What is a contronym? A word that, depending on its context, can have contradictory meanings. For example, “to weather” can mean both “to withstand” and “to wear away” (here is a great list if you want to nerd out). In this week’s parasha, Parashat Miketz, we encounter a contronym on full display. The verb is נָכַר nakar and it means “to recognize or know” but in some conjugations can also mean “to make oneself unknown or strange.” Here is the narrative context:
As Joseph predicted, there is a famine in the land of Canaan (where his family lives) as well as in Egypt. But, because he planned for it (because he had a dream about it), there is food to be distributed in Egypt. So Jacob sends his sons (without Benjamin) to get some. These are the same brothers that cast Joseph into a pit and sold him into slavery – those guys.
Now Joseph was the vizier of the land; it was he who dispensed rations to all the people of the land. And Joseph’s brothers came and bowed low to him, with their faces to the ground. When Joseph saw his brothers, he recognized them; but he acted like a stranger toward them and spoke harshly to them. He asked them, “Where do you come from?” And they said, “From the land of Canaan, to procure food.” For though Joseph recognized his brothers, they did not recognize him.1
See those two bolded parts? Those phrases use this same verb mentioned above, but in almost opposite ways, back to back. To recognize and be a stranger, in one word.
There are different ways someone can recognize something. There is the literal or more surface level recognition, like, “I have seen your face before and recognize it.” There is also the more psychosocial like, if someone is acting out of character you might say, “I barely recognize you.” Both are based on memory, comparing whatever you are experiencing in that moment to some past experience of it and noticing the differences. If the differences are too great, maybe this new experience is unrecognizable. What’s fascinating about this contronym is that it suggests that even when something is recognizable, built into the fabric of that concept is the potential to be unknown, or rather forgotten. Precarious.
Is the opposite of recognizing to have never known, or to forgetting? What’s the difference between the two?
According to Midrash Tanchuma, Pekudei 3, there is nothing we have “never known.” It teaches that there is an angel named Lailah who shows us the secrets of the universe and our own lives all while we are in the womb only to make us forget right before we are born. I’ll let the brilliant story teller, Howard Schwartz tells us more:
According to this midrash, there is an angel, Lailah, who brings the soul and the seed together and then sees to it that the seed is planted in the womb. In doing so, Lailah serves as a midwife of souls. While the infant grows in the womb, Lailah places a lighted candle at the head of the unborn infant, so he or she can see from one end of the world to the other. So too does the angel teach the unborn child the entire Torah, as well as the history of his or her soul. Then, when the time comes for the child to be born, the angel extinguishes the light in the womb and brings forth the child into the world. And the instant the child emerges, the angel lightly strikes its finger to the child’s lip, as if to say “Shh,” and this causes the child to forget everything learned in the womb.2
In this story’s imagination, every moment is a moment of remembering what was forgotten. Recognizing. There is no purely new thing we are encountering, that our soul hasn’t learned of before. Our core state is one of having forgotten. It is the recognizing that is so special and the forgetting that is commonplace.
The midrash tells us at the end a person’s life, they will meet Lailah and she will ask:
“Do you not recognize me?” And he answers: “Yes, but why do you come to me on this day of all days?” The angel replies: “To take you from this world; the time of your departure has come.” He begins to cry out immediately, and his voice can be heard from one end of the earth to the other, but no one recognizes or heeds his voice except a crowing cock.3
In the end, the person recognizes the angel and becomes unrecognizable to the world. As transformation happens to sever the life for this version of existence.
To be born is to forget and to die is to recognize the angel, at last. A life is merely one great act of both.
I can’t think about forgetting without thinking about my dad, Wayne. Dad has been living with Lewy Body Dementia, a Parkinsonian syndrome that is marked by hallucinations, memory loss, paranoia, confusion and typical Parkinsons symptoms since around 2008. As of now, he is wheelchair bound, his hands are contracted in and he can’t do anything for myself. Dad also has aphasia and is partly blind. Lewy Body is what Robin Williams had – it’s why he killed himself. Currently, Dad lives in a memory care unit and receives hospice care. Over the past few years I’ve been writing about my experience as his daughter, and the topic of this essay is begging me to share some of it now.
