Here we are, in the merry month of Adar under the nearly-full moon, one day shy of Purim! Memories of childhood Purim carnivals come flooding back, from which I’d return home with the annual haul of unlucky goldfish. And hamentaschen! Which at our favorite Jewish bakery in Skokie were not little cookie jobs, but yeast dough, like triangular challahs, glazed and filled with delicious prune or plum or apricot – none of those other unnecessary flavors.
And at the center of Purim was the story – a grand story that seemed so easy to get on board with. A palace setting, a mortal threat, a brave heroine, underdogs coming out on top and a villain getting hoisted on his own petard. Plus so many costume opportunities.
But like so many topsy turvies, there is a shadow to this story. With the reversal of the Jews’ fortune at the end of the book comes a surprising reprisal. The Jews, threatened with destruction, now become ruthless avengers.
I bet you didn’t even know about this part of the story, because it was probably hidden from you, as it was from me. When you were a child you probably thought that Haman, at the end, was thrown into a dungeon or something. Or maybe, because we were less cautious about the violent imagery we used in those days, you heard that Haman was hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordecai. You probably didn’t hear the part where Mordecai, in the king’s name, issues an edict calling off the destruction of the Jews and permitting the Jews to take up arms and fight back if threatened. Then we get to Chapter 9 of the Book of Esther, and 500 enemies of the Jews are killed in Shushan the capital on the first day, and 300 the next day, not counting Haman himself and all ten of his sons. And outside the capital, throughout the kingdom of Persia, 75,000 people die at the hands of the Jews, the megillah tells us. So what is that? All told, 75,811 of those who would harm us – destroyed. I suspect this is news for you.
So what do we do with a text like this? One thing I can tell you is that I will, like my teachers did, omit it when we are together as a community this Sunday with our children and our grandchildren, all in costume, sticky-fingered, reading the megillah. I will omit it, but I am always thinking about it, and this Sunday, when our eyes meet, I know you will be thinking about it too.
I can tell you that rabbis around the world are struggling in their sermons today about this exact question of what to do with Chapter 9 of Esther, because we are inhabiting a moment when all our attention is on a struggle in which Jewish self-defense is at the center, and our self-defense is resulting in tremendous death and suffering. How can Chapter 9 not feel shockingly relevant?
And so rabbis are furrowing their brows, tapping their pencils, maybe wiping away sweat and tears. Some rabbis and other Jewish creatives, responding to the story’s cry for a different ending, are boldly rewriting Chapter 9 of Esther altogether to cook up a better outcome – to creatively imagine how coexistence and reconciliation can be possible.
And on the rabbi listserves, in addition to all the angst, there are also the calls to just let Purim be Purim. It’s just a story. And it is just storybook violence.
I don’t quite know what storybook violence is. But Chapter 9 of Esther is bigger than its plot. It is a revenge fantasy. The Book of Esther is unusual in the Hebrew Bible because it takes place entirely in the Diaspora. These are not Jews in the Land of Israel but Jews in Persia. They certainly had some status and success, but they were still a minority subject to the whims of a monarch and a dominant culture that might or might not be friendly to them. The book is a fiction, a novella. The massacres of Chapter 9 are not history; but they are the daydream of a politically powerless people.
But we are not powerless people now. We have a State. And that State has tremendous military power. So what obligation does tremendous military power give us when responding to those who would (and did) harm us. Is there an obligation of restraint? It is reasonable to worry that for some, the Book of Esther will read this year as a license to kill widely and immoderately.
There is another important resonance of the Book of Esther that is playing into the current situation; a tie-in to the rhetoric of the Netanyahu government and its continued military attacks and its blockade of food and water and medicine in Gaza. To explain this connection I need to tell you about Shabbat Zakhor, which it is right now.
Shabbat Zakhor, the shabbat of remembering, is the special Sabbath immediately preceding Purim. On Shabbat Zakhor we read a little out-of-season piece of Deuteronomy in our Torah reading. In this snippet, God instructs the Children of Israel that once they are in the Promised Land, they must remember the Tribe of Amalek who, according to Torah, were the first to attack us when we were refugees fleeing slavery in Egypt. The Amalek fighters picked off the tired and the stragglers, with no fear of God, emboldening other nations to go after us as well. Therefore, says God, remember to blot out the memory of Amalek. “Do not forget,” Torah adds paradoxically. (Deuteronomy 25:17-19)
How do you blot out the memory of a people? Torah answers this later on, in the Book of Samuel, where King Saul, responding to this commandment in Torah, brings over 200,000 troops and massacres the neighboring Amalekites. (I Samuel 15:2-9)
So what does the commandment to wipe out the memory of Amalek, and King Saul’s intent to exterminate them have to do with Purim? Well, in the Saul story, the King of Amalek is named Agag. Then in the Book of Esther, Haman is referred to as Haman the Agagite. That is, a descendant of Agag. So when we read in the megillah “Haman the Agagite” we are identifying him as being of Amalekite ancestry. He is of the royal line of the very people we were told to hunt into oblivion.
