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25 Sivan 5759 - June 9, 1999 | Mordecai Plaut, director Published Weekly
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Home and Family
MEMORY FOREVER
based on a piece by Hadassa Ehrman

This idea is directed to you, the present reader, and future reader and writer, for your friends, family and even coming generations. It is called "Memory Forever."

All you have to do is write. This is not an assignment for school or a transcription of your daily experiences in a diary. This is a memory that you enjoy writing and want to write for your own benefit and for that of others. When you have the time, urge and energy, and this does occasionally happen, just take a pen and paper, or better, a notebook. Start off with the date and then WRITE!

Whatever you fancy.

You might wish to record a difficult experience and how you handled it, while it is still fresh in mind, with the lessons it provided. This "Memory Forever" will help you face a similar situation in the future. It may provide a tool for a friend or relative or even a member of some future generation.

You may wish to record something exciting and personally decisive or historic. If you get your facts down right and describe the emotions as you felt them at the time, the event can be recaptured at will.

Or write about the mundane, "What I did today." Maybe an insight that struck you, a lesson you learned (the easy or hard way). Each day is a new world. Recalling how you lived it may help you to proceed through your `mundane' life in a more meaningful way with hindsight up front!

Write your `memory' and then read it over. You will realize where you are holding in life, what you've accomplished, what you may wish and be able to refine. In a few days, weeks or even years from now, turn the pages back and pick yourself a Memory Forever, perhaps at random, or one you'd like to recall and reminisce. Compare yourself then with the You of today.

The "Memory Forever" project is a very Jewish one; we are constantly trying to improve our characters, traits, deeds. We all grow from our constant attempts at overcoming our yetzer horo through the sage, learned and good advice we hear all around us. Maybe our techniques can be repeated for future success, or teach others who will read our memories. This record may even help our very children, by letting them see how we struggled, by appreciating our particular trials.

IDEAS FOR PRESERVATION: * a box with individual dated papers * a looseleaf with dividers for months or years * a dated diary * also invaluable are tapes of yourself or your family, talking, telling

How about doing this for an elderly member of the family -- recording their past experiences in a rapidly changing world, before these memories are lost forever. Telling about the family...

What really started this idea was a poem, written by R' GAVRIEL KLATZKO, who passed away suddenly, this year, at the age of 28, very active at the time in Kiruv work and the father of several children. He prophetically wrote this very meaningful poem, which we bring here with his sister's permission.

HOW TO LIVE

Time starts to slip away,

Do we wait until the day

Or prepare ourselves in advance,

Shaping our lives, leaving nothing to chance?

Will our reflection leave us in shock?

Will we be confident to really take stock?

Will our lives go on, the same as before?

Or will we grow and strive for more?

Let us not wait for time to run out,

Rather, let us start thinking what life is about.

Let us grow, let us move, let us learn how to give,

Greatest of all, let us learn how to live.

 

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