Never Forget

Parashat Zakhor 5776 / 19 March 2016

A few weeks ago, many of us read about a political leader who energized his base of support by stoking fears of a hidden fifth column, living among the citizens but not really loyal to them. He spoke, in vivid language, about the danger that these aliens would increase in number and, joining together with foreign enemies, inevitably pose a danger to national security. They needed to be monitored, restricted, denied the rights of other citizens and limited in their range of activities.

Of course, I’m talking about Pharaoh and his justifications for enslaving the Israelites;^[1] but I can understand how one might think I meant one of the leading Presidential candidates instead. Donald Trump has been a divisive figure from the very beginning of his campaign, but the controversy spilled into the Jewish world last weekend whenAIPAC announced that Trump had accepted their invitation to address this week’s Policy Conference in Washington, D.C.

I understand AIPAC’s decision. AIPAC has a very straightforward mission: to promote close ties between America and Israel, and in order to fulfill their mission AIPAC must necessarily work with anyone who sits in the Oval Office. With that in mind, as they have done for several election cycles, the Policy Conference organizers have invited all the candidates still in the running from both parties; aside from Donald Trump, the Policy Conference will hear from Governor Kasich, Senators Clinton and Cruz, Vice President Joe Biden, House Speaker Paul Ryan, and more members of Congress than I have time to mention.

Many rabbis, journalists, and leading Jewish thinkers have criticized AIPAC for inviting Trump, arguing that his attitude and policy proposals violate basic Jewish principles. The flaw in their critique lies not in their assessment of Trump’s politics, to which we will turn our attention in a moment, but in their assumption that AIPAC’s guest list should include only people whose political positions are aligned with Jewish values. To illustrate the point: halakhah not only permits but mandates abortion in cases where a pregnancy jeopardizes the mother’s life; if we expect AIPAC to invite only politicians whose policies accord with that halakhah, how many current Congressional leaders would be left out? How could AIPAC hope to fulfill its mission of bipartisan support for Israel with such a litmus test in place?

Although Trump’s recent ascendance has caused a great deal of consternation on all sides of the political spectrum, a seasoned reader of Torah will know there is really nothing new about Trump. This morning’s Torah reading concluded with a special maftir aliyah, Parashat Zakhor,^[2] which is added to the parshah each year on the Shabbat before Purim. In three short verses, the maftir delivers a stark message: God commands us, the Jewish People in every generation, to destroy the nation of Amalek.^[3] For the Israelites, Amalek serves as a kind of arch-enemy; they were the first to attack the Jews after the Exodus, even before the revelation at Sinai, sneaking up from the rear and targeting the weakest, slowest stragglers at the back of the Israelite procession. Mitzvot, like children, are all special in their own way, but our tradition has given this one particular emphasis, establishing it as one of a small handful featured in special maftir readings; and despite its seemingly arcane context, the mitzvah of blotting out Amalek remains in force to this very day.^[4]

As a practical matter, the Rabbis of the Talmud established long ago that the Assyrian conquest of the ancient world so thoroughly mixed up the nations as to render any Biblical-period nationalities effectively meaningless;^[5] we fulfill this mitzvah today not through holy war against an ancient enemy, but by opposing the values Amalek represented wherever they might emerge. Rashi and others note that the mitzvah to destroy Amalek follows immediately after mitzvot of honesty and fairness in economic matters because a Jewish society must be defined by equity and truthfulness, whereas Amalek believes that might makes right.^[6] As Rabbi Shimshon Raphael Hirsch explains:

The antithesis of [the Jewish] national ethos is presented by Amalek, which exults and glories only in its triumphant sword and in trampling the weak and unprotected… Israel is required to regard itself as an instrument that participates in God’s war against Amalek. Amalek’s wreath of military laurels misleads people and blinds them with its glitter. The final leaf will fall from this wreath when Amalek’s power is broken — not by a sword stronger than its own sword, but by… loyalty to God’s moral law.^[7] 

We read parashat Zakhor on the Shabbat before Purim because Megillat Esther identifies Haman, the villain of the Purim story, as a descendant of Agag,^[8] the Amalekite King featured in this morning’s haftarah.^[9] Haman’s association with Amalek, however, runs much deeper than a passing biographical reference. Haman’s worldview connects him directly with Amalek’s will to power. Haman singles out the Jews as “a certain people scattered abroad and dispersed among the peoples in all the provinces of your kingdom; their laws are different from those of every other people, and they do not keep the king’s laws, so that it is not to the king’s profit to tolerate them.”^[10] Notwithstanding Haman’s personal conflict with Mordechai,^[11] what threat did the Jews really present? By Haman’s own admission, they were “scattered” and “dispersed.” Here Amalek reveals its true evil: Haman sets out to exterminate the last Jewish remnants just as his ancestors attacked the weakest members of a People already exhausted from slavery, thirst, and the trials of wilderness. As Rav Hirsch emphasizes, “It was the weakest among the weak, who could not keep up even with a slow march, whom [Amalek] pounced upon. That weakness did not move him to compassion and mercy, but to cruelty and ridicule of the weak.”^[12] Who, in this election season, has made “ridicule of the weak” a cornerstone of his campaign? Who has made a point of his disdain for compassion and common decency, emphasized his willingness to be cruel, expressed his passion for violence?

