Just before Purim, Joshua Hammerman, the Conservative rabbi whose column is carried by the Jewish Telegraphic Agency and appears in certain Jewish weeklies, penned an article that essentially asked whether Haman really was the absolute villain Jewish tradition makes him out to be.
The column did not reference the Torah much, referring instead to Broadway musicals, Superman comics, and the movies “Shrek,” “The Wizard of Oz,” and Spielberg’s “Munich,” and arguing that maybe Haman was just misunderstood. Finally, Hammerman reimagined Purim as the story of Haman being persecuted by a scheming and manipulative Mordechai and Esther. Hammerman concluded by voicing his concern that Amalek and Haman are really us.
The column wasn’t a Purim shpiel; sadly, many of Rabbi Hammerman’s columns are similar in tone. And there is, after all, a certain logic to it, since liberal Judaism has spent the last generation reimagining the persecutors of Jews as victims and the Jews as persecutors.
In the bad old days, someone who wanted to exterminate the Jewish people would be considered a clear-cut villain. In these modern times, there are plenty of Jewish leftists who ask how we wronged our enemies and what we can do to further abase ourselves before them.
Actually, Hammerman is a relative moderate when compared with all too many Jewish academics and a number of his own Conservative, Reform and Reconstructionist colleagues whose moral relativism is something that would be unrecognizable to our ancestors.
In such an amoral environment, it is no surprise that 400 Reform, Reconstructionist and Conservative Rabbis signed an ad calling on President Bush to fund the new Hamas government. The irony is that if the president were about to hand over money to the most peaceful and non-violent Orthodox Jewish or Christian institution, these same clergypersons would immediately rush to sign petitions opposing it in the strongest terms. Yet when a fanatical Islamic party comes to power, these same “spiritual leaders” demand that our government send it money and lobby for the defeat of the Ross-Lehtinen/Lantos bill that would bar further aid to the Palestinians.
“Woe unto them that call evil good, and good evil; that change darkness into light, and light into darkness,” warns the prophet Isaiah. “That justify the wicked for a reward, and take away the righteousness of the righteous from him.”
Increasingly, America and Israel are run by intellectual elites who make a specialty of just that. Modern historians rewrite the birth of both countries so that examples of pioneering heroism are transformed into cruel acts of persecution and injustice. Modern artists remove the art, leaving behind squiggles, obscenity and symbolic messages. Modern journalists don’t report the news so much as manufacture it, imagining Korans in toilets and trying to pass off memos written in Microsoft Word as being from the Vietnam War era. And modern moralists describe evil as good and good as evil.
The present-day villains, in the view of the amoral moralists, are not the terrorists who killed 3,000 people on September 11 but the government and the military trying to combat them. When a terrorist blows up a bus in Jerusalem, the media warn Israel against striking back and “perpetuating the cycle of violence.” When a terrorist is forced to pose for some goofy photographs in Iraq, journalists lose their minds at the sheer horror of it all, baying for blood like a Southern lynch mob.
To modern liberals – and to liberal rabbis who rely on a few scraps of Jewish culture to pretend they’re not Unitarian ministers – Haman must be the misunderstood hero for a very simple reason: he is both violent and aggrieved. Where Mordechai and Esther responded to troubles with inward reflection, fasting and prayer, Haman responded with the frustrated rage that liberals believe is the hallmark of victimization.