Memory and Representation
Dr. Naftali Moses’ son was killed in the Merkaz HaRav Kook massacre. It was a very personal loss for him, but he was confronted with the national loss and political image his son took on in death.
Yesterday’s Psychology Club speaker, Dr. Moses, spoke about the tension between memory which is private and representation which is the public memorial, and he grapples with the ethics involved in it. He questioned whether the ends of memorializing justify the often intrusive means. Dr. Moses worried that the true memory of his son, the private memories, would be somehow washed away by the media storm and the representation. It was a thought-provoking speech, but perhaps most moving was when Dr. Moses read the passage from his book describing the mass funeral for the victims with the parents sitting on the same benches their sons had sat upon and the bodies of the boys passing before them. “Clichéd as it might sound,” Joshua Goldstein, President of the Psychology Club, says, “hearing Dr. Moses speak reinforces the need to appreciate life. Because it can be taken away in a second.”
