by David Roskies, delivered at Minyan M'at

Not long ago, Aryeh asked me whether I believed that the Torah was given to Moses on Mount Sinai. It was one of those moments when everything you’ve done as a parent hangs in the balance, not to speak of all that you paid in parochial school tuition. Taking a deep breath I said:

“I believe that the people I belong to heard the voice of God.”

“The truth of the Torah,” I said to Aryeh, “ is borne out by the people that lives by it.
“While the Torah may or may not be a true account of what was, it most surely is a true account of what shall be.

“The Torah is not a verifiable record of the past, but an accurate blueprint of the future.
“And if you want to hear more,” I said, “I’m giving the dvar Torah for Parshat Zakhor.”

What I especially love about coming to shul is being reminded, time and again, of God’s presence in history.

VA-YAHAROG MELAKHIM ADIRIM--KI LE’OLAM HASDO.

LE-SIHON MELEKH HA’AMORI--KI LE’OLAM HASDO

U-LE-OG MELEKH HABASHAN--KI LE`OLAM HASDO.

This Og king of Bashan is a character straight out of Lord of the Rings. Do I care if his iron bedstead, preserved (according to Deut. 3:11) in Rabbat Ammon, was nine cubits long and four cubits wide, i.e., the size of several football fields? What matters to me is the deeper message, that temporal rulers, no matter how great and mighty, are subject to a transtemporal scheme; ultimately they too are part of God’s covenantal plan.

What I love about the days that the Torah is read--how brilliant it was to require the cyclical reading of the whole Torah--is that it helps us salvage and secure history as the plane of God’s most active involvement in the affairs of humankind.

I cannot tell you whether Amalek really existed. For all I know, the Amalekites, like the Canaanites, are some kind of biblical trope, representing the Other, the alien, the nations from whom Israel must always remain apart. But I do know the predictive power of the Maftir from Deuteronomy that we have just heard. I am certainly not alone here, for every person sitting in this room remembers the experience--

How undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear.

Who is Amalek? Amalek is the force of gratuitous evil in the world, evil that takes you by surprise, evil that attacks the least suspecting, the most vulnerable; evil that take pleasure in destroying ordinary people who, on a Tuesday morning in September, happen to be at work or are grabbing a cup of coffee in their office.

Watching the twin towers collapse was uncanny, uncanny in precisely the way that Freud has taught us to understand the term: familiar yet strange; “that class of the frightening which leads back to what is known of old and long familiar.” 9/11 seen through Jewish eyes, filtered through Jewish covenantal memory, was deja-vu all over again.

Osama bin Laden and his minions are the present embodiment of gratuitous evil. They strike from behind. They murder the innocent. And once we recognize them for what they are, we also know how to respond. The only response to gratuitous evil is: TIMHE ET ZEKHER-AMALEK.

Do not negotiate.

Do not rationalize.

It is them or us.

Do not rest until they have been destroyed.

Why should we constantly rehearse the gratuitous evil that others have perpetrated? Isn’t it really their problem, not ours?

Why disturb our Sabbath rest; why interrupt our lectionary cycle half way through Exodus; and why make that interruption come on the Sabbath immediately before Purim, to read Parshat Zakhor?
It is to reveal the dark side of history in the most vivid and brutal way; so brutal, it is a wonder that children are not sent out of the room when it is read.

Since growing up Jewish means that the story of Amalek, like it or not, age-appropriate or not, is part of our master narrative, there must be sufficient reason why we read these terrifying passages not once, but twice a year.

Amalek is not only the presence of evil lurking somewhere out there, waiting for an opportunity to strike, thirsting for blood, for martyrdom, but also the remembrance of evil lurking in our very midst. You’d be surprised how banal some of these remembrances can be. They can crop up anywhere, anytime.

Last summer, Shana and I joined a group of 40 Israeli academics on a tour of Jewish sites in Ukraine. The tour was organized by my friend, Avrom Novershtern. It was very intense, as Israeli tours are wont to be: 40 sites in 11 days; no day of touring shorter than 12 hours, and sometimes, much longer. And all in Hebrew, spoken at breakneck speed.

The town of Skvyra, the third place on our itinerary, was the first that showed renewed signs of life. Once the center of a great hasidic dynasty, the surviving community, the inhabitants of New Square, NY, were funding the reconstruction of the rebbe’s besmedresh, his home, and private shul. We meet the project coordinator, a man my age who, in Soviet fashion, looks considerably older, and we ask him:

“Ir shtamt fun skvirer khsidim? Do you yourself come from Skvirer Hasidim?”

“Eyn zeyde,” he replies with a smile, “ iz geven a Chekist. Der tsveyter--a kontrabandist.”
Here, in a nutshell was the unusable past, yet he was perfectly happy to own up to it. One grandfather was a Chekist, the other--a professional smuggler.

On one side of his lineage,a member of the hated Cheka, the secret police founded by Lenin in the first months after the Bolshevik seizure of power. Wearing pistols and black leather jackets, they recruited a not insignificant number of angry young Jews. Its founder was YAAKOV SVERDLOV, a member of the tribe. Who this Sverdlov was Shana, Aryeh, and I learned on December 31st, 2003, on a beautiful snowy morning, as part of our walking tour of Stalin’s Moscow. (Felix, our tour guide, was the best we’ve ever had. If anyone’s planning a trip to Moscow, we’ll give you his private number.)

