Every year we tell the story, again and again. This week we add another layer as we begin the last book of the Torah, Devarim, “words,” or “things.” It opens: “These are the devarim that Moses spoke to all Israel.” This is Moses’ last address to our people, and in it he retells the last 40 years to a generation that didn’t live it themselves. Like all retellings, some details change. The emphasis shifts. Certain incidents disappear. New ones surface.
In this moment of rising antisemitism, I’ve noticed that the way I remember, and retell, my own childhood has changed too.
When people hear I’m from Omaha, they usually say, “I didn’t know there were Jews there.” I tell them there were, just not many, and that it was a lovely place to grow up Jewish. When people ask about antisemitism, I usually say I grew up with almost none. That was true. Mostly but not entirely.
A few years ago, before October 7, I was on a podcast when that tension caught up with me. Right after saying I’d experienced very little antisemitism, I mentioned, almost as an aside, that in second grade, someone came to our home in the middle of the night and painted a swastika on our front door.
“That sounds like a lot of antisemitism,” the interviewer said. She was right.
Why had I always left that detail out? It happened, it was part of my childhood story. But we washed it out, just like we quickly repainted the door and almost never mentioned it again. For years, when I talked about growing up in Omaha, I told a story of my childhood without much antisemitism in it. My siblings did, too.
This week, thinking about Moses’ retelling, I called my sister and brother to ask what they remembered about the incident. What I learned was that the swastika wasn’t where the story started. It began earlier, when my sister was in sixth grade. The boy who would later vandalize our house, and his friend, our paperboy as it turned out, were awful to my sister. One of them said to her, “I wish Hitler had won, and then you wouldn’t be here.”
And then my sister told me that ten years ago, one of those boys, now a grown man of fifty, wrote my sister a letter of apology. He was ashamed of what he’d said and done, and wanted her to know he deeply regretted it.
My sister had carried both things, the sentence and the letter, for years without telling me.
I share this story now, all of it, including the part I only just learned, because this is the part I need to tell, and we need to hear, right now.
That, I think, is what Devarim is teaching us to do: not just retell the story, but decide, each time, which part of it the moment needs. Moses isn’t randomly rearranging the past. He’s choosing what this generation, at the edge of the land, must hear before they can move forward.
I could tell you my childhood was overwhelmingly good, and it was. I could also leave out what those boys said to my sister on that bus and what one of them did to our front door and let that memory go quiet again. But this is not the time for forgetting. If we erase the moments when hatred showed up so plainly, we forget how real it is, and how easily it returns, especially now, when algorithms are built to provoke our rawest feelings and fan the fires of hatred.
And yet I can’t let this become the whole story either. If the swastika on our door and the boys on that bus become the entire narrative of my childhood, I’d be leaving out the friends and allies and many kindnesses that made for an otherwise wonderful childhood. Both of these devarim, these things, are true. The discipline, maybe the holiness, is holding them together rather than picking one and calling it the whole truth. That’s the retelling I want to practice: the part of the story this moment needs.
So here’s the invitation. Call someone close to you this week and ask them to help you remember something important, a part of your story that needs to be told at this moment. And then share it so that this truth might help you and all of us find meaning.
Rabbi Yoshi Zweiback is the Senior Rabbi of Stephen Wise Temple in Los Angeles.
