January remembrance always feels heavy to me. January, which coincides with the Hebrew month of Tevet, is not just another month on the calendar. It brings fast days, remembrance, and a reminder to pay attention to how we live.
That is where my mind has been lately.
I have been thinking about how Jewish canonical texts, the Torah, the Talmud, and the many layers of commentary that followed, continue to shape Jewish thought, politics, and the ways we remember, not only as part of our past but as part of how we try to live now.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks once noted that Hebrew has no exact word for “history.” Instead, it gives us zachor, remember. Not as advice, but as a command: zachor.
The older I get, the more I feel the force of that word.
January Remembrance and the Fast of Tevet
The Tenth of Tevet is known as one of the minor fasts, though I have never liked that phrase very much. Minor makes it sound almost small, and there is nothing small about what these days hold.
These fasts are not mentioned in the Torah itself. They were established later by the Sages and discussed in the Talmud. Each one carries its own history, its own sadness, and its own lesson.
The 10th of Tevet marks the start of the Babylonian siege of Jerusalem in the days of the First Temple.
The Fast of Esther, observed the day before Purim, recalls Esther’s call for the Jewish community to fast for three days before she went to the King of Persia to try to stop Haman’s decree to kill the Jews of Persia on the fourteenth day of Adar (Esther 4:16).
The 17th of Tammuz marks the day the Romans broke through the walls of Jerusalem.
The Fast of Gedaliah, observed the day after Rosh Hashanah, remembers the murder of Gedaliah, the last Jewish governor of Judea after the destruction of the First Temple.
Each of these days tells a different story. But for me, they all point to the same truth: memory is never only about looking back. It asks something of us in the present.
That may be why January feels so full to me. Alongside these fast days, the month also brings civic and global moments of remembrance that ask us to stop and reflect.
In the United States, Martin Luther King Jr. Day is observed on the third Monday of January. On January 27, many nations mark International Holocaust Remembrance Day. These are, of course, very different occasions, rooted in different histories. Still, both ask us to pause, remember, and think about what memory requires of us.
January is also when we begin reading the Book of Exodus in the weekly Sabbath synagogue service. I feel that every year. The story never feels far away. It still feels close. It is the story of an enslaved people freed from slavery in Egypt through God’s guidance and through the courage of three siblings, Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.
January Remembrance in Exodus
When I read the opening chapters of Exodus, I am always struck by how quickly welcome can turn into threat.
The Israelites first came to Egypt in a time of need. Joseph had helped save Egypt from seven devastating years of famine, and his wisdom reached far beyond its borders. For a time, his family was received with honour.
But that did not last.
Then comes one of the most chilling lines in the Torah: “A new king arose over Egypt, who did not know Joseph” (Exodus 1:8).
It is such a short sentence. Yet with that one line, everything changes.
What follows is not oppression all at once, but oppression that builds slowly. Year by year, conditions get worse. What begins as distrust turns into slavery, and over the course of 210 years it becomes something even darker: an order to kill all Hebrew baby boys at birth.
From there, the story moves through generations of suffering, and then to the birth of Moses, this Jewish baby boy marked for death, who is instead raised in Pharaoh’s court by Pharaoh’s daughter. We see him witness injustice and try to act, only to realize he cannot change everything by force of will. We follow him as he leaves Egypt for the desert, marries Tzipporah, the daughter of a Midianite priest, and later encounters God at the burning bush.
By then, Moses is no longer young. He is in middle age when he is called to go back, confront Pharaoh, and lead his people out of slavery.
And what follows, the plagues, the struggle with Pharaoh, the exodus itself, has become one of the defining stories about slavery and freedom.
Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks writes beautifully about all of this in Covenant and Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Essays on Ethics¹. I keep coming back to his reading because Exodus does not feel far away to me. It feels painfully relevant. It is not only a story about ancient Egypt. It is also a story about what happens when people become cruel, when those in power stop caring what is right, and when ordinary people have to decide whether to go along, speak up, or refuse.
The Quiet Courage of Civil Disobedience
In the opening chapter of Shemot, Rabbi Sacks points to a moment that could easily be overlooked: the story of Shifra and Puah, the midwives ordered by Pharaoh to kill all male Jewish infants at birth.
They refuse.
“The king of Egypt spoke to the midwives, one of whom was named Shiphrah and the other Puah, saying, ‘When you deliver the Hebrew women, look at the birthstool. If it is a boy, kill him; if it is a girl, let her live.’
But the midwives feared God and did not do as the king of Egypt had told them; they let the boys live.
So the king of Egypt summoned the midwives and said to them, ‘Why have you done this thing, letting the boys live?’” (Exodus 1:15–18)
What stays with me every time I read this is how quiet their courage is.
There is no speech. No public protest. No spectacle.
There is only a decision to do what is right in the face of absolute power.
