Torah Readings: Exodus 27:20 to 30:10; Deuteronomy 25:17-19.
Haftarah: I Samuel 15:1-34
(Note: We will have have two Divrei Torahs this week. GoldnI will be writing a D'var Torah on the primary Torah reading, from Exodus, Tetzaveh. What follows is a second D'var Torah for this week on the second Torah reading, from Deuteronomy.)
This Shabbat, the Shabbat before Purim, is known as Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of Remembrance. This Shabbat gets its name from the first word of the special 3 sentence Torah reading that is read on this Shabbat:
Remember [Zachor] what the Amalekites did to you along the way when you came out of Egypt. When you were weary and worn out, they met you on your journey and attacked all who were lagging behind; they had no fear of God. When the Lord your God gives you rest from all the enemies around you in the land he is giving you to possess as an inheritance, you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget!
Deuteronomy 25:17-19.
But why are these three sentences read on the Shabbat before Purim?
In the special Haftarah read on Shabbat Zachor, we read:
This is what the Lord Almighty says: ‘I will punish the Amalekites for what they did to Israel when they waylaid them as they came up from Egypt. Now go, attack the Amalekites and totally destroy all that belongs to them. Do not spare them; put to death men and women, children and infants, cattle and sheep, camels and donkeys.’ . . . Then Saul attacked the Amalekites all the way from Havilah to Shur, near the eastern border of Egypt. He took Agag king of the Amalekites alive, and all his people he totally destroyed with the sword. I Samuel 15: 2-3, 7-8.
As we continue reading in chapter 15 of First Samuel, the prophet Samuel condemned Saul for not murdering King Agag. Saul had followed orders and murdered all the men except the king, and all the women and children of the Agagites, but that was not good enough. Samuel announced that God would punish Saul for not murdering Agag by causing Saul to be overthrown as king. The reading ends with Samuel himself murdering Agag. This reading has obvious moral problems, to which I shall return in a minute.
On Purim night, this year Wednesday night, in synagogues throughout the world, we will read the Book of Esther, and hear again of the plot of the evil Haman to murder all the Jews of Persia, and how the Jews were saved by Queen Esther and her Uncle Mordechai. In the Book of Esther, Haman is introduced at chapter 3, verse 1 as "Haman the son of Hamadahtah the Agagite" - that is, the descendant of King Agag, who, we learned in chapter 15 of First Samuel, was the descendant of Amalek.
(One may ask, if Saul murdered every man, women and child of the Agagites, and Samuel murdered Agag, how could Agag have any descendants? There is a midrash, alluded to in the Babylonian Talmud Megillah 13b, that Agag fathered a child during the time between his capture by Saul's army and his execution at the hands of Samuel.)
Back to the obvious moral problem with murdering every man, woman and child of a militarily defeated nation. At I Samuel 15:5, we read, according to the standard translation:
Saul went to the city of Amalek and set an ambush in the ravine.
The Hebrew of the words I put in Italics, vayarev banachal, is noted in my Hebrew-English Bible "Meaning of Hebrew uncertain." My English translation of the Talmud, Yoma 22b, translates these words as "and he strove in the valley" and explains:
"And he strove in the valley." Rabbi Mani said: "Because of what happens ‘in the valley’: When the Holy One, blessed be He, said to Saul: 'Now go, attack the Amalekites' he [Saul] said: 'If on account of one person the Torah said: Perform the ceremony of the heifer whose neck is to be broken [Numbers chapter 19] how much more [ought consideration to be given] to all these persons! And if human beings sinned, what have the cattle committed; and if the adults have sinned, what have the children done?' A divine voice came forth and said: 'Be not righteous overmuch.'
We remember World War II as "the good war", the war that we had to fight, the war fought against the ultimate evil. And yet we thought nothing of mass bombings of cities, destroying homes and schools as well as factories and bridges - killing men, women and children, the old and the young alike. We firebombed the cities of
Hamburg,
Dresden,, and
Tokyo.
By early morning on 14 February, Ash Wednesday, the center of the city [Dresden], including its Altstadt, was engulfed in a firestorm, with temperatures peaking at over 1500°C (2700 °F). Over ninety percent of the city centre was destroyed.
