Interestingly, the words of Elkana hauntingly echo those in Deuteronomy, the selfsame phrase underpinning the activities in restless synagogues worldwide during the festival of Purim. When the name of Amalek's descendant – Haman – is sounded everyone boos, hisses, makes noise with a greggar (noisemaker) and stamps their feet (many have the name of Haman written on the soles of their shoes so that when they stamp his name is simultaneously erased). Asserting the complexity of history, both Elkana and Purim festivities position history between two irreducible differences: forgetting and remembrance. During Purim, memory is kept in circulation as a problem taken up anew by each generation; the problem is not one that can be reduced to either the blotting out of Amalek's name, nor the call ‘Do not forget’. Simply put, each generation probes history with the question: how can we be inspired not crippled by memory? And this question is largely a problem of how to deterritorialise the monumentality of history, concomitantly invoking the double becoming of ‘singular memory’.