That matters to me because so much of moral life looks like that. Not grand or dramatic. Just a person deciding, often quietly, that they will not go along with evil.
When Conscience Comes Before Power
The Torah does not speak about religion in quite the way we do now. The closest idea may be Yirat Hashem, the fear of God.
What Shifra and Puah understand is simple: Pharaoh has power, but he is not the final authority. Rabbi Sacks suggests that what they do here may be the first recorded act of civil disobedience in history.
Then the story turns darker. Pharaoh orders the Egyptians to throw every Jewish baby boy into the Nile, and this time the people obey. They fear Pharaoh more than they fear God, and in doing so they become participants in genocide.
Joseph Telushkin compares Shifra and Puah to those who rescued Jews during the Holocaust. Those rescuers answered to something higher. Many collaborators did not.
It took until after World War II for Western law to say this plainly. At Nuremberg, “I was only following orders” was no longer accepted as a defense. Some orders are so wrong that obeying them is a crime.
That may be a legal lesson, but it is also a human one. It raises the question of what we do when those in power tell us one thing and conscience tells us another.
January Remembrance and Holocaust Memory
One of the things that moves me most about Exodus is that the story does not end with freedom. Leaving Egypt is only the beginning. The harder part comes after that. How do you build a decent society after slavery? How do you live with freedom once you have it?
That is one reason this story never feels distant to me.
The same question shows up again and again in modern history. Martin Luther King Jr. made that clear in his own way. A law does not become right just because it is written into the legal system, and obeying an unjust law is never a neutral act.
For Jews, remembering the Holocaust is never only about looking back. It is also about telling the truth in the present, especially when people try to blur that truth, reshape it, or deny it altogether.
This year, the Jewish community invited Elisha Wiesel, the son of Elie Wiesel, to preview Soul on Fire, the recent film about his father. In an interview with Susan Schwartz in the Montreal Gazette, Elisha spoke about his father’s legacy and why it still matters now.²
In his 1986 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance speech, Elie Wiesel said:
“I have tried to fight those who would forget, because if we forget, we are accomplices. We must always take sides! Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
That line has stayed with me for years: “Neutrality helps the oppressor, never the victim.”
Elisha Wiesel was asked what he thought his father would have said about the rise in antisemitism around the world and the drumbeat of Holocaust deniers.
He replied:
“My father clearly articulated that the antisemites will always hate, even if they mask that hate as anti Zionism, as though it were somehow separable from antisemitism.
My father never failed to stand up for Israel, asserting that only Israelis can best decide how to reach their goals of living in peace in an extremely hostile neighbourhood. And lastly, he insisted that we never relinquish our desire to have a positive impact on the world as a whole. He strongly resisted isolationism as a principle.”
Holocaust denial continues to plague us. And the more chaotic the world becomes, the easier it seems for some people to twist history until it barely resembles the truth, or simply to look away.
That is part of why Exodus still feels so close to me. It is not only an ancient story. It speaks to the world we are living in now.
It also reminds me of something we forget too easily: freedom and democracy do not survive on laws and elections alone. They depend on people who are willing to listen to their conscience.
And most of the time, that does not happen in big public moments. It happens quietly, in the small choices people make when no one is watching and no one is praising them.
What do you do when the state tells you to do the wrong thing?
How does a society lose its moral freedom, and how does it recover it?
What sustains a people across centuries of pressure?
These are some of the questions Rabbi Sacks returns to in his later essays.
The Question January Leaves Me With
These fast days and memorial days matter to me because they force us to face what human beings are capable of and to ask whether we are really paying attention.
As I write this, the news makes it impossible to look away. We are witnessing, in real time, the Iranian people trying to free themselves from the ruthless Islamist regime of the Ayatollahs. In a recent segment of CBC’s The Current, titled “The Push for Justice in Iran,” Matt Galloway interviewed Payam Akhavan about the ongoing human rights catastrophe in Iran and the brutal slaughter of protestors.
The Iranian people are crying out to the world. Who will hear them?
And so January becomes one of those months when everything seems to come together.
The Fast of the Tenth of Tevet.
MLK Day.
International Holocaust Remembrance Day.
And the reality of the present, all pointing to the same question:
What will you do with what you know?
I truly welcome your feedback. And if you would rather share your thoughts privately, you are welcome to email me at askabigail@me.com.
Footnotes:
- Sacks, Jonathan. Covenant & Conversation: A Weekly Reading of the Jewish Bible: Essays on Ethics. “Parashat Shemot.”
- a. Schwartz, Susan. “Son of One of the World’s Most Public Holocaust Survivors Upholds Father’s Legacy.” Montreal Gazette, 21 Jan. 2026. b) YouTube A conversation with Elisha Weisel, Montreal Holocaust Museum, Jan 26, 2026