זכור אשר עשה לך עמלק -
זכור בפה ואל תשכח בלב.
Sifre Devarim, Ki Tetze, 296
Remember what Amalek did to you - remember with your mouth and do not forget with your heart.
(9) And these are the generations of Esau the father of the Edomites in the mountain-land of Seir. (10) These are the names of Esau’s sons: Eliphaz the son of Adah the wife of Esau, Reuel the son of Basemath the wife of Esau. (11) And the sons of Eliphaz were Teman, Omar, Zepho, and Gatam, and Kenaz. (12) And Timna was concubine to Eliphaz Esau’s son; and she bore to Eliphaz Amalek. These are the sons of Adah Esau’s wife.
ת"ר (במדבר טו, ל) והנפש אשר תעשה ביד רמה זה מנשה בן חזקיה שהיה יושב ודורש בהגדות של דופי אמר וכי לא היה לו למשה לכתוב אלא (בראשית לו, כב) ואחות לוטן תמנע ותמנע היתה פלגש לאליפז (בראשית ל, יד) ... אחות לוטן תמנע מאי היא תמנע בת מלכים הואי דכתיב (בראשית לו, כט) אלוף לוטן אלוף תמנע וכל אלוף מלכותא בלא תאגא היא בעיא לאיגיורי באתה אצל אברהם יצחק ויעקב ולא קבלוה הלכה והיתה פילגש לאליפז בן עשו אמרה מוטב תהא שפחה לאומה זו ולא תהא גבירה לאומה אחרת נפק מינה עמלק דצערינהו לישראל מאי טעמא דלא איבעי להו לרחקה
A teaching of our Sages: "The words 'But the person who sins deliberately' in Numbers 15:30 refer to the wicked king Menashe, who would mock the Torah. [Menashe] said, 'Did Moses really have nothing better to do than write words like 'And Timna was Lotan's sister' and 'Timna was Eliphaz's concubine?!' ... What is the purpose of [writing], And Lotan's sister was Timna? — Timna was a royal princess, as it is written, alluf [duke] Lotan, alluf [duke] Timna; and by 'alluf' an uncrowned ruler is meant. Desiring to join the Jewish people, she went to Abraham, Isaac and Jacob, but they did not accept her. So she went and became a concubine to Eliphaz the son of Esau, saying, 'I had rather be a servant to this people than a princess of another nation.' From her Amalek was descended who afflicted Israel. Why so? — Because they should not have repulsed her.
(3) And the people thirsted there for water; and the people murmured against Moshe, and said: ‘Why have you brought us up out of Egypt - to kill us and our children and our cattle with thirst?’ (4) And Moshe cried to Ad-nai, saying: ‘What shall I do to this people?They are almost ready to stone me!’ (5) And Ad-nai said to Moshe: ‘Pass on before the people, and take with you of the elders of Israel; and your rod, with which you smote the river, take in your hand, and go. (6) Behold, I will stand before you there upon the rock in Horeb; and you shall smite the rock, and there shall come water out of it, that the people may drink.’ And Moshe did so in the sight of the elders of Israel. (7) And the name of the place was called Massah, and Merivah, because of the striving of the children of Israel, and because they tried Ad-nai, saying: ‘Is Ad-nai among us, or not?’ (8) Then came Amalek, and fought with Israel in Rephidim. (9) And Moses said unto Joshua: ‘Choose us out men, and go out, fight with Amalek; tomorrow I will stand on the top of the hill with the rod of God in my hand.’ (10) So Joshua did as Moses had said to him, and fought with Amalek; and Moses, Aaron, and Hur went up to the top of the hill.
Amalek attacks after internal disputes and lack of trust in God. It is the mistrust in the world - that things are actually good. Hold on to that thought.
(יז) זָכוֹר אֵת אֲשֶׁר עָשָׂה לְךָ עֲמָלֵק בַּדֶּרֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶם מִמִּצְרָיִם. (יח) אֲשֶׁר קָרְךָ בַּדֶּרֶךְ וַיְזַנֵּב בְּךָ כָּל הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִים אַחַרֶיךָ וְאַתָּה עָיֵף וְיָגֵעַ וְלֹא יָרֵא אֱלֹהִים. (יט) וְהָיָה בְּהָנִיחַ ה' אֱלֹהֶיךָ לְךָ מִכָּל אֹיְבֶיךָ מִסָּבִיב בָּאָרֶץ אֲשֶׁר ה' אֱלֹהֶיךָ נֹתֵן לְךָ נַחֲלָה לְרִשְׁתָּהּ תִּמְחֶה אֶת זֵכֶר עֲמָלֵק מִתַּחַת הַשָּׁמָיִם לֹא תִּשְׁכָּח.