So our Jewish textual tradition draws a line from the people who attacked us in the desert during the exodus to the villain who tries to wipe out the Jews of Persia. And with that association, comes a kind of permission for retributive violence. Amalekites are free game. They are people who can be destroyed without hesitation, without the inconvenience of conscience.
It is this connection that arose in November when Prime Minister Netanyahu quoted that piece of Deuteronomy. He told Israeli soldiers to zakhor, to remember Amalek. It was not clear whether he was narrowly suggesting that Ḥamas was Amalek, or Gazans, or Palestinians as a whole. But he turned to armed soldiers and reminded them of a biblical directive to wipe out the tribe that had brutalized us.
These words didn’t go unnoticed and the government denied that there was genocidal intent in what Netanyahu said. But this is how the name Amalek gets used. The last time the name Amalek was applied in Jewish culture, it was to refer to the Nazis.
“No, it didn’t mean anything,” said the Israeli government. But we are responsible for the symbols we use. We are responsible for the cultural stories we bring forward and uplift. And we are responsible for the consequences of using them. What Ḥamas did on October 7 was savage, barbaric, unforgiveable. And that might be all we need to say. We don’t need to also deploy a term that contains within it a genocidal revenge fantasy.
Sometimes when I talk this way, I am asked – and reasonably so – why I am so hard on Israel and I am not seeming to be as hard on Ḥamas. So a reminder that I have friends and family who were directly victimized by Ḥamas on October 7. My husband’s cousins were killed. My anger and disgust are thorough.
But I am a rabbi and my concern is the Jewish soul. I am hard on Israel because Israel makes a claim for my loyalty and my identity. I am hard on Israel because I am implicated in its actions. I am hard on Israel because it claims to be the voice of the Jewish soul. Of course I condemn Ḥamas, but Ḥamas is not my job. Condemning Ḥamas is easy. That’s low-hanging fruit. No, I am responsible for the Jewish soul. That is my job. That is our job. And what I see in this moment are Jews at risk of becoming Amalek.
But there might be some more hidden guidance in this topsy-turvy holiday of ours. Talmud (Megillah 7b:7) creates a famous Purim mitzvah:
מִיחַיַּיב אִינִישׁ לְבַסּוֹמֵי בְּפוּרַיָּא עַד דְּלָא יָדַע בֵּין אָרוּר הָמָן לְבָרוּךְ מָרְדֳּכַי
On Purim a person is obligated to become so intoxicated, so altered, that they cannot distinguish between “cursed is Haman” and “blessed is Mordecai.” There is something possibly rather profound here. This is a mitzvah obligating us to shift into a different consciousness. A consciousness in which the difference between good guy and bad guy is not so obvious. A consciousness in which we see how alike we are to our perceived enemy. A consciousness in which we are forced to rehumanize the person we have dehumanized for all the reasons.
If this is so; if Purim wants us to look from a different level, in which we and the other are not so different, then who is Amalek then? Maybe that’s the moment we have to admit that neither one is. And that if Amalek exists, it is not a tribal designation, and not an epithet hurled at enemies. If Amalek exists it is something within us, in the urge to take refuge in violence, to pick off the weak and the stragglers, to turn away from the other’s suffering.
If that is Amalek, then yes, let Amalek be forgotten. Let Amalek be wiped out beyond memory. This is a topsy-turvy holiday, full of masks and disguises. Let us look under our own masks and see what’s there. Let us reveal and begin to excise the Amalek within us. Let it be forgotten. Let us not forget to do that.
And yes it is hard. It is such a tall order. Right now our anger, our hurt, our enmity – they protect us and give us purpose. But still, taking the risk, letting the Amalek in us die and be forgotten to our bodies and forgotten to our epigenetics is what we must do, I think. It might be the greatest work of our lives, and so scary and daunting. But as Mordecai says to Esther in Chapter 4 of the megillah,
וּמִ֣י יוֹדֵ֔עַ אִם־לְעֵ֣ת כָּזֹ֔את הִגַּ֖עַתְּ לַמַּלְכֽוּת׃
“Who knows? Maybe it is for just such a moment as this that you came into the world.”
Let us learn to see the Human, not the Haman, in each other. To see the Divine in each other. Let the Amalek in us be gone from our souls and our conversations and our posts and our politics. Let the Amalek in each of us fade away. We don’t need it. If we could even begin to do that, oh today would merry merry be.
Shabbat shalom and happy Purim.