The Shabbat immediately preceding Purim is Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of Remembrance, on which, in the Maftir (the final reading of the Torah), we remember Amalek’s attack on us in the Sinai Desert:
“Remember what Amalek did to you when you were on your way out of Egypt: how he confronted you on the way, attacking you from behind, all the weak stragglers, when you were tired and weary, and he did not fear G-d. And so, when Hashem your G-d will grant you respite from all your surrounding enemies in the Land which Hashem your G-d gives you as a heritage to inherit – eradicate the very memory of Amalek from beneath the Heavens! Do not forget!” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19).
The connexion with Purim is clear: it was Amalek’s descendant, Haman, who enacted the legislation to exterminate us in Persia.
Thus it is entirely appropriate that the Haftarah for Shabbat Zachor is the account of King Saul’s war against Amalek (1 Samuel 15:1-24), and the Torah-reading for Purim morning is the account of Amalek’s attack on us in the Sinai Desert about six weeks after the Exodus (Exodus 17:8-16).
It is intriguing that the Torah, usually so concise and sparing with its words, enjoins us both to remember and not to forget. But surely the one implies the other! Would it not have been enough to tell us either “Remember what Amalek did” or “Do not forget”? Why both?
On a technical halakhic level, this constitutes two distinctly separate mitzvot, one positive and one negative:
The positive, to actively remember the evil that Amalek did to us by mentioning it, pronouncing it with our mouths (Mitvzah #603, Positive Mitzvah #242 in the Rambam’s mitzvah-count);
The negative, not to forget the evil that Amalek did to us (Mitvzah #605, Negative Mitzvah #362 in the Rambam’s mitzvah-count).
Hence this Torah-reading constitutes a double mitzvah.
Interestingly, we encountered a similar double expression in the narrative of Pharaoh’s Chief Butler who was in prison with Joseph. When Joseph correctly interpreted his dream to mean that he would be released from prison in three days, he asked him to bring up his unjust imprisonment to Pharaoh, “but the Chief Butler did not remember Joseph, he forgot him” (Genesis 40:23).
The same question arises: Why the double expression “did not remember…forgot”?
The Bluzhover Rebbe zts”l, Rabbi Yisrael Spira (Poland and the USA, 1889-1989), gave an intriguing answer to both.
He had survived various Nazi ghettos, concentration camps, forced-labour camps, and death camps; most of his family perished in the Shoah. There are certain events, like the Shoah, he said, which we are forbidden ever to forget.
Nevertheless, they are far too painful to remember constantly. We must remember – but we must have some respite from the memory; otherwise we drive ourselves into insanity.
“Remember…do not forget”. Even while you are not actively remembering Amalek, the Shoah, the Hamas’s genocidal attack, our hostages still held in the Hamas’s hell in Gaza – still do not forget.
Remember, do not forget who Amalek was (and is!) and who he attacked: “He chanced upon you on the way, and he attacked you from behind, the weakest ones who were straggling behind, when you were tired and weary, and he did not fear G-d” (Deuteronomy 25:18).
Who were “the weakest ones who were straggling behind”?
These were the people of the Tribe of Dan who were the weakest of faith, straggling behind spiritually, who had been cast out of the protection of the Clouds of Glory because of their idolatry (vide Targum Yonatan to Deuteronomy 25:18).
Don’t ever fall into the terrible trap of believing that abandoning Judaism will save you from the Jew-haters. It won’t. They don’t care if you are religious or secular, Zionist or anti-Zionist, if you’re right-wing or left-wing, if you live in Israel or you’re wandering through the desert.
A century ago, Jews in Germany heard the vile rhetoric of Hitler y”sh and the Nazis: Juden raus! (Jews out!), Die Juden sind unserer Unglück (The Jews are our misfortune), and so forth.
And there were Jews among them who comforted themselves with the thought: They don’t mean us. They mean the Ostjuden, the Eastern Jews, the Polish Jews who are a foreign implant in Germany, the Orthodox Jews who speak Yiddish instead of German, who embarrass us all by their distinctively Jewish dress and appearance.
They don’t mean us “proper” German Jews, we who fought for the Vaterland in the World War, we who are thoroughly German.
But when they spoke of “the Jews” they meant us all. The “enlightened” Jews, the German Jews, steeped in German culture, no less than the Ostjuden.
A generation ago in Israel we heard the rhetoric of Yasser Arafat y”sh and his genocidal terrorists: Itbach el-Yahud (slaughter the Jews), idfess el-Yahud la-il-bahr (drive the Jews into the sea).
And there were Jews among us, here in Israel, who comforted themselves with the thought: They don’t mean us. They mean the “settlers”, the “fanatics” who embarrass us all by insisting on living on the “wrong” side of the Green Line.
But when they spoke of el-Yahud, “the Jews” they meant us all. The “enlightened” Jews of Tel Aviv no less than the “settlers”.
And more recently – who can ever forget the poignant, heart-wrenching cries of the Jews of Kibbutz Be’eri, of Nir Oz, of Netiv ha-Assarah, who were stunned at the Hamas’s genocidal onslaught: But these were our friends! We gave them employment, they were guests in our houses, they celebrated our weddings with us!
How could they possibly see us, the “good” Jews, as their enemy? When they needed medical treatment we took them to Israeli hospitals in our own cars! We protected them against the attacks of marauding “settlers”! We hid them in our houses when the soldiers came looking for people who were in Israel illegally!
