This column comes with a caveat. In researching the topic, I found that so much has been written about Amalek that it would be difficult, if not impossible, to contribute anything original. Consequently, I’m writing my observations with an apology to all those who deserve credit as reference sources but can’t be because the footnotes would far exceed the length of the column.
As we approach the end of the month of Adar, it’s appropriate to consider how the story of Haman is relevant to our present-day predicament. During the weekly cycle of Torah readings covering the Book of Exodus, we recall our ancestors’ enslavement in Egypt, Hashem’s delivering us from their hands, and then, as they traveled through the wilderness of Sinai, the unprovoked attack by the Amalekites. As both Rabbi Jonathan Sacks, z”l, and Caroline Glick have observed, there was a major difference between the two oppressors whom we recall at this time of year. While Pharaoh had a reason, however terribly mistaken, for persecuting us, namely the fear that the growing Israelite people would rise up against the Egyptians. Amalek had no grievance. We didn’t attack them, we didn’t take their food or water, we didn’t even trespass on their property. What motivated them was pure hatred, the hatred of Jews that Eisav had bequeathed to his grandson Amalek as a consequence of Yaakov having taken away the firstborn birthright (even though Eisav was unworthy of it).
And the Amalekites concentrated their attack against the weak and vulnerable, the physically weak stragglers at the rear and those who were spiritually weak. They made no distinction between young and old, children and adults, male and female, men of war and civilians.
Consequently, it not surprising that of all Israel’s enemies over the centuries, G-d commanded us to utterly destroy only one – Amalek – especially since Amalek turned the nations against G-d. But King Shaul chose to set his own view of morality above Hashem’s and spared the Amalekite king Agag’s life long enough for him to impregnate his wife, so that even after the prophet Samuel slew Agag, the genetic descendants of Amalek remained alive to torment Israel.
It didn’t take long for their implacability to become evident. In an instance with which many of us aren’t familiar, I Samuel chapter 30 records that King David learned that the Amalekites had attacked the town of Ziklag, burned it to the ground, and carried off as captive the women who dwelled there. David pursued and smote them, except that four hundred youths riding camels escaped and freed the captives, an episode cited by Daniel Greenfield in Frontpage magazine as providing three lessons for Israel: “The first thing is to eliminate moral doubt about its rightness through faith. The second is to act quickly and debate later about the ‘endgame’ of the conflict. The third is to pursue the release of captives through the destruction of the enemy and by no other means. And finally, to recognize that wars are only won when the debate ends and the battle begins.”
Five centuries later came the final showdown. As we know, the Persian Vizier, Haman the son of Hammedatha the Agagite, i.e., a descendant of Amalek, was angered by Mordechai the Jew not bowing down before him, so he determined to kill all the Jews in the kingdom. His plans were thwarted by hidden Divine intervention, insofar as Mordechai’s cousin Esther won the beauty pageant to become Queen, thereby positioning her to turn King Achashverosh around, so that in the end Haman and his ten sons were hanged on the gallows he had prepared for Mordechai. Thus ended the Biblical story of Amalek. But even though his genealogical line disappeared from history, his influence did not.
As Rabbi Elie Mischel explains in his recent book The War Against the Bible, over the last two millennia there has been a long line of spiritual descendants of Amalek. In accordance with the family ties that were established when Eisav married a daughter of Yishmael, the Islamists have joined the Edomites.
Thus, nowadays, at the civilization level, as commentator Dennis Prager has observed, there is a three-way struggle among Western civilization, Leftism/collectivism, and Islamism, the latter two being disciples of Amalek. Their antisemitism isn’t just a Jewish problem; for example, as Thane Rosenbaum has noted, Columbia Against Apartheid, a major student protest organization, has the stated goal of destroying Western civilization. At present, the collectivists and Islamists have united in a marriage of convenience, but if, G-d forbid, they win (and perhaps even if they don’t), they will inevitably turn against each other, as did Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union.