(17) Remember what Amalek did to you by the way as you came out of Egypt; (18) how he met you by the way, and smote the hindmost of you, all that were enfeebled in your rear, when you were faint and weary; and he did not fear God. (19) Therefore it shall be, when Ad-nai your God has given you rest from all your enemies round about, in the land which Ad-nai your God gives you as inheritance to possess it, that you shall blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; you shall not forget.
(יח) אשר קרך בדרך. לשון מקרה דבר אחר לשון קרי וטמאה, שהיה מטמאן במשכב זכור. דבר אחר לשון קור וחום, צננך והפשירך מרתיחתך, שהיו כל האמות יראים להלחם בכם ובא זה והתחיל והראה מקום לאחרים. משל לאמבטי רותחת שאין כל בריה יכולה לירד בתוכה, בא בן בליעל אחד קפץ וירד לתוכה. אף על פי שנכוה, הקרה אותה בפני אחרים:
(18) Korcha (Smote) - comes from the expression "happenstance"(mikreh) ... A third possibility: This is the language of cool (kor) and heat, cooled you and stopped you from boiling. All the nations of the world were afraid to fight you [Israel] and this one came and started and showed the way to others. It is likened to a legend of a boiling bath that no creature could enter. A scoundrel came and jumped in. Even though he was scalded, he cooled it down for others.
From here I want us to understand two possibilities about how Haman works in the Megillah, and how Amalek in general works in the world: Happenstance, chance - Haman has an idea of letting the pur, the casting of lots, decide things. We can also say that this is the inclination to say that all that happens is just chance, coincidence - that there is really no meaning in all we see. This, of course when taken to its most extremist conclusion, leads to the possibility of doing whatever our impulses tell us to, since it is all coincidence there is no need for morality. The only problem with wrong actions in this view is to get caught doing the wrong thing. In this view, we are cooled off from our desire of changing this world to a better place: why would we?
The second idea is that Amalek works by taking away the fear in others of doing wrong, of oppressing those who are weak and weary and faint first - is similar to those who use abusive and violent language, inciting others to do violence, but say they have no responsibility for the actions they incite.
When we think about our place in the world, how to live a meaningful life, or even better, why to live a meaningful life, I want us to hold onto those two ideas as well: Amalek as the goader to despicable actions, and Amalek as cooling off our desire to change the world.
But when we say we need to think about our place in the world, we need to revisit another story of the Jewish people: the creation of the world.
Now I want us to take a step back and return to Bereshit. [HOW MANY of you believe that God created the world out of nothing?]
R. Shai Held, Vayikra 5774: Ask a traditionally-educated Jew, and he or she is likely to tell you that before God began to create the world, there was simply nothing. “The” Jewish view, he or she will insist, is that God created the world out of nothing (ex nihilo).... The idea that God created something out of nothing is, at any rate, a far cry from the ways in which creation is portrayed in Tanakh. Biblical texts describe a God who creates the world by bringing order where before there was only chaos. As Genesis 1 portrays it, God takes an earth that is “unformed and void” (tohu va-vohu) and makes a cosmos, a place where life can survive and flourish, out of it. Bible scholar Jon Levenson writes that “two and a half millennia of Western theology have made it easy to forget that throughout the ancient Near Eastern world, including Israel… creation is not the production of matter out of nothing, but rather the emergence of a stable community in a benevolent and life-sustaining order. Genesis 1 presents God’s rule as majestic and uncontested. But read Genesis 1 alone—assume that it represents the biblical approach to creation, as opposed to one of them—and you will miss something crucial about biblical theology as a whole: Many biblical texts explicitly invoke a God who created the world by engaging in combat with dangerous and threatening forces of chaos. Some assume, more dramatically, that this process of subduing chaos is far from over. In much of the ancient world, water and the sea embody and symbolize chaos, threat, and a world not yet under control. (Picture the devastation wrought by recent tsunamis and hurricanes and you can begin to understand just how and why this is the case.) Psalm 74 evokes a great cosmic battle between God and the monstrous forces of chaos. The psalmist praises God for vanquishing the forces of cosmic evil: “It is You who drove back the sea with Your might, who smashed the heads of the monsters in the waters; it was You who crushed the heads of