As one survivor described the firebombing:
To my left I suddenly see a woman. I can see her to this day and shall never forget it. She carries a bundle in her arms. It is a baby. She runs, she falls, and the child flies in an arc into the fire. Suddenly, I saw people again, right in front of me. They scream and gesticulate with their hands, and then — to my utter horror and amazement — I see how one after the other they simply seem to let themselves drop to the ground. (Today I know that these unfortunate people were the victims of lack of oxygen). They fainted and then burnt to cinders. Insane fear grips me and from then on I repeat one simple sentence to myself continuously: "I don't want to burn to death". I do not know how many people I fell over. I know only one thing: that I must not burn.
It's estimated that 43,000 died in Hamburg, 25,000 in Dresden, and 97,000 in Tokyo, many if not most burned to death, or suffocating from the lack of oxygen that the firestorm sucked out of the air. The bombs we dropped on these three cities, and the two nuclear bombs we dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, like the army of Saul of old, did not distinguish between young and old, between male and female, between mother and child.
It's tragic that we still fight wars - that young American men and women are still killing people. But, since 1945, we have fought wars in a different, more humane way. I recall during the Vietnam War how the right wingers of those days demanded that we firebomb Hanoi and Haiphong - fortunately Presidents Johnson and Nixon did not listen to them. But we still hear to this day how "the liberals" deliberately lost the war - John Bolton excuses his draft dodging by claiming that although he absolutely adored the Vietnam War from the safety of the Yale campus, he decided he was not going to die in a war that Ted Kennedy, who in 1970 was somehow running the country, had determined to lose. In Iraq and Afghanistan, not to mention Pakistan and Yemen, our military has carefully chosen targets to maximize the chances of killing just the people we intend to kill, while avoiding "collateral damage" to nearby civilians.
Abraham, who in Genesis 18:22-32 disputed God's plan to destroy Sodom and Gomorroh, was the first to question God's concept of justice. Saul, as quoted in the Talmud by Rabbi Mani, followed the teachings of our father Abraham. In the 18th Century, Rabbi Levi Yitzchok of Berditchev famously argued with God on Yom Kippur, telling God that, while we Jews may have sinned during the previous year, You too God, have sinned against the Jewish people by allowing the Jews to suffer persecution. Nor was Rebbe Levi Yitzchok acting in rebellion to Jewish teaching, for, as the Talmud, Bava Metzia 59 famously recounts:
If someone cuts an earthenware oven into ring-shaped pieces, and rebuilds the oven putting sand between the pieces, Rabbi Eliezer declared it ritually pure, but the sages declared it impure. . . . Rabbi Eliezer . . . said to them, "If the law is in accordance with me, let this carob tree prove it." The carob tree uprooted and walked from its place one hundred cubits, some say four hundred cubits. They said to him, "One does not bring proof from a carob tree." He then said to them, "If the law is in accordance with me, let the channel of water prove it." The channel of water turned and flowed uphill. They said to him, "Proof cannot be brought from a channel of water either." Rabbi Eliezer then said to the sages, "If the law is in accordance with me, let the walls of the House of Study prove it." The walls of the House of Study shook and were about to fall. Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah rebuked the walls, saying to them, "If Talmudic scholars argue with one another about Jewish law, what affair is it of yours?" The walls did not fall out of respect for Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah, nor did they straighten out of respect for Rabbi Eliezer ben Hurcanus, but remain leaning to this day.
Rabbi Eliezer then said to them, "If the law is in accordance with me, let it be proven by a Voice of Heaven." Suddenly a Voice from Heaven went forth and proclaimed to the Sages, "Why are you disputing Rabbi Eliezer? The law is in accordance with him in all circumstances!" Rabbi Yehoshua ben Hananiah rose to his feet and proclaimed, [Deuteronomy 30:12] "The Torah is not in Heaven!" What did Rabbi Yehoshua mean? Rabbi Yirmeyah said in reply, "Since God already gave the Torah on Mount Sinai, we no longer pay attention to Heavenly Voices. For You, God, already wrote in the Torah at Mount Sinai, [Exodus 23:2] 'After the majority you will incline.'" . . . . God smiled and said, "My children have defeated me, my children have defeated me."
God's command to Saul to murder every man, woman and child of the Amalekites, and their cattle as well, was wrong, and Saul, as recounted in the Talmud, was right to question God. Today religious fanaticism has acquired a foothold in one of America's two national parties, and prominent party activists, and presidential candidates, purport to tell us what God commands and deign to inform us that we may not question God's will, even if our own moral sense teaches us that their God, as they claim to proclaim His Will, is wrong. We must be resolute in standing up to these self-proclaimed self-righteous moralists as we work to create a nation where there will be justice and love for all, and thereby do God's work on earth.
Shabbat Shalom