‘Preserve your memories’ - The Jewish Standard

Memories — there’s no one alive who doesn’t have memories. Some are wonderful, and some can be devastating. So how do we handle them?

The Torah reading a few weeks ago drove that point beautifully. The parsha was Devarim, where Moshe Rabeinu retells the stories of the events of the last 40 years. You read my wording correctly — he doesn’t review them, he retells them. Moses chose which details to emphasize and which to ignore; he was interpreting the past, and by doing that he was creating memories.

The Israelites whom Moses addressed weren’t the generation who wandered in the wilderness for 40 years — the vast majority of that generation died there, in the wilderness. This generation was made up of their children and grandchildren. The only history that they knew was what their parents told them, but now they were listening to Moses’ stories. That’s what they would remember and tell to the next generation.

It was about 18 months ago when I walked into a room in the Neuro ICU unit at Overlook Medical Center in Summit and met Gabriel (not his real name).

He was in his early 40s, an observant Jew. His wife, his mother, and a few friends were sitting around his bedside. I sat down next to him, and with a big smile on his face, he told me a bit of the history of his life. He was from the Midwest. He has four children. He told me more about himself. All of us were just sitting around chatting.

I hadn’t read his diagnosis, but being in the neuro ICU isn’t usually a good sign. When his biopsy report showed a malignancy, surgery was scheduled, and a few days after the surgery the neurosurgeon came in and began asking Gabe questions. Those questions are part of a neurological assessment to check whether the person’s brain function appears intact.

I stood next to the wall in the room, and I couldn’t move a muscle as I watched and listened. The doctor held up a cell phone and asked Gabe what he was holding.

Gabe tried to answer, but the look in his eyes was devastating; it looked like he knew that it was a cell phone, but he couldn’t form the words.

Watching this brought back very intense memories, and tears ran down my face.

In 1969, about five weeks after my motorcycle accident, during which I suffered brain trauma, two psychiatric social workers came into my room in the hospital and asked me lots of questions.

I remember many things, but 1969 was life changing. Yes, I was at Woodstock, and a month later left I the U.S.A. I lived in Barcelona for almost two years (that’s a story all by itself) and was a disc jockey on Radio Nacional de Espana.

I came back to see my parents and my friends and spent lots of time with my then best friend Phillip Goldberg and his wife Jackie, also a bestie. We played all the albums that I never heard while in Spain, because it was under the dictatorship of Francisco Franco, who restricted many civil liberties and censored the press and the arts.

I was all of 22, maybe 23, and Phil put the Simon & Garfunkel album “Bookends” on his record player. It’s a great album, with many wonderful songs, but there was one that tugged at my heartstrings the most.

It’s “Bookends,” which really made me look at my own mortality. This is how it starts:

“Old friends, old friends, sat on their park bench like bookends

“A newspaper blown through the grass, falls on the round toes of the high shoes of the old friends.

…

“Can you imagine us years from today, sharing a park bench quietly?

“How terribly strange to be 70

“Old friends, memory brushes the same years, silently sharing the same fears.”

I am well past 70 now. I have very little connection with Phil anymore, and some connection with Jackie, but the times the three of us spent together are burned into my memory bank. Truth be told, I could go on and on and on with incredible stories, incredible memories, with incredible friends. I may even get a call: “Why didn’t you tell x, or y, or z?”

Maybe I will, but this whole article came to my mind because of Gabe. His illness ravaged his body, he was on my MeSheBerach list daily, and I kept in touch with Gabe’s wife. When I asked her how he was doing her answer was simple: “We’re making memories.”

The song “Bookends” ends the album, and its end will end this article:

“Time it was, and what a time it was, it was

“A time of innocence, a time of confidences

“Long ago, it must be, I have a photograph

“Preserve your memories, they’re all that’s left you.”

Cantor/Rabbi Lenny Mandel of West Orange leads Congregation B’nai Israel in Emerson.