When the Soul Forgets Its First Love

There is a forgetting that creeps like dust upon the altar, and there is a forgetting that God Himself performs — a holy erasure. The verb nâshâh appears only six times in the Hebrew Scriptures, yet each occurrence trembles with consequence. This is not the casual misplacement of a thought. This is a severing, a releasing, a deliberate turning away. The sages teach that when Israel forgot the covenant, the heavens themselves remembered. But when the Most High chooses to forget, it is a mercy hidden in judgment — or a judgment that masquerades as mercy. You must ask yourself today: What have I forgotten that I was never meant to lose?

The First Occurrence: God’s Strange Action

The first time this verb appears, it is not spoken by man but by the Holy One Himself. In Genesis 41:51, Joseph names his firstborn son Manasseh, saying, “God has made me forget all my toil and all my father’s house.” Here the verb appears in the Hiphil stem — the causative form. God does not merely forget on your behalf; He causes you to forget. This is profound: the Almighty administers a sacred amnesia to His servant. The paleo-Hebrew letters of nâshâh — the nun (seed, life), the shin (teeth, pressing), the heh (breath, revelation) — together whisper of a life pressed through suffering until a new breath is given. Joseph’s forgetting was not weakness; it was survival wrapped in divine surgery. God cut away the bitterness so that Joseph could steward Egypt without the poison of the past. When the Lord causes you to forget, He is not robbing you of memory — He is freeing you from the power of memory.

The Contrast: Divine Forgetting and Human Neglect

How different is God’s forgetting from ours! When humans practice nâshâh, it is neglect, deprivation, exacting cruelty. The KJV translators rightly saw this range: to forget, to deprive, to exact. In Deuteronomy 32:18, Moses cries against Israel: “You forgot the Rock who begot you, and you neglected the God who gave you birth.” Here the verb carries the weight of abandonment — a child who no longer knows the face of the Father. The rabbis of old observed that this forgetting is active, not passive. To forget God is to act as though He does not exist, to live as an orphan when you have been adopted. But when God forgets, it is a different matter entirely. He does not forget out of weakness or neglect. He forgets our sins — as the prophet declares in Isaiah 43:25, “I, even I, am He who blots out your transgressions for My own sake, and I will not remember your sins.” Divine forgetting is a covenant act of purification.

The Verb in Covenant Context: Where Obedience Hinges

In the covenant, nâshâh marks the boundary between life and death. Deuteronomy 4:9 warns with holy urgency: “Only take heed to yourself, and diligently keep your soul, lest you forget the things your eyes have seen, and lest they depart from your heart all the days of your life.” The covenant depends upon remembrance. The festivals — Passover, Shavuot, Sukkot — are divinely appointed memory devices. To forget the exodus is to sever yourself from the people of God. Yet even here, the verb appears in a different form: God remembers His covenant, and when Israel forgets, He sends prophets to call them back. The tabernacle itself was a structure of remembrance — the menorah burning as a perpetual witness, the incense rising as a memorial. Jewish tradition holds that the breastplate of the high priest bore the names of the tribes as a continual remembering before the Lord. When you forget the covenant, you lose your identity. When God remembers the covenant, He restores your place.

The Stem Speaks: What the Grammar Reveals

In its Qal stem, nâshâh means simply to forget, as in Job 11:16: “You will forget your misery; you will remember it as waters that have passed away.” But in the Piel stem, the verb intensifies — it becomes a deliberate, forceful forgetting, a stripping away. And in the Hiphil, as we saw with Joseph, it is causative: God makes someone forget. The grammatical range mirrors the spiritual journey. There is a passive forgetting that happens when you drift — the slow erosion of devotion. There is an active forgetting that you must choose — releasing a grudge, laying down a wound. And there is a divine forgetting that only heaven can perform — when the Lord removes your transgressions as far as the east is from the west. The early church understood this as the work of the Spirit, who brings to remembrance what Yeshua taught (John 14:26) and also helps you forget what lies behind (Philippians 3:13). The grammar of grace includes both memory and forgetting, each in its appointed time.

The Gematria of 355: The Number of Release

The gematria of nâshâh is 355. The ancient sages meditated on numbers as pathways to deeper truth. Three hundred and fifty-five — what does it signify? In Hebrew, the word shalom (peace) has a value of 376, a number close but not identical. Yet 355 is the value of nâsash, a word that suggests a flame flickering and rising. The rabbis of old observed that the number 300 speaks of divine perfection (the shin with three heads), 50 speaks of jubilee (the year of release), and 5 speaks of grace (the heh, the letter of breath). Together, 355 whispers of a perfect release — the jubilee of the soul, the grace that breathes freedom into the captive. When Yeshua read from the Isaiah scroll in Nazareth, He proclaimed the year of the Lord’s favor, the release of the captives (Luke 4:18-19). That release is nâshâh made manifest. The number itself is a promise: God’s forgetting is the jubilee of your heart.

Messianic Fulfillment: Yeshua and the Holy Forgetting

The Messiah came to fulfill what nâshâh foreshadowed. In the Tanakh, the psalmist cries in Psalm 13:1, “How long, O Lord? Will You forget me forever?” This is the agony of divine hiddenness. But in the Gospels, we see Yeshua experiencing the ultimate forgetting — not His own, but the Father’s turning away. On the cross, He cries, “My God, My God, why have You forsaken Me?” (Matthew 27:46). In that moment, the Messiah bore the full weight of human sin, and the Father — who cannot look upon evil — turned His face. This was not a forgetting of love but a forgetting of the relationship as the Sin-Bearer. Yet three days later, the forgetting ended. The Father remembered the Son, and raised Him from the dead. And now, because of that death and resurrection, God can forget your sins. The apostolic tradition teaches that Yeshua is the mediator of a new covenant in which God says, “I will remember their sins no more” (Hebrews 8:12). Nâshâh finds its complete expression in the blood of Messiah: God remembers your sins no more, because He has caused them to be forgotten forever.

Your Call: Choose What to Forget and What to Remember

Beloved, you stand at the threshold of this sacred verb. There is a forgetting that destroys — when you neglect the Rock of your salvation, when you deprive your soul of the bread of life. But there is a forgetting that heals — when you release the bitterness of your father’s house, when you let the Lord remove the weight of your past. You must ask yourself: What have I been clutching that God is asking me to forget? And equally: What have I forgotten that I must now remember? The covenant meal of bread and wine is given so that you do not forget. The Spirit is given so that you can forget rightly. Go now and let the Lord perform His nâshâh upon your soul. Let Him cause you to forget the toil and the sorrow, that you might remember only His love. And when the enemy whispers your failures, you may answer: “The Lord has forgotten them. And I will forget them too.” May your forgetting be holy, and your remembering be eternal. Shalom.