Abstract
During Holy Communion, Christians here Jesus’s words of institution that asks the participants to “do this in remembrance of me” (1 Cor 11:24). Being at the center of the Christian worship services, memory plays a vital role both liturgically and in prayer. Memory is the evocation of God’s deeds one lifts up in one’s mind in prayer. However, our modern understanding of memory is that it is an act of recollection from the past. One would think that this requires the one to participate in the event in order to remember it. Yet, in Christian and Jewish religious rituals, remembering carries a different notion. When Christians “remember the night before Jesus died” (1 Cor 1), they do not recollect their own biographical past, nor do Jews during their Passover Seder. Yet, memory has certain identifying factors that are of importance if one wants to understand prayer. Tracing back the origins and transformation of how memory was understood in Rabbinic context and the Words of the Luminaries, we can recover a fuller understanding of memory. This paper unfolds its argument in three steps: It first outlines the general Christian liturgical understanding of memory. In a second step, it surveys rabbinic texts that discuss the biblical scriptures used during the Passover Seder on the topic of memory. In a third and final step, the paper shows how the rabbinic understanding enriches the Christian understanding of memory, and how it can shape the Christian identity.
Presenters
Domenik AckermannPh. D. Candidate, Theology Department, Boston College, Massachusetts, United States
Details
Presentation Type
Paper Presentation in a Themed Session
Theme
2021 Special Focus—Modeling Traditions from the Margins: Non-Canonical Writings in Religious Systems
KEYWORDS
Memory, Prayer, Liturgy, Christianity, Judaism, Talmud, Comparative Theology
