On Shabbat Zachor, it’s a positive mitzvah, a halachic obligation, to hear the Torah read, to hear the part that we read today: “Remember what Amalek did to you…” (Deut.25:17-19) As Hannah explained so beautifully, we remember what the Amalakites did to us when we left Egypt, how they killed the weak stragglers, and we are obligated to remember this and to wipe out the memory of them.
As Jewish law evolved over the centuries, the rabbis debated about how and when to do this mitzvah of remembering Amalek. Some, such as the Rambam, say that this mitzvah applies constantly. Others said this is a once a day mitzvah, and therefore this parasha should be recited each day. Others say that it’s enough to fulfill this mitzvah once a year, which is how the halacha was decided: it should be read on Shabbat, when most people are present, and on the Shabbat before Purim, in order to connect the blotting out of Amalek with the blotting out of Haman, who is Amalek’s descendant.
But what does it really mean to fulfill this mitzvah? There was a time when blotting out Amalek was understood literally, as we saw in the haftarah. The kingship is taken away from Saul for failing to fully wipe out the Amalakites in battle. He spares the best animals and the Amalakite king, Agag. God’s command is clear.
Today, however, we no longer have Amalakites; we don’t know exactly who their descendants are, but we still have the mitzvah to wipe out the remembrance of them. This raises many questions for us? What does it mean to fulfill this mitzvah?
There are terrible dangers of taking this mitzvah literally. You might remember Purim in 1994 when a Jew murdered 29 Muslims in prayer. A literal reading of these texts leads to violence. We, on the other hand, tend to take this mitzvah very lightly. We fulfill it by “booing” and “hissing” and mocking the wicked Haman while wearing funny costumes and acting crazy. But there’s more to it than that. So, I ask you to consider: what might it mean to fulfill the mitzvah of remembering to blot out the memory of Amalek? More than simply fighting that mythic battle of good versus evil, the Torah is guiding us today. How so?
One understanding of Amalek stems from Rashi’s commentary. The Torah says Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey when you were leaving Egypt asher korcha baderech . Our Chumash translates this as: he surprised you on the way. But Rashi explains the various meanings of this strange word. Korcha could mean mikreh, meaning “by chance,” indicating that Amalek happened upon Israel. Their attack was unexpected, and so the translation: surprised you. Another meaning of the word that Rashi offers is Kor, meaning “cold.” Rashi explains the connection: before Amalek attacked us, we were hot – we had passion, confidence, zeal, idealism, but Amalek took that away from us, cooled us, made us feel spiritually cold.
Rashi is saying something so important here about the power of Amalek in our spiritual lives. What is Amalek, according to Rashi? Amalek is the sense that life happens to us by chance, mikreh, that it’s all random and meaningless. It’s that bully that beats up on us when we’re vulnerable, when we’re the stragglers in the back, and takes away our faith and our trust that the world is a good place. Amalek is that which leaves us feeling cold, kor, towards God and feeling that God is cold towards us.
We also read Vayikra today, which speaks of the sacrifices that we offered to God in ancient times. The altar where the offerings were made had an Aish Tamid, a perpetual fire that burned constantly. Amalek cools our hearts, it extinguishes that eternal fire. The Hasidic masters who love to play with gematria, the numerical value of words, point out that the gematria of Amalek is the same as that of Safek, doubt. Asher Korcha Baderech, Amalek is that which takes our faith from us, leaving us feeling cold in a meaningless world of random chance.
With that understanding of Amalek in mind, we can now understand what it means to remember to wipe out the memory of Amalek, and we also understand why the fulfillment of this mitzvah was linked with Purim.
God seems absent in the Megillah, in the Purim story. God’s name is never mentioned, and the series of events that lead to the death sentence and also to the victory of the Jews are all random. In fact, Purim means “lots,” as in casting random lots, rolling the dice, to see when the Jews would be killed. A convoluted series of coincidences and misunderstandings that reads much like an episode of Three’s Company takes place. Mordechai happens to overhear of a plot to kill King Ahashverosh, but then years later when the king has insomnia, he orders his records to be read and he remembers Mordechai and finds out that he was never rewarded for saving his life. The king wants to reward Mordechai by parading him around in the royal garb on the king’s horse, but Haman thinks the king wants to honor him, and so on and so on until the villain is killed and the Jews emerge victorious.
Unlike the overt miracles of the Passover story, the miracle of Purim is considered a nes nistar, a hidden miracle – because God is hidden in the twists and turns of the story, just like God is hidden in the twists and turns of the story of our lives. Our lives are God’s Purim costume. In fact, the root of the Hebrew word for world, olam, means hidden, because God is hidden in our world. The story may seem like random chance events, but, we understand, the miracle was hidden: God was working behind the scenes.*
In this way, Purim is the antidote to Amalek. On Shabbat Zachor, we remember how Amalek threatens to put out our fire, to crush our faith, to knock us down to the point where it all seems random and meaningless. That is the Amalek we must remember to wipe out. And the message of Purim is: where God seems absent, God is only hidden, in costume. The meaning of our lives is cloaked in the ordinary, even in the random. As we move from remembering Amalek to Purim this week, may we rekindle that fire on the altar, the fire of hope and trust and faith that Amalek tries to take from us, and may we find in the places where God seems absent many hidden miracles.
*I want to acknowledge Estelle Frankel for her teachings about God’s hiddeness in the Megillah. See her book, Sacred Therapy, Chap. 13, for more on this topic.
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