Shabbat Zachor

Rabbi Mati Kirschenbaum

POLSKĄ WERSJĘ The last Shabbat before Purim is known as Shabbat Zachor, which can be translated into English as the ‘Shabbat of Remember! (imperative)’. On Shabbat Zachor, on top of the regular Torah portion, we read a special maftir, an additional reading. It recalls the vicious attack of Amalekites on the Israelites soon after their Exodus from Egypt. It reads:

Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt—

how, undeterred by 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 Eternal your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Eternal your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)

This moving passage describes one of the hardest moments in 40 years of Israelite wandering in the desert. Immediately after their liberation from Egypt, the Israelites are attacked from the rear by the Amalekites who target those who are slow and defenseless: the seniors, families with young children, the disabled.

This year the reading from Deuteronomy 25 hits particularly close to home. We are reeling from the barbaric attack of Hamas on Israel. We remember the men, women and children killed, we remember the names of the hostages and do our best to remind the world about their ongoing ordeal.

In the wake of such a tragedy, it is tempting to embrace the last line of the maftir reading, which calls for the annihilation of those who harmed us. This passage seems to give a green light to the part of us that yearns for collective punishment of the group responsible for our suffering, it satisfies our thirst for revenge, born out of despair, hopelessness, fear and anger.

Shabbat Zachor precedes Purim because, without Deuteronomy 25, the book of Esther would feel problematic for many of us. After all, its chapter nine cheerfully celebrates the massacre of people who followed Haman. Deuteronomy 25 eases us into this story, frames the rivalry between Mordecai and Haman as yet another iteration of the kill-or-be-killed conflict between Israelites and Amalekites. It calls for total war and justifies genocide.

Our tradition has done a lot to counter such readings. It limited the call to total war against Amalek to the past by pointing out in 1 Chronicles 4:43, that the last Amalekites were killed thousands of years ago. Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, the founder of modern Orthodox Judaism, believed that the commandment to destroy Amalek obliged the Jews to destroy the memory of Amalekites, not their purported descendants. Still, the tendency to ascribe the role of inhuman and eternal enemy to the entire nation is present in the Jewish world today.

Let me be clear: it is obvious that Hamas is an existential threat to the Jewish people. It is also sadly true that it has the support of many, if not the majority of Palestinians. This does not mean, however, that when we identify Hamas with Haman, we should automatically assume that all Palestinians are modern Amalekites.

My teacher, Rabbi Deborah Kahn-Harris, the principal of the Leo Baeck College, writes about the danger of reading the Purim story through this lens. She writes:

This year marks the thirtieth anniversary of Purim 1994 when Baruch Goldstein, donning an IDF uniform, walked into a room in the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and opened fire on a group of Muslims worshipping there during Ramadan. Twenty-nine worshippers were killed with more than one hundred and twenty-five injured.

We cannot know for certain what was in Goldstein’s mind as he committed this atrocity. (He was killed during the attack.) But it seems certain that it was no accident he chose Purim as the date on which to carry it out. The massacres described in chapter 9 of the book of Esther were undoubtedly a source of inspiration to him. But there are crucial differences between the real actions of Goldstein and the fictional story retold in the book of Esther.

For starters, the book of Esther is just that – a work of fiction. No accounts from any other source in antiquity corroborate the events of the book of Esther. No serious Bible scholar or historian accepts the historicity of Esther. The story is simply not a recounting of actual historical events.

The lessons we might learn from it, therefore, are highly dependent on how we read the story. Is it revenge fantasy or farce? Panto or horror? What is clear to me as a Bible scholar and rabbi, who has taught this text for more than a decade, is that the violence at the end of the book is not, and was never meant to be, real. Think of the book of Esther more like Inglorious Basterds and you get the idea.

But for Goldstein and other extremists who shared and continue to share his world view, the fantasy violence was read as a road map for real life.

At this moment in history, when so many of us in the Jewish community feel a sense of existential threat, the story of Esther may feel in equal measure both especially potent and dangerous. But we must read it with the words of Carleen Mandolfo ringing in our ears:

… the choices we make about reading have political consequences as significant as those we make in the voting booth or with our checkbook. Our reading practices, in part, construct the symbolic world we inhabit and serve to motivate and justify our actions. Because words, particularly biblical words, possess the power to muster armies, we must approach the text with a certain ethical consciousness.[1]

As we approach Purim 2024, ethical consciousness must be at the forefront of our reading of Esther and the Purim celebrations that surround it, now more than ever.

To this I can only add the following: in the middle of the war, we need to find a way to defend and support Israel and to protect our hearts from starting to see our adversaries as Amalekites. The story of Purim teaches us that God can manifest the Divine power through courageous actions of every person. Let’s all fight our inner Amaleks that call us to seek revenge. Let’s focus on restoration of safety to all Jews, and not on revenge. Shabbat Shalom and Purim Sameach!