The Stories That Save Us: Devarim and the Power of Collective Memory
- Dr Tanya White
- 3 hours ago
- 5 min read
On my way to London recently I bought two books. The first was Yuval Noah Harari’s Nexus. The second was Rachel Goldberg-Polin’s When We See You Again. On the face of it they could not be more different. Harari is sociological, theoretical, civilisational in scope. Goldberg-Polin is personal, intimate and raw. She opens her book as if she is telling a fairytale come nightmare: “Once upon a time I was meandering down the road of life with my husband Jon. It was a regular beige life and it worked, it was a warm beige. Suddenly one day…a metaphorical 18-wheeler semitruck hit us from behind and broke every bone in our bodies.”
One book explains how human societies hold together. The other is a mother’s account of what happens when everything falls apart. And yet sitting on that plane I realised they are both asking the same question: how do humans survive?
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks argues in his Haggadah commentary that the reason Judaism survived centuries of exile and persecution is that we never lost our story. The difference between hope and tragedy, he writes, lies not in what happens but in how we respond — not in events but in how we recount them, where we begin and end, how we frame our telling. That insight is ancient. It is also urgently contemporary.
Harari makes this argument at civilisational scale. Large human societies are held together by shared stories. Nations, religions and civilisations do not exist in nature; they exist because enough people believe in the same narrative. These stories create collective identity, which in turn makes large-scale cooperation possible. For Harari, stories are always fictional.
Rachel Goldberg-Polin is a broken bereaved mother. Her story is not fictional but she makes a choice about how she tells it. Faced with the unendurable — her son Hersh taken into Gaza on October 7th and murdered there — she does what humans have always done under unbearable pressure: she frames it. It is an act of profound courage — a deliberate choice to impose meaning on what feels meaningless, to make a story out of what could only be experienced as rupture. What began as one mother’s private grief became a vessel for a nation’s mourning, the way Elie Wiesel’s Night became not just one boy’s testimony but a portal of memory across generations.
The Bible is where this tool is first executed. The book we start reading this week, Devarim, is Moses’ farewell — his final address to a people he has led for forty years and will never follow into the land. The rabbis call it Mishneh Torah, a repetition of the Torah (hence the English name Deuteronomy – second law). Micha Goodman reads it as the first book of the Oral Torah — a text with a human signature, Moshe’s interpretation of events and laws addressed to a living breathing people on the cusp of their entry into their land.
But it is also simply a rendition of Moses’ story. Rabbi Sacks points to one of the great ironies of the Torah: he who said “I am not a man of words — heavy of mouth, heavy of tongue” becomes the most eloquent spokesman in all of Israel’s history. The speech impediment was never only physical. It represented a psychological impasse of identity. Born a Hebrew, raised in Pharaoh’s palace, belonging fully to neither world, Moses does not begin life with a coherent self. When you do not know whose story you belong to, you cannot speak. It takes forty years of wilderness to find that belonging. When Moses finally finds his story, he finds his voice; standing before the people, he speaks an entire book.
Moses is doing simultaneously what Harari describes sociologically and what Goldberg-Polin demonstrates existentially: constructing collective memory while integrating personal trauma. The two are not separate acts. They are the same act at different scales.
How we remember determines what world we will create. Too much memory curdles into nostalgia — the paralysis of a people who romanticise the past because they fear the future. Too little memory becomes amnesia — the dissolution of everything that makes them who they are. Distorted memory becomes psychosis: a nation governed by a story that no longer corresponds to reality. In Numbers, the people wept: “We remember the fish, the watermelon, the meat we ate freely in Egypt” — oppression romanticised into longing.
The antidote is not to forget. It is to see clearly. Moses declares: “Your children, who today have no knowledge of good or evil, they shall go in there, and to them I will give it” (Devarim 1:39). Only the generation that refuses to flatten reality into a story that cannot hold contradictory components — good and bad, black and white — is mature enough to enter the land. This is the perennial human challenge: to resist the seduction of easy narrative, to choose depth over verdict, complexity over the satisfying lie. We are often tempted to simplify the past — to remember only the good or only the bad. But the answer to a painful and complex inheritance is not erasure. It is honest reckoning: to face what was, carry its cost, and build truthfully from it.
Moses tells us a story. He knows that any identity — personal or national — cannot be possessed without a coherent human narrative. A story is where I find myself in relation to others, where I coexist with conflicting truths, where I locate myself in an indeterminate reality. A story gives me memory, and memory gives me identity, and identity gives me belonging, and belonging gives me what every person ultimately seeks: meaning. Without a story we are disconnected dots without a pattern.
In telling his story, Moses does exactly what Rachel Goldberg-Polin does three thousand years later: he transforms private grief into collective memory. His wound becomes their foundation. Sacks understood this better than anyone. He wrote that a politics based only on power ends when power is lost, and a politics based on land ends when a people is exiled — but Israel’s existence is constituted by words, by devarim, and therefore can never be destroyed. “So long as the word exists, Israel exists.” Not the land, not the borders, not the victories — but the story that binds the living to the dead and the unborn, that makes exile survivable and return imaginable.
I have often been asked why we made aliyah. I always give the same answer: I wanted to be part of my people’s story, and for me that meant being in its old-new land. For many years that story felt like triumph. Today it has morphed into tragedy as well. But it is my story because it is my people’s story — and I know that being a dot in a complex, tumultuous, and meaning-laden pattern is better than being a disconnected one. I join an unbroken line from Moses on the ancient plains of Moab to Rachel Goldberg-Polin in modern-day Jerusalem: those who transform private loss into enduring narrative. It is more than Harari’s sociological nexus of group survival; it is a story animated by the love story of God and His people.
So what Moses was giving the people on the plains of Moab was more than a tactic to survive — he was giving them their dot in the grand pattern of humankind. And he was telling us that as long as we keep connecting it, our story will endure.
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