Tuesday, 28 June 2016

Religion and Cultural Memory (tr. Rodney Livingstone),
Jan Assmann, Stanford University Press, 2006, page 18-19

The fifth cultural memory formation technique that Jan Assmann points out in Deuteronomy is the festival cycle.

Festivals of collective remembering - the three great festivals of gathering and pilgrimage on which the entire people, great and small, is to appear before the face of tha L-rd. Mayzah - Passover, the festival to commemorate the exodus of Egypt: "they you may remember the day when you came forth out of the land of Egypt all the dats of your life" (16:3); Shavuot is the Feast of Week, on which the people are meant to think about the sojourn in Egypt: "and you shall remember that you were a bondsman in Egypt" (16:12); and Sukkot, the Festival of Booths, in the course of which the entire text of the Torah is to be read aloud every seven years.