The Return of Amalek

Rosh Hashanah 5763

by Rabbi Sim Glaser

Several weeks ago I was sent a startling article from the magazine Biblical Archeology, with a note attached saying: Rabbi – thought you might dig this.

The author described excavations over the past several years revealing evidence that contradict the Biblical time line with which we are familiar, and come up against many facts we previously held to be true. For example, it has been proven that the Israelites were never really slaves in Egypt, nor was there likely an historical figure Moses who led them to freedom. More likely, we were an indigenous people living alongside the Canaanites in ancient Israel. There were almost certainly no Abraham, Isaac or Jacob; Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel or Leah whose existence can substantiated, and thus the extraordinary story we only just heard beautifully chanted cannot be authenticated. Nor was there likely any Hebrew man named Joseph serving the Pharaoh of Egypt as second in command some 400 years later.

Other archeological discoveries even cite as recent a historical figure as the mighty King David as having been at most a minor ruler… if indeed he existed at all.

So I’m reading this and suddenly the horrifying reality of it all hits me…I could be out of a job!

I mean, I’ve been basing mountains of interpretation on the examples set by our magnificent ancestors. Our prayers invoke their names. Our songs ring out their praises. Our youth are taught basic Jewish values exemplified by the patriarchs and matriarchs; they are the focus of our holiday celebrations. We name our children after them.

They never existed??!!?!?!

With grave doubt in the very foundations of my chosen enterprise, I walked about in a fog for days wondering what is true, anyway? Even the supermarket tabloids plagued and teased me with their headlines that up until now I had always believed…Could it be, I wondered, that Elvis is not Big Foot’s baby after all?

Hey, if you don’t think Elvis is important - several weeks ago on Friday night at least 20 different people reminded me that it was Elvis’s yahrzeit.

When confronted with doubt and confusion we stumble for the assurance of facts.

After the fall of the World Trade Center buildings a year ago, doubt about our national security and how we are perceived by the rest of the world clouded our minds and we rushed to establish verifiable facts as quickly as we possibly could.

Almost immediately, the faces and names of each and every assailant appeared before us for posting on our basement dartboards. The evil Osama bin Laden was identified as the master architect and given nonstop coverage as the devil to despise. Over the year our phobias blossomed and our scrutiny turned to those of different races who live alongside us – from our own immigrant populations to the Muslim Americans in our communities, as though they were the symbol of our insecurity. Then we turned on ourselves, trying to understand the psychological motivations of our enemies by doubting the very nature of American values and our position in the world. Our foreign policy, the imposition of our Western ethic upon Middle Eastern culture, what are we doing that makes them so angry?

Religious professionals are certainly not exempt from such moments of great doubt. Our tendency is to turn to the sacred texts to find truths that will guide us and guide our congregations through lonely nights of uncertainty. Despite the fact that the discipline of archeology insisted on proving our Torah woefully inaccurate or largely fictional, I nonetheless went excavating for reassurance in those ancient words and their commentary. I stumbled upon, of all people, the ultimate antagonist of the Israelite wilderness experience – a man by the name of Amalek!

Amalek is the most evil, vicious, lowlife, anti-Israelite, Jew-hating villain who ever walked the earth. He assailed the Israelites as they strode through the desert, attacking from the rear…striking down the famished and the weary; the women, the children and the weaker tribes because he knew that this was Israel’s most vulnerable point. The Amalekites and the Israelites fought each other on numerous occasions throughout the wilderness wandering experience.

The Amalekites are said to have blocked the direct route the Israelites could have taken to Canaan, forcing them to adopt plan B, known as the quadruple decade bypass operation. In the days of the Judges, the prophet Samuel admonished King Saul to completely destroy the nation of Amalek, which Saul was either unable or unwilling to do. He allowed the Amalekite King Agag to live, and thus to fight again another day.

For all of Jewish history it has been said that the greatest enemy of the Jewish people is Amalek, and that he has arisen in some form in every age. A descendant of the aforementioned King Agag was none other than the wicked Haman, villain of the exciting, though historically unverifiable scroll of Esther; also the Cossack Chmielnitzki of the Russian Pogroms. Even Hitler (yemach sh’mo) is considered to be a distant relative of Amalek.

