Myth, Memory, and Meaning - Kazantzakis in Jerusalem, Theo in Athens, and Ladino in New York

An original handwritten fragment of Maimonides’ Mishne Tora, held at Cambridge

The Greek word mythos, from which we get ‘myth’, ultimately means ‘storytelling.’ It embodies a more emotional experience. Such impassioned retelling contrasts with logos, rational thought. Myths are stories that are accorded a higher significance by people’s belief in them, factual or not. The Jewish tradition is full of mythic stories, from the biblical to the contemporary, and the communal to the individual. Every week on Shabbat when we lift up the Torah scroll, and declare “this is the Torah which Moses gave to the Israelites1”, I feel part of that mythic continuity, knowing that these are the same words my ancestors read at this point in the year, however many centuries ago.

Last month, I went to the Grolier Club’s exhibition of rare Jewish books from across the world. I saw documents from everywhere between Spain and India, in a remarkable diversity of artistic styles. Perusing these illuminated manuscripts of gold leaf, marbled paint, and multilingual brush calligraphy, I felt a sense of pride. While reading the words to myself, I found myself automatically humming the melodies to the daily prayers, to the Purim Megillah, to the Passover Haggadah, and even my Bar Mitzvah Torah portion. The exhibit also included several personal writings by the 11th-century Rabbi Moses Maimonides (HaRambam), one of the foremost Jewish sages of all time —  from his legal rulings to his personal correspondence. Minutes from his arbitration between two rival mohelim (ritual circumcisers) stood beside thank-you notes he had sent for silverware gifted to him at his wedding. It gave me chills that just an inch of glass separated my hand from the handwriting of one of Judaism’s greatest scholars — and I couldn’t help but find it slightly quaint, reading these quotidien writings of such a larger-than-life figure.

I had a similar feeling when I found my grandfather’s high school yearbook in Greece. I was a Fulbright scholar teaching at Athens College, the same school he had attended. Searching in the school library, I leafed through the shelves, dusty tomes not opened in decades, and finally found the picture of him with his class — at an age younger than I was then, standing in front of the same building in which I now worked. The blurb about him, touting his articulate arguments and intellectual passion, felt humorously accurate even seven decades later. In tears of joy, I called Papou on the phone. I told him, beaming with pride, “I’m retracing all your steps, Papou. I’m working at your school, and I’m reading the Torah every week in your synagogue.” After a heavy pause, in his typical full-bellied laugh, he told me, “We didn’t go to synagogue.”

Papou’s yearbook page. Translation: “If you hear a philosophical discussion, inside or outside the classroom, Albertos is always taking part in it. If you follow the discussion, you will be amazed by the clarity of his thinking. Albertos tries to impose his opinion with irrefutable (!) arguments and always gives a special tone to every discussion. He’s had a remarkable intellectual maturity since being class president in his 3rd year. But he’s not going on to study philosophy, but an equally noble profession: medicine.”

Athens College class of 1956. My grandfather, Albert Levis, is seated in the second row from the bottom, third from the left.

My first day on the job at Athens College. The building, Benaki Hall, is the same as in Papou’s class picture above.

It was a bittersweet victory. In that one moment, I simultaneously felt my imagination compacted and my curiosity opened. On the one hand, yes, it was true — my grandfather really went to school here, and the book is here to prove it. It was saying that we belong here — akin to the archaeologists looking for proof of the Davidic monarchy in Jerusalem. No longer was this story just in my head, but a string of empirical finite events. At the same time, that realness was also a limit. Even if my heritage had been the initial spark to send me to Greece, the life I had built there ultimately had little in common with Papou.

Nikos Kazantzakis at the Dome of the Rock on his trip to Jerusalem in 1926

In that feeling, I was reminded of the great Greek author Nikos Kazantzakis’ journey to Jerusalem in 1926, and how he couldn’t fathom that this mythic city was in fact a real place as much as his native Crete. Kazantzakis quotes the Hasidic master Rebbe Nahman of Breslov:

“When I get an idea, so greatly do I work on it within me that inevitably, when I begin to tell it to others, it has ceased to be an idea and comes out like a myth….

As a child, our family’s stories of Greece — the marble house with lemon trees in the yard — were planted deep in my mind. This extended all the way back to our community’s foundational myth, that in the 1st Century, Jewish slaves taken from the Land of Israel by a Roman ship were blown ashore in Greece by a storm, and set free by the captain. When I finally went to Greece, as Kazantzakis had felt in Jerusalem, I was confounded how these places could be tangible when I had heard about them in such grand terms.

A painting of the historical Levis family home in Athens

It’s moments like these where our engagement with the raw material of history bridges the divide between past and present. The Hebrew language lacks a word for history. (In Modern Hebrew, we would say historia.) The Arabic word for history, whose Semitic cognate root also exists in Hebrew, is ta’arikh — “lengthening”. Etymologically, this word comes from ‘moon’ or ‘month’ — simultaneously finite and cyclical.

Visiting the historical family home in Kypseli, Athens. The current residents were quite genial and showed me around.

To borrow from Mircea Eliade’s The Sacred and the Profane, or Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel’s The Sabbath, the Jewish tradition’s sense of time is not linear but circular2. As the author Richard Powers stated in his commencement address to my class at Oberlin in 2023:

In English, we say that the future lies open in front of us, while the unchanging past is behind. But life as a story obeys an idea of time more like that in Aymara, the Andean language, where the past is in front of us, always there to see and reinterpret, while we walk backwards into the invisible future.

It’s not that I doubted these stories of Greece were true. Yet there was still something affirming about feeling the page with my own hands, that I could actually reach out and touch it. It makes this history real. And at the same time, it reduces the experience from the infinite into the tactile. If I can touch it and live it, it makes it almost not history at all — it’s a part of me, and I am part of it.

