Tzitzis: A Torah Strategy for Greater Memory

"And you shall look at it (tzitzis) and remember all of Hashem’s mitzvos and fulfill them…” Chazal tell us what the Torah message is, seeing promotes remembering and remembering promotes doing. Rashi and Ramban each give an explanation of how the tzitzis reminds us of Hashem’s mitzvos. Essentially, the Torah provides a strategy for greater memory, by establishing a siman-sign that stimulates the memory.

The Baalei Musar write that people should not rely only on their memories, but to establish simanim to enhance it. HaRav Baruch Epstein, Z”L, the Baal Torah Temima, wrote in the name of the Vilna Gaon of an episode in Sefer Shmuel that supports this notion. The young Dovid presented himself to Shaul HaMelech to be given the opportunity to battle Golliath. Based on the Medresh, Dovid told Shaul that the coat he was wearing inspired him, and as a result he had no fear of the giant, making him a worthy opponent. The Vilna Gaon explained that Dovid made a coat from the skin of the sheep that a lion and bear grabbed from his flock. Dovid considered his action of killing the lion and bear to save the sheep as a miracle due to HaShem’s great Chesed.  Therefore, he slaughtered the sheep and made from its skin a coat that he constantly wore in order to always remember the chasdei HaShem. Essentially, Dovid endorsed the notion of establishing a siman to reinforce memory.

In the Gemmarah Eruvin, Chazal write: “The Torah can only be acquired with simanim”. Rashi explains the simanim are referring to a recurring structure in Shas that preceding many sugiyosthat contain a number of statements, there is a list of the authors of each statement or a list of key words from each statement. Its purpose, once a sugiya has been learned well, knowledge of the siman will help to make the recall of the sugiya baal peh much easier.

The secular world in recent years has placed much less importance in the role of memory in education of the youth. They claim that the times require more of a focus on informational retrieval because of the meteoric increase of information available to us, and less of a focus on knowing and mastering it. This mindset has crept into our machaneh. Once upon a time, the Yeshiva and Bais Yaakov curriculum emphasized memorization of key sections of Tanach like Az Yashir & Birchos Yaakov and sugiyos of Gemmarah and mesectos of Mishnayos to a much greater degree than now. What the children know by heart becomes the fabric of their very being-Girso D’yankesa. Learning Torah greatly impacts the learner. Knowing/mastery of Torah makes him into a true Ben Torah. However, it seems that it is becoming a lost component of our chinuch system because of the influence of the general society and the great challenge that memorizing is for so many children.

I believe the message of the Torah, to make simanim to enhance memory, needs to be embraced more significantly by the olam hachinuch. By utilizing memory systems that include the use of simanim, multi-modality instruction and learning and a greater emphasis on chazarah in a tactile approach, memorizing will become more achievable for most students.

In our Yeshiva, Darchei Aliya, there is a great emphasis on learning and mastery/knowing what was learned. We utilize the above stated strategies to achieve our curricular goals. In fact, we can say, that one of our learning objects is for each boy at some point to gaze at his tzitzis and truly remember taryag.