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Ron Kronish

On Remembering Amalek–The Evil Within Us

This past Sabbath in the Jewish calendar was known as Shabbat Zachor, the Sabbath of Remembering. It was the Sabbath that precedes the holiday of Purim, which Jews around the world celebrate this week, to remember how they were saved from the evil machinations of a Persian man named Haman, who sought to annihilate the Jews of Persia (today’s Iran!), as told in the book of Esther, which is read in full on this holiday.

On this past Sabbath, we read special verses from the book of Deuteronomy at the end of weekly Torah reading:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt, how undeterred by the fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you should blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:17-19).

In Jewish tradition, Haman was considered a descendent of Amalek, so that on the holiday of Purim, Jews remember his attempts to annihilate our people by listening carefully to the reading of the Scroll of Esther in the synagogue and making lots of noise to eradicate his name.

Who exactly is Amalek that we seek to blot out his name and at the same time keep his memory alive?

In the traditional Jewish mindset, he is the classic antisemite, the one who attacks innocent Jewish women and children when they are weak and helpless (mostly in the Diaspora, but also now in Israel). In today’s terms, he would be called a “terrorist” since he attacks Jews just because they are Jews, and focuses on innocent civilians, whether in Paris and Copenhagen, or in Jerusalem and Tel Aviv.

But the holiday of Purim can lead also to hatred and vengeance. When I was young and grew up in a Reform Jewish congregation, we never read the whole book of Esther, so I never got to the back of the book. Only when I got to Israel did I discover that in chapter nine of the book of Esther we read about the large counter-pogroms that the Jews enacted against Haman’s children and their families! (This was somehow purposefully overlooked in classical Reform Judaism, which preferred to stress the ethical parts of the Bible and tended to ignore the more violent stories.)

This remembering of Amalek — and the commandment to wipe out any memory of him — allegedly led the mass murderer, Baruch Goldstein, to kill 29 innocent Muslims who were praying in the famous Ibrahim mosque at the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron 29 years ago, just before the holiday of Purim. And it leads too many Jews to see all Muslims or all Arabs or all Palestinians as descendants of Amalek, and thus fosters an unhealthy spirit of vengeance against others who are not of the Jewish tribe.

This spirit of vengeance was evident once again in the Palestinian village of Hawara a week ago, when hundreds of radical Jewish settlers, mostly the so-called “hill-top youth” who are the true anarchists in Israel today — vandalized the town in the Northern West Bank, near Nablus, after a Palestinian terrorist has shot and killed two young Jewish men in cold blood earlier in the day. They were operating in the spirit of “blotting out the memory of Amalek” in a literal sense even though Rabbinic Judaism has rejected this literal interpretation of the passage a long time ago.

However, there are other Jewish interpretations of who Amalek is and how we should relate to him. I learned one such interpretation from Professor Menachem Klein who teaches in the Department of Political Science at Bar Ilan University and lives in Jerusalem, and who wrote about how Amalek can be understood differently.

Today, Amalek does not exist, but Amalekite behavior exists and must be confronted… The Hasidic commentary on Amalek sees Amalek as a very negative character trait. According to the Hassidic approach, the battle with Amalek is an inner struggle that every Jew conducts within himself. Preachers with a social and political orientation see Amalek as a radical anti-Jewish stance on the part of individuals and groups from the nations of the world. They distance “Amalekite” behavior beyond man and the Jewish collective. (Shabbat Shalom, Issue #845, Purim 5774, 2014)

Klein ended his article about Amalek by bringing a profound and inspirational quote not from a Reform or Liberal rabbi but from one of the most famous Orthodox rabbis in modern history, Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch (1808-1888), who was one of the founders of Modern Orthodoxy in Germany. In bringing this quote, Klein points out to us that it sounds like Rabbi Hirsch was writing this as if he lived in Israel today:

Do not forget this thing: If the day comes and you want to be similar to Amalek and their likes, and you will not know the obligation, and you will know not God, but you will just look for opportunities in small and big matters, to exploit your superiority only to harm mankind, “don’t forget” the moral mission of Israel… Remember the land soaked with tears that cause the laurel to grow for these wreaths. Do not forget this thing, for when the day comes when you yourself will suffer from the aggression and vulgarity of Amalek… Preserve your humanity and the values of integrity that you learned from God… and in the end humanity and justice will win over vulgarity and violence. (Commentary on Deuteronomy 25:19)

Accordingly, remembering Amalek can have an important moral meaning for us today, especially for us in Israel. “Amalek” can be understood as the evil within us, as individuals and as a people. We must be mindful of this side of ourselves and attempt to “blot it out” as much as possible, and not only accuse others of being “Amalekites”.

This is our great challenge in rebuilding Jewish sovereignty in the land of Israel. We can no longer ignore this. On the contrary, remembering “Amalek” could help us in our own struggle against unethical behavior, especially by ministers in the current Israeli government and their immoral followers in some settlements who are known as “hilltop youth”, who committed an unspeakable pogrom last week, which has been strongly denounced by responsible Jews in Israel and the Diaspora.

The perpetrators of this terrible incident of violence against innocent human beings obviously had not read the passage above from Rabbi Hirsch. They completely forgot their humanity and the values of integrity that they should have learned from God.

About the Author
Rabbi Dr Ron Kronish is the Founding Director the Interreligious Coordinating Council in Israel (ICCI), which he directed for 25 years. Now retired, he is an independent educator, author, lecturer, writer, speaker, blogger and consultant. He is the editor of 5 books, including Coexistence and Reconciliation in Israel--Voices for Interreligious Dialogue (Paulist Press, 2015). His new book, The Other Peace Process: Interreligious Dialogue, a View from Jerusalem, was published by Hamilton Books, an imprint of Rowman and LIttelfield, in September 2017. He recently (September 2022) published a new book about peacebuilders in Israel and Palestine entitled Profiles in Peace: Voices of Peacebuilders in the midst of the Israeli-Palestinian Conflict, which is available on Amazon Books, Barnes and Noble and the Book Depository websites,
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