Leaders of the Reform Movement, in a statement responding to AIPAC’s announcement that Trump would speak at the Policy Conference, minced no words in their assessment of Trump’s policies:

His approach to immigration, his proposal to ban Muslims from entering our country, his comments speaking favorably about the use of torture, and his general demeanor of disrespect for the office he now seeks are all anathema to our fundamental values. The values we hold most dear – justice, mercy, compassion, peace – are altogether absent from Mr. Trump’s statements.

We should take no comfort in the fact that Trump, who refuses to denounce the white supremacists among his supporters, has so far not made American Jews a target of his venom. Hillel taught, דעלך סני לחברך לא תעביד, “What you would hate, you should not do to your fellow.”^[13] As Rob Eshman, editor of The Jewish Journal of Greater Los Angeles, asks: how might we react if, instead of “Muslim” or “Mexican,” we insert the word “Jew” into Trump’s campaign speeches? “Bigotry is bigotry,” Eshman wrote this week, and “Racism is racism. A demagogue willing to defame or threaten an entire religion or nationality just to rile up voters could easily redirect his venom to some other group when the time is ripe.”

Again and again, the Torah tells us, “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt”^[14] — not only because it is morally right but because we know, from the Exodus, from Purim, from the Inquisition and the Final Solution, the inevitable trajectory of a society built around oppression and exclusion. As James Kirchik, a self-described political conservative, noted this week:

From the cult of masculinity to the boastful anti-intellectualism, Donald Trump has unleashed ugly passions that any Jew with even the most tenuous connection to Jewish community, history, or tradition ought instinctively fear… [Trump] is the candidate of the mob, and the mob always ends up turning on the Jews…

A country that is politically pluralistic, open to new ideas and new people, ethnically diverse, and respectful of religious difference, is a country that will naturally be safer for Jews than a country that is none of these things. This, I believe, is why so many Jews… innately fear Donald Trump.

Wherever the forces of discrimination, hatred, and bigotry have been allowed to flourish, it is only a matter of time before they begin knocking on Jewish doors.

I believe there is no candidate today who embodies the vile spirit of Amalek — in its methodical victimization of the weak and disenfranchised, its willingness to justify violence and cruelty, its disdain for all standards of common decency, its mockery of moral virtue — more than Donald Trump. We have a well-established principle in halakhah, שתיקה כהודאה דמיא, silence indicates consent;^[15] and on these issues we simply can not remain silent. It is not AIPAC’s job to promote Jewish values in American politics. The responsibility of upholding Judaism’s distinct moral vision lies with me and you.

I don’t want Trump to speak before the AIPAC Policy Conference. I don’t want to see any advocate of exclusion, discrimination, and hate addressing the nation’s largest gathering of Jews — but I also believe AIPAC is right to reach out to all leading candidates, across the board. The ship has sailed for this year; if we don’t want Donald Trump, or anyone like him, at next year’s Policy Conference, we will need to take action in the public square and at the polls, not in angry emails to AIPAC staff and social media posts. As the Shalom Hartman Institute’s Yehuda Kurtzer asked on Facebook earlier in the week

Instead of a pin that says “Jews Against Trump,” how about one that reads “Jews For American Muslims?” Instead of the “distancing” action of standing apart, how do we use this moment to stand together with those who are the targets of Trump’s vitriol – Muslims, first-generation Americans, women, the disabled and differently-abled, members of the LGBTQI community? … Can we use this moment to signal that antisemitism and Islamophobia are twin illnesses that must be fought together?

Everything we do and say must make clear, in public and in private, our commitment to stop a worldview diametrically opposed to every sacred principle in our Torah — the worldview of Amalek. The Torah demands that we walk the walk on this one, that we dedicate each of our actions, individually and as a community, to preserving the spirit of justice, equity, compassion, and inclusion that defines Jewish social values.

This morning’s maftir concluded with two simple but evocative words:לֹא תִּשְׁכָּֽח, “Never forget.”^[16] I leave you with Rav Hirsch’s eloquent and haunting elaboration of this directive:

לֹא תִּשְׁכָּֽח. Do not forget this should you ever falter and, like Amalek, forget God and your duty, seeking only opportunities to use your superiority, in matters great or small, to the detriment of your fellow men.

Do not forget this should you ever wish to forget your calling and your mission as Israel among mankind. Do not envy the laurel wreaths woven by a foolish world to the memory of successful wreckers of human happiness. Remember the tear-drenched soil from which such laurels grow…

Justice and humanity will ultimately triumph over brutality and violence, and you yourself have been sent to herald and to help bring about — through your very fate and example — that triumph and that future.^[17]

Here is the choice that sits before the American People: brutality and violence, or justice and humanity. In the immortal words of John Stuart Mill, “Bad men need nothing more to compass their ends, than that good men should look on and do nothing.” It is not enough to hope for the best in November; we must raise our voices now, lest our silence leave us complicit. We must act to reinforce the bonds of civil society, standing on behalf of the immigrant and the stranger in order to repudiate any expression of hatred, bigotry, or racism. Our parshah could not be clearer: Amalek, the unchecked will to power that preys on those unable to defend themselves, can be given no quarter. A world in which Amalek is ascendant holds no place for Jewish values — and is not safe for the Jewish People.

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Tags: America, Purim, Zakhor