But when they screamed for Jews to be exterminated, they meant what they said. All the Jews meant and means all the Jews.
Amalek doesn’t change. His pretexts for wanting to exterminate us morph from generation to generation and from location to location – but his genocidal psychopathic hatred remains constant.
Who was Amalek?
– His father was Eliphaz, who was a son of Esau and Adah, the daughter of Elon the Hittite (Genesis 36); the Hittite being descended from Heth, the son of Canaan, the son of Ham, the son of Noah (Genesis 10:1, 6, 15).
Amalek’s mother was Timna, Eliphaz’s concubine (ibid. 36:12), the daughter of Sa’ir the Horite (ibid. verses 20-22). So Amalek is an admixture of Esau and the Canaanites.
Esau became Edom – the progenitor of Rome, the origin of Christian and post-Christian European civilisation. And the Canaanites claim to be the indigenous inhabitants of Israel.
Amalek is the admixture of the Canaanites, Esau, and Ishmael; or in modern terms, the collaboration of Arabian-Muslim claimants to the Land of Israel with their European Christian (or post-Christian) enablers.
And even today, there are all too many Jews around the world who still comfort themselves with the thought: They don’t mean us. They mean the “Zionists”, the Jews who “occupy Palestine”.
But if the last year-and-a-half has taught us anything at all, it’s that when they say “the Jews”, they mean the Jews.
They mean us all: The left-wing peaceniks of Kfar Azza no less than the right-wing “militants” and “settlers” of Hebron, Yitzhar, and Beit El; the secular assimilated Jews of California no less than the deeply religious Jews of Williamsburg; the Jewish college students in Britain, France, America, Australia and everywhere else in the world no less than the Jews of Jerusalem and Haifa; the anti-Zionist Peter Beinart and Neturei Kharta types no less than the Magen David-waving proud Jews.
We confront hatred – and we can respond in one of two ways:
We can all-too-easily succumb. Is it possible that they are all wrong, and only we are right? Is it possible that Europeans and Americans, extreme Left and extreme Right, nationalists and internationalists, First World, Second World, and Third World, the United Nations, Russia and Ukraine – is it possible that they all make the same mistake?
That is the way to despair, ultimately to self-hatred.
Or we can confront Amalek with all the confidence of Jewish history, of Jewish faith and trust in G-d:
Yes, they are all wrong and we are right. Their hatred for us is irrational; it always was, it still is, it always will remain irrational – yet their hatred for us will remain.
Thousands of years ago, King David lyricised this persistent hatred for Jews:
“O G-d, don’t hold Your silence!... Because behold! – Your enemies are in uproar, and those who hate You have raised their head… They have said: Come, let us exterminate them as a nation, so that Israel’s name will never be heard of again! They conspire unanimously against You, forging a covenant against You: The tents of Edom and the Ishmaelites, Moab and the Hagrites; Gebal and Ammon and Amalek, Philistia with the denizens of Tyre; Assyria, too, accompanies them…” (Psalm 83).
When King David was writing these words, the idea of such a vast international coalition of hatred against us must have seemed impossible. Today it is as tangible as tomorrow’s headlines.
And this is ultimately comforting.
Forget the comforting delusion that “they don’t mean us, the good Jews, they only mean the bad Jews” (whoever you personally believe the “bad Jews” are). They don’t. When they call for “the Jews” to be eliminated – they mean you.
This is so completely irrational that yes, we know that they are all wrong and we are right.
Amalek’s ultimate ancestor was Esau, Israel’s twin brother. And while they were yet in Rebecca’s womb, G-d already told her: “Two nations are in your womb…” (Genesis 25:23).
There is a peculiarity in the text here: the word for “nations” is written in the Torah as גיֹיִם instead of גוֹיִם: a yud instead of a vav. Why would this be?
– According to the Ba’al ha-Turim (Rabbi Ya’akov ben Asher, Germany and Spain, c.1275-1343), this is because the numerical value of the letter yud is 10, which is an oblique reference to the ten nations listed in Psalm 83, the ten nations who collaborate in trying to exterminate us: Edom, Ishmaelites, Moab, Hagrites, Gebal, Ammon, Amalek, Philistia, Tyre, and Assyria.
This genocidal psychopathy isn’t random or haphazard, it’s part of G-d’s eternal and infinite plan. Amalek indeed views history as happenstance, as directionless and meaningless. Hence the wording in in this week’s Maftir, “Remember what Amalek did to you…how he confronted you on the way”.
The Hebrew phrase אֲשֶׁר קָֽרְךָ בַּדֶּרֶךְ connotes chance meeting: קָֽרְךָ, “he chanced upon you”, a cognate of מִקרֶה, coincidence.
But we understand that history is not random, not happenstance, not coincidence.
This is the ultimate message of the Book of Esther, which we will read twice this Purim, Thursday night and Friday morning. When we look back over the long sequence of events, from Achashverosh’s party at the beginning of the Book of Esther, to Vashti’s refusal to appear, to Achashverosh’s search for a new queen and choosing Esther, to Haman’s plot to exterminate all the Jews in the Persian Empire – all was under G-d’s direct supervision.
And one day we will understand how even the most tragic and disastrous events in our history were part of G-d’s plan.
This is how we confront the hatred which has plagued us throughout our history.