Forgetting and Becoming, written in winter 2021
I often think about “who he used to be” and wonder if that’s fair. It’s not like we turned a switch and one day he was a different guy. It’s been a slow process, as we all experience for ourselves. Certainly, I too, am not who I used to be.
But then I think, this is different. It’s dramatic. Take the five senses for example – his smell, his muffled voice, his empty eyes, his drooled over skin, I’ll assume the taste in his own mouth – they are all different. He doesn’t whistle like he used to to signal he is near and we need to find him.
On days I’m scared I’ll forget “who he was before” I brainstorm memories with my sister, pour over old photographs and home videos, cry to my wife, tell stories, and write poems.
I think about what he used to cook when he could be trusted with the stove or even stand at it. I think about how fast he used to drive with the top down – he was quite the show off. I think about how he used to come back from a bike ride, covered in sweat, stand in the kitchen and drink water from his bicycle water bottle and tell me I really ought to get some exercise today because endorphins are just the best. As I sat at the kitchen table in my pajamas, a teenager, I wanted to punch him in the face with all this “take care of your body” nonsense.
Sometimes I forget how he used to drive me crazy. Where does this leave me? Constantly searching for what still remains? Constantly comparing the present to the past?
And what if I do in fact forget some things? Will the sky fall down? Will my heart stop beating? He has certainly forgotten enough to forgive my own haziness. It’s like we are in it together. He is forgetting where he is, sitting at the dinner table. I’m forgetting how he used to look at me, before his right eye stopped and both started to glaze. Maybe we understand each other more than I thought, these days.
And yet, there is a deep feeling that I am becoming more and more like you. My nose is hooking slightly like yours. When I wear my aviator style glasses it could be you, from the 70s, when you were, apparently, always high on something or chasing girls.
I’m extroverted like you (but also with a heavy dose of introvert, which you never understood). Your almost obsessive need to be surrounded by us all the time now makes sense to me. I understand your entrepreneurial spirit in new ways as I create my own projects and dream about my future career and your taste for wine has been passed on (or cultivated, really — you’ll get more of this in the reflection on wine).
It’s a strange thing to watch you and me age. It’s almost as if if I studied myself I could know who you were.
Forgetting and recognizing. Two sides of the same word, relationship, or person.
Forgetting is inconvenient at best and devastating at worst. It is also a sort of chaos from which creativity springs. In her book, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus, Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg writes about forgetting as a sort of creative necessity. Specifically, she is talking about the breaking of the first set of tablets and a subsequent midrash when she writes, “If the Torah is forgotten, the effect is not, after all, unmitigatedly tragic. For out of oblivion comes interpretation, reconstruction, the act of memory that re-creates the past.”4
Ironically, it is from forgetting that we get storytelling, and the joys and woes of memory. No rain no rainbow kind of a thing.
And then sometimes forgetting is actually a gift, or rather, a balm. Forgetting the pain of childbirth or some horrific childhood trauma. Forgetting can be a blanket or an outstretched hand. “Forget about it,” we might tell a friend who is asking for forgiveness. Let’s move on. Forgetting can mean we are finally facing forward and accepting the newness our life can bring. Brandi Carlile sings, “Sometimes I pretend we never met because its harder to forgive than to forget.”
The more I think on this the more I don’t hate forgetting so much. I used to cast it as the villain with remembering as the obvious hero in a classic good verses evil shoot ‘em up. Now, I’m thinking about them as dance partners, moving across the floor together.
Genesis 42:6-8
from Mysteries of the Angel Lailah By Howard Schwartz, http://www.jbooks.com/interviews/index/IP_Schwartz_Lailah.htm#
Midrash Tanchuma, Pekudei 3
Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodus (2001), 456.