Leviathan.” Chaos defeated, God proceeds to order and structure the universe: “It was You who set in place the orb of the sun; You fixed all the boundaries of the earth; summer and winter—You made them” (Psalm 74:13-14, 16-17). And yet, crucially, even in a psalm that describes God’s great victory over the forces of evil, the defeated forces of chaos still rear their ugly head and threaten to reverse God’s good ordering of the world. The sea monsters may be defeated, but human forces acting destructively in history still wreak havoc with God’s plans, leaving the psalmist at once pained and perplexed. Right before the verses we have just seen, the psalmist asks: “Till when, O God, will the foe blaspheme, will the enemy forever revile Your name? Why do you hold back Your hand, Your right hand? Draw it out of Your bosom!” (74:10-11). And right after, he implores: “Do not ignore the shouts of Your foes, the din of Your adversaries that ascends all the time” (74:23). .... As Levenson poignantly notes, Psalm 74 “honestly and courageously draws attention to the painful and yawning gap between the liturgical affirmation of God’s absolute sovereignty and the empirical reality of evil triumphant and unchecked.”3 Some biblical texts are much more radical than Psalm 74. They imagine a world in which the forces of chaos were not vanquished in the past; God’s victory will only take place in an apocalyptic future. The prophet Isaiah looks forward to the day when “the Lord will punish with His great, cruel, mighty sword Leviathan the Elusive Serpent—Leviathan the Twisting Serpent; He will slay the Dragon (tannin) in the sea” (Isaiah 27:1). In Isaiah’s world, God is not yet fully lord over all creation.
There are forces afoot—dangerous, unpredictable, deadly forces. God will one day slay them, but they have not yet been defeated. ... “We must not forget,” Levenson writes, “that the optimistic element in this theology, which is the faith in God’s ultimate triumph, is dialectically qualified by the pessimistic element, which is tacit acknowledgment that God is not yet God.” What contemporary sense can we make of such starkly mythological imagery? Are these texts not destined to seem hopelessly antiquated to contemporary readers? It depends, I think, on how literally we want to take talk of sea monsters. The fact is that we live in a world that often seems chaotic in ways large and small, and that there is something wholly terrifying about this. On some level, all of us know that we—or, the worst thought imaginable, our children—could be hurt or harmed or killed in an instant in a freak accident, or at the hands of a crazed sociopath or a cruel monster. (The fact that we still use the language of monsters to describe people totally indifferent to moral norms and constraints is surely telling. Most of us still do believe in, and fear, monsters of one kind or another.) What makes parts of Tanakh so powerful, so compelling, and so utterly contemporary is precisely the fact that they do not paper over the reality that life can be so totally frightening, and seemingly so random and chaotic. Biblical texts give voice to the pain of affirming the reality of a powerful God, on the one hand, while acknowledging the often excruciating ways that the world we believe God envisions and wants is unbearably far from being realized, on the other. Tanakh gives voice to the agony often felt by those who believe in the reality of a good, life-affirming Creator but who must nevertheless live in a seemingly endless period of “not yet.” Divine dreams and human yearnings—all subjected to a protracted and painful period of not yet.
[IN THIS SENSE I want us to think about God as in the process of becoming God - through our actions in the world. NOw hold on to that thought while we explore another idea about Amalek]
Kedushat Levi
The author of the Kedushat Levi is Rabbi Levi Yitzhak of Berditchev (1740-1810). Rabbi Levi Yitzhak, known also as the Berdichever Rebbe, was a Hasidic luminary in Eastern Europe, and one of the main disciples of the Maggid of Mezeritch.
“Remember what Amalek did to you by the way, when you came forth out of Egypt; How he met you by the way, and struck at your rear, all who were feeble behind you, when you were faint and weary; and he did not fear God” (Deuteronomy 25:17-18). It appears, that this is not simply that the seed of Israel is commanded to wipe out Amalek, which is the seed of Esau, rather that every person from Israel (the people, not the place) needs to wipe out an evil portion that we call by the name of “Amalek,” buried in his/her heart. The seed of Amalek is always found in the world, and since every person is also considered a “small world”, there is reality to Amalek being the force of evil in every person, that wakes up every time to entice a person to do wrong, and on account of this, comes the “Rememberings” in the Torah.
