Zachor

I do not want to write this. To write about the parsha of angry memory now, during the Gaza war, is excruciating.

I am the child of holocaust survivors. A large part of my religious beliefs come from the holocaust. To me, the Nazi murders and the flourishing of the survivors, are religious ideas because  of their enormity. The events are too large for mundane analysis. Mathematics does not work outside the limits within which it is defined. These events are outside those limits. They require an extra-ordinary context. But once I leave the usual understanding of the world, I have no certainty. Anything can happen. Truth has a new meaning or no meaning at all.

The establishment of the state of Israel is tangential to ordinary reality. The skew line of history that decimated European Jewery and my ancestors, touched  the fragile  ball of the universe  within which the rules apply. A functional state, that housed the survivors and that became the repository for Jews, must function within the rules: both the stated, public rules; and the private, plutocratic guidelines that secretly govern the actions of states and wealth. The contact between the exouniverse of dreams, nightmares and outrageous events moved the bubble of reality off course and simultaneously redirected history.

The annual  cycle of Jewish ritual begins with the Passover, the celebration of  spring  and liberation and renewal. It ends with Purim, the bacchanal of survival and victory; a reminder of eternal antisemitic  threat.  We are up to Purim.

Purim is a Rabbinic decree. The story that is celebrated took place a thousand years after Moses. It is tied to a commandment of the Torah: reading Zachor, Remember, three verses from Deuteronomy ( 25 :17-19)   that admonishes Israel to remember the Amalek nation, and when the time is right, erase all memory of it. This is followed by a Haftarah (I Samuel 15:2-34)  that deals with king Saul’s attempt to carry out these instructions and Samuel’s admonition that Saul had misinterpreted the instructions ( by following the will of the people).  The Haftarah is tied to Purim by the mention of Agag, the king of Amalek, who was spared by Saul … and killed by Samuel. Hamen, the villain of Purim is called an Agagi, presumably a descendent of Agag, and hence a residual Amalekites. There is an implication that Samuel’s clemency toward Agag, dictated by mercy and international law, allowed Agag to father Hama.

The haftarah is a polemic against mercy of any kind in the fulfillment of the Divine task. Erasing the memory of Amalek means annihilating everything, all the DNA.

Amalek is to be eliminated because of the cruel and overbearing attack they made at the moment of weakness. The issue that needs erasing is cruelty. Overwhelming retribution would seem to perpetuate the problem, it does not erase it. To the extent that it succeeds, a war of obliteration preserves its validity for the next instance.

The Purim story accepts a state of exile for the Jews. The story takes place when there is no Jewish homeland. The ascent of Esther and Mordechai in the Persian empire is a forerunner to permission for the Jews to rebuild their Temple in Jerusalem (a multicultural and divided city, then).  This is not the time prescribed in the Torah for the erasure of Amalek.

How do these stories impact the thinking of Jews today? We are careful to say that we cannot identify Amalek and thus we can not invoke the command to kill. But the idea of vengeful annihilation is glorified in these stories and the late unforeseen consequences for failure to do so is remembered by connecting the story of Saul and  Agag to that of Haman and Mordechai.

Forgoing evil does not seem to work (example: Chamberlain). Annihilation is intolerable. Sometimes the solution comes from the incidental (the Purim story) and we celebrate it as a miracle.