After Fania Kaplan, a latter-day Yael, failed to assassinate Lenin in 1919, Sverdlov unleashed a bloody reprisal, proclaiming, “Better to kill 9 innocent people than allow 1 guilty person to go free.
“Go after anyone,” he instructed his minions, “who could be an enemy of the people!”
It was Sverdlov who gave the order to assassinate the Tsar and his family.

Later on, other Jewish Bolsheviks surpassed him in cruelty. Lazar Kaganovitsh, for example, was a mass murderer, responsible for more deaths than Pol Pot.

Why then, is the story of Amalek so emphatically inscribed within our Jewish master narrative? Because Amalek is the demonic order by which we are seduced. And if it could happen to us, the most merciful, children of the All-Merciful, it could happen to anyone.

Our Maftir ends with the paradoxical crie-de-guerre: LO TISHKAH! Do not forget! Because Amalek must never be forgotten. It creeps up on you from the inside, within the very fabric of your own society.

Judaism, a system of belief firmly grounded in law and historical memory, has much to teach other religions, religions of love and forgiveness, or like Russian Orthodoxy, religions based upon cultic mystery, in which the priests keep the Bible hidden behind the Iconostasis and make sure that no one but they can read, let alone interpret, what’s written inside.

In the Soviet Union, monasteries were the favorite execution site and dumping ground for enemies of the people--legions of them. In Russia today, as the New York Times reported on 24 February, it is non-Russian republics that erect memorials in the gulag to the millions who died there, because the Russian government is still intent upon erasing most of its terrible past.

So let me tell you about evidence to the contrary, evidence that the biblical injunction of LO TISHKAH may just now be making itself heard. I’ll tell it to you in shorthand, because each story has a long and complicated history.

The single most astonishing sight on the Moscow skyline is the Cathedral of Christ Our Savior with its golden domes. Built to commemorate the victory of Alexander I over Napoleon, it was blown up by order of Stalin on December 31, 1931. Some of its marble was later used for the steps and interiors of the Moscow Metro. Even as recently as 1993, a huge indoor swimming pool stood on its ravaged site. And now it has been rebuilt, at enormous cost and with extraordinary effort. The basement of the Cathedral houses a museum about its construction, destruction, and reconstruction, and the most memorable object in the whole display is a black-and-red poster from the early 1990’s, which depicts the Cathedral being blown up, the Hurban habayyit, if you will, and below it the inscription: ZA CHTO? WHY? Why did he do it? Why was Bolshevism so intent on destroying that which was most beautiful? Why this gratuitous evil?

The second site we visited that gave us hope was a tiny room in St. Petersburg just across from St. Isaac’s Cathedral (recently renovated after decades of neglect). In this cramped office, which can be reached only after negotiating an indoor courtyard full of mud, our new friend, Valery Dymshits, introduced us to his team of self-trained Jewish ethnographers, historians and museum curators. Their journey began in 1989, with a first and extremely tentative expedition to the Ukraine. Someone had told them that in a godforsaken town called Medzhibozh they might find something of Jewish interest. And indeed they did: ancient tombstones, the ruins of the Baal Shem Tov’s house of study, local informants. From that trip a grass roots movement of self-discovery came into being, involving dozens of young people, heretofore denied the most minimal exposure to Jewish languages and lore. Valery was astonished to discover, for example, that flanking the very river Bug where he had once gone kayaking was a town called Braslav, once the home of an important mystic and storyteller named Reb Nahman ben Simhah.

And so, in the course of ten years of fieldwork, Valery and his friends researched every single shtetl in Ukraine, the hasidic heartland, completing the work begun by S. Ansky on the eve of World War I, but carried out with a degree of professionalism modeled on the best of Soviet ethnography, so that last summer, when our tour bus of Israelis set out from Kiev, we knew exactly where to go and what to visit, thanks to a 400-page guidebook compiled by the St. Petersburg group. In some towns, we met up with local historians, non-Jews, who will continue the work of preservation and commemoration.

Memory work is constant. It is communal. It is commanded.

One reason it is so difficult to sustain is that much of the past is a record of pain. Who in his right mind would own up to having a Chekist on one side of the family and a kontrabandist on the other? Once the hasidim from New Square start coming in droves, I’ll bet you anything, our project coordinator, if he’s still there, will clean up his act.

Truth is, if we didn’t have to, we would skip this Maftir and write divrei Torah about other subjects. Luckily, we have no choice. No choice but to recognize that what this Maftir has to teach us has never been more true than it is today.

Truth is, Amalek will never be erased. Not in our lifetime. Not ever.

Why do we interrupt the biblical narrative to reread these terrible lines? In order to wean ourselves away from our utopian fantasies.

But why read it today? Because Shabbat Zakhor will always be followed by Purim.

The rage will always be followed by the rejoicing.

The somber commemoration always precedes the comedy.

After rehearsing the murder we hope and pray for the miraculous rescue.



Shabbat Shalom.

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