This Shabbat is Shabbat Zachor, or Remember! It is the Shabbat that precedes the
festival of Purim. In the case of this
year, as you are probably aware, Purim begins immediately at the conclusion of
Shabbat, this evening. We hope that you
will come tonight at six, to celebrate this joyous festival.
Last night, I spoke
about the meaning of the designation, Zachor, or ‘remember’ in the
imperative. It comes from the opening
phrase of the traditional Maftir reading for today. The entire Maftir, from the 25th
chapter of Deuteronomy, reads in translation as follows:
Remember what
Amalek did to you on your way out of Egypt.
When they encountered you on the way, and you were tired and exhausted,
they cut off those lagging to the rear, as they did not fear God. Therefore, when God gives you peace from all
the enemies around you in the land that God is giving you to occupy as a
heritage, you must obliterate the memory of Amalek from under the heavens. You must not forget.
As I told the folks
in attendance last night, we read this on the Shabbat before Purim because the
Rabbis saw Amalek not only as an actual people, as players in one particular
drama chronicled in the Torah. Amalek,
to our Sages, also serves as the embodiment of the worst kind of evil that humans
unleash against humans. And
specifically, for the enemies of the Jewish people. For the ones that hated and oppressed us for
no reason other than that we were the Jewish people. Haman the Aggagite, the villain of the Book
of Esther which we read in part this morning and will read more of tonight, is
seen as the essence of Amalek. As are Joseph
Stalin, Adolph Hitler, and Saddam Hussein.
To name just a few of the more recent examples.
What made Amalek,
and his later heirs, so evil was not that they were the enemies of the People
Israel. Rather, that they were enemies
who were cowards. They struck the people
Israel from the rear when they were exhausted, killing women, children, and the
aged who were lagging behind the main body of combatants. They did this as they did not fear God. With no fear of God, they felt free to commit
the worst atrocities.
Each religious
tradition since Judaism has struggled with the concept known as ‘the Laws of
War.’ These include setting out when it
is lawful to go to war, and what are the limits of cruelty in war. To some, this is an absurd concept. The great Prussian strategist and philosopher
on war, Carl von Clausewitz, thought so. But the Jewish religious tradition was always
held otherwise. As have our daughter
faiths. That the standards are not
always met, does not bring them into question.
It just means that those trying to live within them are imperfect.
So Amalek
represents, among other things, a cowardly enemy. And we overcame him as well as all the other
Amaleks that followed. Not without
injury. For example, in the Shoah about
half of the Jews of Europe perished. And
so many survived only to live haunted lives, unable to find peace in the shadow
of their suffering. And really, how
could one expect otherwise? But with
each Amalek, we had no choice but to try to overcome, and so we did.
As a result of our
history, we have developed a ‘sixth sense’ for sniffing out our enemies. We listen carefully to what others say about
us. And we’re quick to express our
concerns when those words convey disdain or hatred. Sometimes others pooh-pooh our
concerns. It’s just rhetoric, they
tell us when our Arab cousins say they want to wipe Israel off the map. But we know that it isn’t just
rhetoric. We know that the worst
persecutions begin with just rhetoric.
So when we hear hurtful rhetoric, we tend not to minimise it or dismiss
it as unimportant.
And yet…in every
service we recite the Amidah, the central prayer. And at the end of that prayer there is a
reflection. I always leave time for it,
before we come back together to sing the anthem, Oseh Shalom Bimromav. Maybe you’ve noticed this reflection,
found on page 260 in this morning’s service:
My God, guard
my speech from evil and my lips from deception.
Help me to be ever modest, holding my tongue even when people slander
me. Open my heart to Your Torah, that I
may pursue Your Mitzvot. As for all who
think evil of me, cancel their designs and frustrate their schemes. Act for your own sake, for the sake of Your
Power, for the sake of Your Holiness, for the sake of Your Torah, so that Your
loved ones may be rescued. Save with
Your power, and answer me. May the words
of my mouth and the meditations of my heart be acceptable to You, O God, my
Rock and my Redeemer.
This reflection is
not an innovation from the Progressive Movement. It is carried over word-for-word from the
traditional prayer book. It expresses
the sentiment that the Rabbis have counselled since at least the Middle
Ages. It expresses a sentiment that
should be universal. Having just offered
our far-ranging prayer to God, we now ask that God would help us to develop a
new spirit that is less combative, less confrontational, less defensive. We ask that we learn to hold our tongues,
even when we believe we are right. We
ask that we allow God to frustrate the designs of those who would do us evil,
rather than giving us the wherewithal to defend ourselves verbally.
This is an important
concept, and it does not really contradict the imperative to blot out Amalek
and his heirs. But perhaps it comes to
tell us something about the nature of Amalek.
Amalek is not every enemy of the Jewish people. Yes, there have been many incarnations of
Amalek that we’ve had to face as our history has unfolded. But not every enemy is Amalek.
The warrior
understands this. There are enemies, and
there are enemies. From the end
of the Second World War until the second half of the 1980’s, the East and West
were locked in a Cold War. It made
generations of the world’s citizens live in a tense world of two competing
systems. When General Secretary of the
Communist Party of the Soviet Union Mikhail Gorbachev unleashed his policy of Perestroika
or re-structuring, he effectively ended the Cold War. In the next years, members of the US and
Soviet military services – from the highest levels to the rank-and-file – met
one another and found it easy to form a comradeship with our former
enemies. We found that we had more in
common than not. In particular, for
those of us who spoke Russian, it was an incredibly heady time. Those who had been our feared enemy were
transformed overnight into something approaching colleagues. We recognised that the Soviet warrior had
been our enemy because he represented a competing system, not because he was
evil. They were clearly not Amalek.
Rabbi Shelomo Goren,
the first Chief Rabbi of the Israel Defence Forces, likewise counselled against
seeing every enemy of Israel as Amalek or the Seven Canaanite Nations. We must defend ourselves against all our
enemies. But we shouldn’t see each one
as an incarnation of Amalek. Amalek was
a specific kind of enemy. If we dismiss
each one of our enemies as Amalek, then we have a tendency to de-humanise
them. And it is important to recognise
the humanity of others – even of our enemies.
If not, then we effectively cannot make peace with them. Peace isn’t necessarily possible with each
and every enemy. But if we see each one
as Amalek, then we won’t make peace with any of them.
Today we remember
Amalek. And we reflect on the many
Amaleks we have encountered through the ages.
Enemies who were cowardly. And
who would have destroyed us solely because we are Jews. But we must not exaggerate when we apply the
label Amalek. It does no good to apply
the label Amalek too broadly. If we do,
we will always be at war with an absolutely intractable foe. And each fight will be a fight to the utter
destruction of one side or the other.
And sooner or later we may be that side that is utterly destroyed. Think about it. Shabbat shalom.
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