was this what god meant

In a powerful essay called Facing Amalek, which was published today in Jewish Currents, Maya Rosen begins, “IN A TELEVISED PRESS CONFERENCE on October 28th, as Israel began its ground invasion of Gaza, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu announced Israel’s “one supreme goal: To destroy the murderous enemy.” Israeli soldiers, he boasted, “are longing to recompense the murderers . . . They are committed to eradicating this evil from the world.” Then he quoted Devarim 25:17: “Remember what Amalek did to you.”

Invoking Amalek was a spiritual red flag, a way for him to communicate his ethnic cleansing goals garbed in religious language. It was scary at the time. And it has haunted me for the past 146 days. 

Every year, on the shabbat before Purim, Jewish communities read a special maftir/additional Torah reading from the book of Deuteronomy 25:17-19. It concludes with a paradoxical spiritual instruction, to “blot out the memory of Amalek from under the sky; you shall not forget.” 

This instruction references an earlier moment in Torah back in Exodus 17, when Amalek fought the Israelites and won, supposedly by attacking the most vulnerable. It is held up as an example of immoral warfare and irredeemable evil. Yet little attention is paid to the morally troubling idea that a people can be blotted out. 

Maya Rosen continues, “While a divine directive to obliterate an entire people is always troubling, it is particularly distressing to read this commandment to commit genocide in the midst of a genocide. As I sit in synagogue this year, it will be impossible not to wonder how those around me are understanding the verse, or to avoid imagining it being chanted by Israeli soldiers in Gaza.”

Purim is always a risky holiday. It is a practice flirting with a world flipped upside down, where boundaries are blurry. Every year this makes me more anxious than excited. And every year it feels worth it. But this year, it feels dangerous. 

Originally there were four mitzvot associated with Purim as described in the megillah itself. They are reading the megillah, having a festive feast, exchanging gifts with your neighbors and redistributing money to folks who need it. But some one thousand years later, the Talmud added a fifth mitzvah:

Megillah 7b reads, “Rava said: One is obligated to become inebriated [with wine] on Purim until they cannot tell the difference between cursed be Haman and blessed be Mordecai.”

When experienced in the same 12 hour period, as we will tomorrow, the relationship between Shabbat Zachor and Purim itself is complicated. We are at once blotting out evil and also identifying with it. We are remembering to forget our worst fears and we are flirting with becoming them. 

In 2009, Rabbi Rachel Barenblat wrote a poem about this conundrum,  

At every opportunity
they remembered Amalek

who attacked from the rear
without warning.

They had been famished, weary,
and then the screams in the night…

As God was their witness
they would never be victims again.

They put their trust in rebar
and concrete,

distributed machine guns
for teenagers to fondle.

Taking action felt so good.
Was this what God meant?

This fierce attachment
the opposite of forgetting.

No one knows how to blot out
without holding on.

This Shabbat Zachor, may we find a way to forgive the past without forcing ourselves to forget. And may it bring us closer to an understanding of Jewish safety that is not forged in fear and revenge.