, and choose their own path, but now some claim it's no longer needed, or even harmful. The success of the movement has made its necessity invisible to those who inherited its victories. And yet, reproductive rights are being stripped, gender-based violence persists, and economic inequality remains entrenched.

Labor unions gave us weekends, eight-hour workdays, and safety standards that prevented workers from being literally worked to death. But their victories became so embedded in our expectations that we forgot they had to be fought for. Now unions are demonized by those who benefit daily from our collective exhaustion, as if fair wages and safe working conditions were somehow un-American rather than the fruit of American organizing.

And the most dangerous forgetting of all: revisionist history is everywhere. Some people are praising Adolf Hitler, minimizing the Holocaust, and treating fascism as just another "perspective." Others have forgotten (or never knew) that the Confederacy lost. That it committed treason to preserve slavery. That it was defeated. Now, some want to bring slavery back. The truth is, it never fully went away, not with the 13th Amendment's loophole allowing slavery "as punishment for a crime." Mass incarceration, private prisons, and immigrant detention centers exploit that loophole daily.

I am not talking about a distant threat. It's happening now. And it's happening because we've forgotten what came before, or because we've replaced memory with myth.

Nostalgia Is Not History

Some in America have a deep yearning to "go back," but back to what, exactly?

People aren't trying to return to a real past. They're trying to return to a fantasy, one shaped by TV reruns and marketing slogans. They want to live in Leave It to Beaver-land. They think of the 1950s as wholesome and simple, but that version of America never existed for Black people, for queer people, for women with dreams who wanted choices.

They romanticize an era when "one job could support a family," but forget to ask which families had access to those jobs. When banks redlined Black neighborhoods. When women couldn't get credit cards in their own names. When being gay could cost you your job, your family, your freedom.

Even the pop culture reveals the cracks in the fantasy. I was watching Bewitched recently, and realized: even in that campy sitcom, there's tension. Samantha is a witch who's told to suppress her power so she can be a proper housewife. She agrees (kind of). But every episode is about her power refusing to stay hidden. Even Bewitched knew that the housewife fantasy was a cage.

So if you want to go back to a "simpler" time, ask yourself simpler for whom? Who had power then? Who didn't? And who wants to rebuild that same world now?

This matters for anyone who values justice because we've seen this pattern before. For those who study Torah, we know that Egypt looked golden to the Israelites when they were hungry in the wilderness. We know that nostalgia can make us forget our own liberation.

Torah Is a Weapon Against Amnesia

Parshat Ki Tavo gives us the tools to resist this amnesia, and they're more radical than we might think.

Tell the truth. Don't sugarcoat it. Don't rewrite it. The first fruits ritual doesn't say "we had some challenges." It says "we were oppressed." It names the reality of suffering without shame. Teach this truth in public, in ritual, in community.

Remember where you came from. Spiritually, historically, politically. Your freedom has a lineage. Every right you have was won by someone who risked everything. Every comfort you enjoy was built on someone else's struggle. Honor that inheritance.

Share your abundance. Your first fruits belong not just to you, but to the stranger, the orphan, the widow, because we know what it's like to have nothing. Ki Tavo teaches us that gratitude without generosity is just self-congratulation.

Stay awake. The Promised Land can become the narrow place all over again if we don't guard our memory. Comfort is not the end goal. Justice is. And justice requires constant vigilance.

Living Torah, Now

Trevor Noah reminded us that we can't fully appreciate something if we don't remember life before it. Ki Tavo reminds us that Torah exists so we can remember and so we can act.

In this moment, in a time of book bans, attacks on Black history, creeping fascism, white Christian nationalism, and deepening inequality, we need both truths more than ever.

We need to tell the real stories about how democracy was expanded, not by appealing to people's better angels, but by organizing, marching, and making it impossible to ignore injustice. About how every generation has to fight to keep the progress their ancestors died for.

We need to honor the real history of the messy, complicated, ongoing struggle for human dignity. Not the sanitized version that makes oppression look like disagreement and resistance look like rudeness.

We need to see how far we've come, how hard it was to get here, and how determined some are to drag us backward. Because when we forget our story, we lose our future.

Memory is a mitzvah.

Justice is a responsibility.

Gratitude is a discipline.

And truth-telling is holy work.

The first fruits are ripe. The harvest is ready. The question is: will we remember who we are?