But what is perhaps most amazing about the nation of Amalek is that it has never, ever suffered total defeat at the hands of the Israelites. Thus Amalek continues to be our irreconcilable foe to this day, and do you know you are commanded to strike down Amalek in every age that he should rear his ugly head. According to tradition, should you be walking down Hennepin Avenue and someone approach you and say: “good afternoon, my name is George, George Amalek,” you are to kill him on the spot. And when the police are dragging you away, try to resist saying: “But Rabbi Glaser told me I could…”

And yet I am thinking this whole time – archeological evidence doesn’t support the existence of anything going back that far… Maybe there was never an Amalek, and besides, the commandment regarding Amalek is contradictory. We are bidden to both remember him and eradicate all memory of him. We are supposed to maintain our hatred of Amalek when scripture even bids us to forgive the Egyptians! And you remember what they did to us! Why, Amalek doesn’t even sound human…

Because, as it turns out, he’s not. The answer comes to us in the mystical science of Gematria. Gematria teaches that each letter in the Hebrew alphabet has a numerical value, aleph being one, bet – two, gimmel three, and so on. If you add up the letters in the name Amalek, you arrive at the number 240. The rabbis of old noted that this 240 is the same numerical value as the word Safek, which is the Hebrew word for doubt. Doubt.

From this our sages taught that the greatest threat to the Jewish people in the desert was not an external enemy at all, rather it was doubt. Doubt in their deliverance. Doubt in their leaders. Doubt in God’s promise. Ultimately, doubt that would deny that hapless group of nomads to the land of promise. Doubt that attacked them from the rear and landed them 40 years of wandering, and an entire generation to die in the wilderness.

Aha! – now it all comes together - the reference to Amalek having blocked the path of the Israelites. And the fact that Amalek continues to live on – unsinkable by Moses, or Joshua, or King Saul or David Ben Gurion or Moshe Dayan or anybody else is because Amalek is virtually synonymous with doubt. There will always be doubt in faith, and there will always be doubt about the land of promise. Even doubt in our core values.

This year we were exposed to daily exchanges of horrific violence in Israel, causing us to doubt its future and for some amongst us to question Israel’s entire purpose. Which was more painful to hear, the suicide bombings and deaths of Jewish civilians who happened to choose the wrong bus line that morning? Or the unintended young Palestinian victims of Israeli counter-terrorism which sent a chilling sensation through us that Israel might indeed be the cruel and oppressive nation we had always associated with our own greatest enemies? In either case, the certainty of the centrality of Israel in our lives crept further away from us each day. Back and forth we went from despising Palestinian martyrs and their leaders to intense anger and frustration at the Sharon government for its oppressive hold on a suffering people.

The suicide bombings shook us to the core, but the real long-term disaster for Israel may well be in how history treats Israel’s decision to demolish the houses of the families of terrorists, and how it has exiled their relatives as a deterrent to future terrorist activity. As a military tactic, it was considered to be effective, and who are we to argue with the IDF? But as a lasting message of Israel’s morality even amidst chaotic circumstances, it fed Amalek, showering us with doubt as to the verifiable dimensions of the dream we call Israel.

A Justice on the Israeli Supreme Court, speaking for the minority view argued that destroying the homes of terrorists’ families contradicted the Jewish character of the State of Israel; that of Human dignity and freedom. He quoted Ezekiel: “The son shall not bear the iniquity of the father with him, neither shall the father bear the iniquity of the son with him.”

No matter where you stand on that question, Israel’s problems should not appear peripheral to us today on this Rosh Hashanah. It has everything to do with our lives and the future of the Jewish people around the world.

We and our children have now stayed away from Israel for two summers. While this may seem like little more than lost vacation time, or one less option for a tenth grader, it is Amalek’s victory, and, by the way, the intended victory of terrorism. It has been suggested that three years or more of our teens missing the experience of the miracle of the Jewish homeland could result in the loss of a generation of Jewish communal leadership down the line.

Of all the known influences on Jewish identity, the experience of Israel is at the top of the list for the idealistic transformation of young lives. And we’re not just talking about your kid and mine. This is tens of thousands of young people that are not going. Do the math. Thousands of young Jews in their most fertile years of intellectual development, who might have grown up with the doubtless assurance that a Jewish nation is essential to them, is essential to a world in need of a moral focus, is essential as a democracy in the midst of 22 nations that have no concept of consensual government, is worth defending and supporting… These kids are coming of age with confusion and uncertainty about Israel. What do you imagine will replace Israel to fuel the energy needed for our Jewish leaders two and three decades from now?  Amalek lives.

If you have ever spent time with a young person – or anyone for that matter – who has returned from Israel, you can see in their eyes, as they relate their experiences, that there is no longer any doubt about Israel’s centrality in their life.

For me it is when I come up out of the tunnel from the Yad Vashem – the Holocaust memorial in Jerusalem - and see the Jewish buses and schoolchildren and Hebrew street signs and store marquis. It was when I saw the newly arrived Ethiopian Jews and the Soviet Jews and the Palestinian construction workers laboring side by side with their Israeli counterparts, and I knew that the core value of Israel is one in the same with the message of the Torah – choose life. Choose blessings – build, and seek peace, and I would never doubt it again.

