“I’ve got a grand memory for forgetting, David.” — Kidnapped, Robert Lewis Stevenson (1886)

We often heard our parents say “Yemach Shmo V’Zichro!” [Erase their name and memory!]

It was their dismissal of Jew-haters in general, as well as personal friends who had betrayed them.

They talked the talk and walked the walk, not speaking of them or even mentioning their names. We found it humorous, at best quaint, at worst antiquated. We mocked it behind their backs. We had more pungent epithets to dismiss our enemies. We found our obscene imprecations more satisfying, the F word more cathartic than the Y word.

Fast forward six decades. A ubiquitous social and personal psychiatric problem is pernicious pertinacious obsessions. Whether our enemies are public figures or private acquaintances, we can be consumed by our hatred of them. Holding onto it is as effective as swallowing poison to kill our enemy.

Anger and peace are mutually exclusive.

If we won’t be happy till they are dead, their existence becomes our life-sentence punishment.

What can we do? We can’t ethically or legally murder them in reality, but we can in our minds. Yemach Shmo V’Zichro.

If we determinedly never utter their name, in time, we think about them less. If we skip any article about them, we look forward to reading the paper again. If we come across them, but don’t look at them, much less speak to them, their presence can’t ruin an occasion for us.

In the process, we not only “kill” them, but more importantly, we stop torturing........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)