I acutely felt that tension — between preserving the past as it was or incorporating it into inspiration for the present — at the annual New York Ladino Day, organized by the American Sephardic Federation and the Sephardic Home Foundation last week. The ceremony’s keynote address was by Dr. Joe Halio, president of the Sephardic Foundation on Aging. In his bubbly and endearing demeanor, he expressed the contrast between Ladino’s role as a mythic memory and as a lived language. A phrase he consistently returned to was that “Ladino has as many dialects as it has speakers.” The Haqetia spoken in Spanish Morocco incorporates more Darija Arabic and Amazigh, while the Salonican dialect is more influenced by Greek, Turkish, and later on Italian and French. Arguably, there is no uncontested place in the vast Sephardic diaspora that spoke a “purer” or “uncorrupted” Ladino. Halio also countered some popular historical misconceptions. Namely, Ladino was not spoken in Spain — it was a language born out of the destruction of diaspora and exile, a mélange of the many linguistic footholds that these fleeing Jews found.

At the same time, as Halio stated, “Sepharadim maintained Ladino for centuries not out of a desire to return to Spain. Rather, Sephardic culture, including language, is a living patchwork and tapestry of all of their influences and host societies.” One humorous point in his speech which articulates this challenge well is charting how “thank you” in Ladino went from “muchas grasyas” to “mersi mucho” or “çok mersi” (çok is Turkish for ‘very’), up to how, in Halio’s Bronx childhood, his father would say “mil tenkyouz” – “a thousand thank you’s.” In that regard, English being woven into Ladino is not an aberration of this chain of multilingual influences, but a continuation. It is no different than the Europhilic Salonicans who spoke a French-peppered Ladino, or even going all the way back to Spanish words themselves. The current moment is just the latest chapter of the story, not the decaying end.

Dr. Bryan Kirschen, Adam Cohen, Lily Henley, and Yinon Sanders at New York Ladino Day, 2026.

The day’s discourse expressed the importance of engaging with the still-living native speakers, many of whom are in their 80s and 90s, while also investing in the future through education and youth engagement. There is the language to be studied as it was, and there is the form it continues to shift as it remains a spoken language. The challenge, as it seems, is that both the linguistic purist gatekeepers and the apathetic modern masses seem united to consign Ladino to history.

Often, things are formally recorded only when we most fear losing them — once it’s at least partially too late. The Mishna, handed down for centuries orally, was written down only in 200 CE by Rabbi Yehuda HaNasí, out of fear that the tradition would die out entirely. Frequently, the act of recording leads to partial preservation at the cost of extinction of the remainder. As one of my favorite thinkers, Walter Benjamin, writes in his Theses on the Concept of History:

The past can be seized only as an image which flashes up at the instant when it can be recognized and is never seen again…For every image of the past that is not recognized by the present as one of its own concerns threatens to disappear irretrievably. (The good tidings which the historian of the past brings with throbbing heart may be lost in a void the very moment he opens his mouth.) To articulate the past historically does not mean to recognize it ‘the way it really was’ [as Ranke says.] It means to seize hold of a memory as it flashes up at a moment of danger.

Paul Klee’s Angelus Novus, the inspiration for Benjamin’s essay

The overwhelming sensation that Ladino day left me with was that we must be able to claim our own seat at the table of history, without the accompanying self-deprecation that we are not as righteous nor as learned as our ancestors. We cannot let the perfect — an imagined pure dialect uninfluenced by modernity — be the enemy of the good. When we study the past as relegated only to the page or the museum, we lose the power of its vitality to impact us. At the same time, as Santayana and Primo Levi remind us, if we don’t learn history well enough, we may forget our ancestors’ lessons and repeat their mistakes.

In the time I’ve spent in the Haredi world, in certain spaces I’ve often heard the fatalistic refrain that our generation is not as holy as that of some historical Rebbe, nor of Talmudic Rabbi Akiva, or of Biblical Abraham. To me, the implicit subtext of this outlook seems to be: we can’t be as good, so we shouldn’t try; We should sit dryly repeating their words, rather than dealing, as they did, with the complexities of the text, or rather than striving for theological greatness in the face of uncertainty.

This idolization of departed figures is not unique to Haredim. Think of all the American politicians who lionize our founding fathers and say that we’ve abrogated the vision that they set out for our country, or of those who decry that we no longer have Martin Luther King Jr.’s generation of Civil Rights leaders. Real as that pain may be, I would counter this despair with the tale of the famous Hasidic master, Rabbi Zusha of Anipol. As he told his students on his deathbed, “When I get to heaven, the Heavenly Court is not going to chide me for not being more like Moses or Abraham. They will chide me, ‘why weren’t you more like Zusha?’”

19th Century postcard of Jewish musicians from Salonica

We can, and must, respect our teachers and elders as the vehicle for passing down tradition, without idolizing them nor demeaning ourselves. It’s easy to base our lives on a crutch of identity, loss, or victimhood — anything but the messy reality that accompanies charting a course through the world in the present. We can hold onto the myths of our ancestors while living our own lives.

Regardless of their factual truths, myths exist for a reason. As one Italian saying goes, se non è vero, è ben trovato, “even if it’s not true, it’s a good find.” In other words, it serves its purpose well. We can appreciate the value of history and myth without needing to claim it as fact. Likewise, we can place ourselves in the chain as much as every generation before us did.

By taking history in our hands, we refuse to let it be confined to the past, calcified, or lost. What keeps a tradition alive is not accuracy, preservation, or reverence, but its dynamic and continual use in our lives. As a Ladino saying goes, sin memoria no ay avenir. There is no future without memory.