And, see here, the strength of the seed of Israel is only in the mouth, [And Jacob went near to Isaac his father; and he felt him, and said,] “The voice is Jacob’s voice,” [but the hands are the hands of Esau] (Genesis 27:22), in Torah and Prayer. When a person has this strength, and his/her heart is always blazing for the Holy Blessed One, then there is no evil that can have mastery over it. But when a person puts this strength at rest, thus immediately [it can be said about that person] “and they departed from ‘Rephidim’ ” (Vayisu Marifidim) – that they softened their hands, and immediately “then came Amalek,” immediately the evil dwells with him/her. But when a person nonetheless holds onto the trait of reverence, to be in awe of the Blessed One and fearful of transgressing God’s commandments, nonetheless, [the person] does not come into the hands of sin.
And that’s what is written “when you were faint and weary,” that you did not have the strength of the seed of Israel within you, that they softened their hands from the service of God (Avodat HaShem), “and he did not fear God,” and on account of this remember greatly, do not let Amalek cause your strength to stumble. And that’s what is written “that you shall blot out” from your heart the root of evil and tether it beneath the good. And that’s what is written “when Moses held up his hand,” that is to say, his strength which we call by the name “hand / yad”, when a person raises this strength, thus “Israel prevailed.” But when a person puts this strength to rest, thus, God forbid, “Amalek prevailed.”
Rabbi Yitz Greenberg - The Jewish Way: Living the Holidays
"The primary lesson of Parashat Zachor is that true reconciliation comes through repentance and remembrance. Confronting the evils of the past is the most powerful generator of moral cleansing and fundamental reconciliation. Repentance is the key to overcoming the evils of the past. When people recognize injustice they can correct the wrongdoing and the conditions that lead to it. In the 20th century, repentance has liberated many Christians from past stereotyping and hatred of Jews, thus beginning to transform Christianity into a gospel of love, which it seeks to be.
Remembrance is the key to preventing recurrence. ...
Naivete and amnesia always favor the aggressors, the Amalekites in particular. The Amalekites wanted to wipe out an entire people, memory and all; amnesia completes that undone job. Ingenuousness leads to lowering the guard, which encourages attempts at repetition. One of the classic evasions undergirding naivete is the claim that Amalek is long since gone. Only "primitive" people are so cruel, only madmen or people controlled by a Hitler type would do such terrible things. The mitzvah of Zachor is a stern reminder that Amalek lives and must be fought.
Through Zachor, one learns to distinguish types and levels of evil. Not every evil is Amalek, but the ultimate evil must be destroyed. King Saul had a chance to wipe out Amalek, but in pity he spared Agag, the king. Centuries later, Haman the Agagite, the descendant of Agag, plotted the mass extermination of Jews (Esther 3:1). Says the Talmud, "Whoever is compassionate to those who deserve cruelty ends up being cruel to those who deserve compassion" (Midrash Tanhuma Metzora, Jerusalem Eshkol, 1971), section 1)."
(ד) .... אבל שבעה עממין ועמלק שלא השלימו אין מניחין מהם נשמה שנאמר כן תעשה לכל וגו' רק מערי העמים לא תחיה כל נשמה וכן הוא אומר בעמלק תמחה את זכר עמלק....
However, if either the seven nations or Amalek refuse to accept a peaceful settlement, not one soul of them may be left alive as ibid. 20:15-16 states: 'Do this to all the cities that ... are not the cities of these nations. However, from the cities of these nations,... do not leave a soul alive.' Similarly, in regard to Amalek, Deuteronomy 25:19 states: 'Obliterate the memory of Amalek.'
Kessef Mishneh: Included in [the concept of] "making peace" is the acceptance of the seven [Noachide] laws. For if they accepted these seven laws, they would no longer be included in the category of the "seven [idolatrous] nations" [which Bnei Yisrael are commanded to annihilate when they enter the land], nor in the category of "Amalek"; they would be considered like [any other] fit Noachides.
SO Where the Wild Things Are? Where is Amalek? In us, alive today, just like the kid in that beautiful book by Maurice Sendak – we need to remember so as to not forget, and as the midrash Sifre in Devarim says: we remember with our lips so that our hearts will not forget. We cannot let Amalek prevail in our hearts as well - as our friend Kedushat Levi reminds us. One of the overarching messages of the story of Purim is vehanafoch hu - things can change completely, those down will eventually come up - our mandate of changing things does not imply that by becoming predator instead of prey all is well – on the contrary, how we treat the vanquished is of supreme importance. How we treat the so called enemy is fundamental - and this is how the Rambam is able to say: look first, they might not be The Enemy.