Like Amalek, terrorism, by definition, attacks from the rear, with the very intention of instilling doubt in the fabric of a nation. And Amalek makes us see things very strangely.

This year I had the pleasure of appearing on a local television show produced by a wonderful group of high school aged kids of various races and religions. The program was about faith and the kids were practicing their healthy teenage agnosticism, seriously doubting God’s existence and using 9/11 as a classic example of an event a caring God could not possibly sanctioned or allowed.

The other clergyman on the show was the senior minister at a sizeable downtown Baptist Church. It threw me a little because he was only 18 years old and still in high school. (You know, one of those after school jobs.) Struggling for religious explanation, he told the kids that he had no doubt the New York City towers fell as a message from God that we Americans require a spiritual awakening.

The kids looked shocked. I responded that while I appreciated my esteemed young colleague’s need to provide firm answers in the midst of crisis, if the Jewish people believed in a vengeful God who would kill innocents and orphan children in order to prove some ethical point we would be facing some pretty serious theological problems with regard to the Holocaust. And the whole conversation wound up on the cutting room floor.

What our country should have learned from this is not who hates us, or whom we should be hating, but how deeply precious are the fundamental values that make America tick. Freedom, charity, opportunity, and yes, courage under fire.

This Wednesday we will be honoring the most extraordinary examples of heroism and caring that should render the most doubtful cynic awestruck. There was no doubt in the minds of 343 firefighters as they rushed into crumbling buildings to rescue fellow Americans.

Rather than fearing or ostracizing those who appear suspiciously different from us, we should have seen that in times of crisis there are no colors or nationalities in the United States, there is only humanity. Community is not a choice for us, but a reality, and at any given moment we might need to be there for each other. This community is bigger than our neighborhoods or our cities. We are a nation tested and, as yet, undivided.

Why is Amalek’s name to be blotted out and to be remembered throughout all time? Because there will always be tragedy, and there will always be fuel for doubting that which we so strongly affirm. What does it do for us to identify a physical enemy outside ourselves?

On Yom Kippur in ancient days it was the custom of our ancestors to take a goat, tie crimson ribbons to its horns representing their misdeeds and drive it over the cliff. Thus the sins of Israel were cleansed. We did away with that ritual long ago not because PETA came after us, but because we were assuming that responsibility for our goodness lay outside ourselves rather than in the assurance of truths that our own souls know.

Unlike Elvis, Amalek has not left the building.

Doubt is what keeps us from praying fully on Yontov – why should my prayers matter? Doubt is what keeps us from loving each other more fully – maybe they won’t love me back… Doubt is when we hear lashon ha rah – badmouthing and reconsider the integrity someone we thought we trusted fully. Doubt in ourselves as ethical people is what causes us to sin willfully. Doubt is what causes us to look into the eyes of a stranger of a different color or nationality and be fearful of his intent.

The challenge of our holidays this year is not to cast blame outside ourselves, searching for Osamalek or Sadaamalek, but to eradicate the doubt and cynicism we may have amassed about the ideals we know to be good, to uphold the vision of the greatest democracy on the face of the earth, and to reaffirm our trust that the State of Israel will remain a beacon of light to the Jewish people and to the world.  Above all, let us never doubt that loving the good is more important than hating the evil.

After hearing about the attack on America a year ago, the young son of the Islamic Imam Makram El-Amin, who will be with us this Yom Kippur, asked: Father, do they read the same Koran as we do?

Our souls are very sure of things when we come into this world. Sure of love, confident in human goodness, desirous of peace and contentment. Only after a lifetime in the wilderness facing Amalek through the challenges of pain, and loss, and the cynicism of others, does doubt begin to overwhelm us.

This afternoon, look into the eyes of a child you know, and tell her something good about the world, something you believe is entirely true. Something in which you have no doubt at all. Watch how those big eyes welcome the message of goodness with the certainty that blessings are what God has always intended for us.

Today is the birthday of the soul. The soul which has the power to see truth and override the momentary doubts we will always have. Rabbi Pinhas of Koretz often cited the words: “A person’s soul will teach them.” He was asked, of course, “well if this is so, then why don’t people listen and obey their souls?” and Rabbi Pinchas replied: “The soul teaches without ceasing, but it never repeats.”

During these days of awe, let us give the soul reign to speak.

And during these awe filled days may we take the sources of truth and celebrate them.

The one book that will never be proven fictional is the book of life which we now open for examination over the next ten days. It is your book of truth. It is the list of those elements in our life about which you have must have no doubt whatsoever. It is your Torah. It is a page turner. 

Once you pick it up, you’ll never put it down.