Parashat Zachor: Reflections on Recent Events, Amalek, & Purim, by Rabbi N. Daniel Korobkin

1.      My first reflection is that many scholars have challenged certain historical accounts in Tanakh based on the fact that they can’t find any corroborating evidence in the secular chronicles of that culture’s history outside of Tanakh. For example, they say, there never was a story of a Queen Esther who saved the Jews from destruction in the Persian empire since there’s no record of it anywhere.

2.      To that I would respond: look at the headlines this past week. There was a major tsunami that was the obsession of the entire world media. But there was another tsunami, one that rocked the Jewish world with a greater shock on our Richter Scale than the 9.0 tsunami in Japan, the murders of three children and the Fogel parents, hy”d. You’d be lucky if you found the news on page 5 of the newspaper. Yes, it was reported, but always with qualifying language ("intruders" attacking "settlers", etc.), so that their blood for whatever reason isn’t perceived as red as everyone else’s.

3.      While it’s true that for the Jewish people, another Jew’s death is more painful, because it’s mishpacha, the opposite is also true for the rest of the world, that our blood isn’t as tragic, since we’re Israelis, or we’re Jews, so we’ve probably done something anyway to bring it upon ourselves.

4.      Don’t be surprised, therefore, if you can’t find any confirmation of the Purim story in ancient Persian history. Our blood wasn’t so red back then, either, so we’d have been lucky if our story was in the back of the Persian newspapers. That’s the message of the miracle that takes place when Achashverosh can’t sleep and they remind him that a Jew, Mordechai, had saved his life. It’s no coincidence that Mordechai hadn’t been rewarded; his Jewishness no doubt contributed to his being overlooked by a king who was too busy to bother himself to extend his thanks to a Jew, no matter how indebted he was to him.

5.      My second observation is that which I discussed with our children in school before Shabbos : The role of Amalek is “אשר קרך בדרך” – "they made you feel a sense of happenstance on the road," they made you think that everything that happens in the world is happenstance, coincidence, purely random and by chance.

6.      Someone asked me how we can come to terms with a natural disaster of such proportions, where 30,000 people are wiped out in mere minutes by an earthquake and tsunami. They told me that they found this more difficult to reconcile than when evil people murder innocents, since that, after all, is human action, not Divine action.

7.      This point is a valid one and is discussed by sociologists of religion. Peter Berger wrote The Sacred Canopy and observes that theodicy – the religious doctrine of why G-d allows evil to occur – is what eventually began to unravel religion in modern civilization. For example, he writes that “in 1755, an earthquake destroyed most of the city of Lisbon and killed a considerable part of its population. This event, slight as it may seem in comparison with the mass horrors of our own time, was an important event for 18^th-century thought. It violently raised the problem of theodicy and the validity of the Christian solution in some of the best minds of the period, among them Pope, Voltaire, Goethe, and Kant…” But “the immeasurably greater horrors of WWII did not have a similar result,” because people were able to appreciate that there’s a difference between when G-d does something (theodicy) and when evil people do something (anthropodicy).[1]

8.      I responded that while a tsunami was difficult to reconcile with a merciful G-d, I personally felt that this distinction between theodicy and anthropodicy was a false one. If anything, it was even harder to reconcile how G-d could allow evil people to exercise their free will and seemingly contravene G-d’s will, who seeks to protect good people, and allow them to be murdered mercilessly.  In other words, what is more painful and difficult to reconcile – having someone die in a natural disaster or from an illness, or to be killed by Nazis or a drunk driver when the person is perfectly healthy? The distinction between theodicy and anthropodicy is somewhat empty when one realizes that HKB”H runs the whole world.

9.      The strength of Amalek and their whole raison d’être was to try and demonstrate that their will could trump G-d’s will, that no matter how much the Jewish people thought that they were a protected class, they had more power than HKB”H.

10.  So why, indeed, did Hashem allow Amalek to attack us? Why didn’t He protect us as we were leaving Egypt, just as he protected us from the elements by placing a cloud pillar around us? Furthermore, why didn’t Hashem drown the Amalekites afterward in some tsunami, just as he had done to the Egyptians who pursued us? Perhaps Hashem felt that He needed to teach us that if we were going to become the Chosen People, we were going to need to learn how to protect ourselves and how to fight for our survival. Perhaps we needed to learn that although we could achieve the manna and the cloud cover, it was far more difficult to protect ourselves from evil people in the world who had a powerful tzelem Elokim and free will; Hashem would more readily protect us from scorpions and other malevolent creatures than he would from the two-legged variety.

11.  I think why the Fogel family’s murder is so painful is because it drudges up a perennial history of our people. It’s fairly obvious that more Jews throughout history have died prematurely at the hands of evil men than at the hands of natural disasters and cancer. I remember back in 2001, when there was a wedding in Israel and a dance floor collapsed and 23 people died. It was around the same time that there was an intifada going on and people were getting killed by terrorists. As tragic as the collapse of the dance floor was, it wasn’t nearly as tragic for us as when people were getting blown up by suicide bombers. We know instinctively that a ba’al bechirah’s (free-willed individual) direct acts of malice against us are that much more painful – the sting of someone’s hatred, a hatred that has no basis, is much harder to bear.

12.  So how do we react to the terrorism, to the hate? We can only react by fighting Amalek once again, and acknowledging that there is no such thing as happenstance, there are no coincidences. That’s the message of Purim and that’s the message of a tsunami and an act of terrorism happening at the same time right before Purim. Both an earthquake in Lisbon and a terrorist’s bomb are under G-d’s providence, in some strange, mysterious way. How we react to these events is what defines us a people of faith. May we all be granted the blessing of emunah (faith) and bitachon (trust) in the days and weeks ahead. May that emunah make us worthy of such a powerful blessing that will protect us from both natural and unnatural disasters in the future, until the coming of the Redeemer, bb”a.

---

[1] Peter L. Berger, The Sacred Canopy (New York: Anchor Books, 1967), 78.