“The great questions – ‘Who are we?’, ‘What is our task?’ – are best answered by telling a story…

Jews were the first people to find God in history [and] to think in historical terms – of time as an arena of change as opposed to cyclical time in which…nothing really changes… the first people to write history… Yet biblical Hebrew has no word that means ‘history’… Instead, it uses the root zachor, meaning ‘memory.’

History is an account of events that happened sometime else to someone else. Memory is ‘my story.’ It is the past internalised and made part of my identity…

Moses warns the people… not to forget… the past [lest they] lose their identity and sense of direction.

…Identity [is] a matter of collective memory; …every one of us, [not solely the leader], is a guardian of that story and memory.

By making the Israelites a nation of storytellers, Moses helped turn them into a people bound by collective responsibility – to one another, to the past and future, and to God.”