Similarly, at the spiritual level, Rabbi Mischel explains that these three ideological foes – Western civilization, guided by the teachings of Judaism and Christianity; the “progressive Left; and Islam, as now exemplified by Hamas, Hezbollah, and the Iranian ayatollahs – represent Yaakov, Eisav, and Yishmael. In particular, he finds that the current Leftists represent a continuation of Jew-hatred from Eisav to the Roman Empire to medieval Europe. In his essay “Amalek and Irrational Hate,” Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks, z”l, traces this succession forward to the European Enlightenment.
Today, besides Hamas, Hezbollah, and Ayatollah Khamenei, we are hated by U.N. officials and innumerable college faculty, students, commentators, journalists, and government officials around the world. Of course, all these genocidal enemies of the Jewish people accuse Israel of genocide. As Dennis Prager and others have observed, Israel must not be proficient in committing genocide, since the Palestinian population has multiplied greatly since 1948.
For Rabbi Mischel, the Ishmaelites are a worse threat than the Leftists. As confirmation, we observe that the Islamists use Amalekite tactics. Like the original Amalek, the brave warriors of Hamas, Hezbollah, Palestinian Islamic Jihad, and Fatah like to attack defenseless women, children, and the enfeebled, committing atrocities that reached their zenith on October 7, and to hide in underground tunnels waiting for their next victims; they also wear masks or kaffiyehs wrapped around their faces to conceal their identity. And the Palestinian Authority, which signed the Oslo Accords that supposedly advanced the cause of peace, continues its “pay-for-slay” program that awards lifetime stipends to terrorists who kill Israelis or, if killed themselves, to their surviving families.
So where do we go from here? Rabbi Sacks in his aforementioned essay observed that while those who hate for a reason, however misguided, such as Pharaoh, can be persuaded to change their minds (without the necessity for ten plagues), those who hate irrationally (such as Amalek and his spiritual descendants) are not amenable to reason. He wrote:
With rational hate it is possible to reason. Besides, there was no reason for the Egyptians to fear the Israelites any more. They had left. They were no longer a threat. But with irrational hate it is impossible to reason. It has no cause, no logic. Therefore, it may never go away. Irrational hate is as durable and persistent as irrational love. The hatred symbolized by Amalek lasts “for all generations.” All one can do is to remember and not forget, to be constantly vigilant, and to fight it whenever and wherever it appears.
Similarly, Rabbi Shmuel Reichman, in a recent column on these pages, emphasized the philosophical side of the conflict, while making the interesting point that although Amalek lost the physical battle in the Sinai desert, it won by achieving its objective of deterring the other nations from accepting Hashem and the Torah.
On the other hand, Rabbi Mischel takes a different approach. He concedes that “[t]he long and slow path to redemption will often be painful and difficult,” while praising Israel for its 75-year transformation from a primarily secular, socialist nation to one that is increasingly traditionally religious and conservative, which he says is a prerequisite for deliverance, citing Biblical verses to prove his point. Moreover, he asserts that “[s]tep by step, everything is rising upwards, toward a fixing of the world and the future redemption” and calls upon Diaspora Jewry to make aliyah as an affirmation of that redemption.
Politically, he contends that Israel made three major mistakes: the 1993 Oslo Accords, the 2005 total withdrawal from Gaza, and the 2011 trade of 1,207 terrorists, one of whom was Yahya Sinwar, mastermind of the October 7 atrocities, for one Israeli soldier, Gilad Shalit, which he says encouraged Hamas to kidnap more hostages. He even proposes that Israel resettle Gaza. And he cautions Israel, following the prophecy of Zephaniah, not to trust in the United States but rather in G-d, the “Ultimate Superpower,” noting that America has repeatedly attached harmful conditions to its aid to Israel.
Regarding America, a consensus appears to be developing among center-right commentators that the U.S. needs to crack down on the anti-Israel and anti-American demonstrations, especially on college campuses. Jonathan Tobin has argued that Columbia University should be made accountable for allowing anti-Israel activists to run amok on campus harassing Jewish students, interfering with classes, and even calling for genocide. He recommends that foreign nationals who are engaging in such illegal activities should have their student visas or green cards be revoked and deported back to their home countries as provided for by American law, a process which has already begun. Second, universities that tolerate such activities should be penalized by the loss of federal aid, such as President Trump’s cancellation of $400 million in grants and contracts to Columbia. And we can always file lawsuits, as exemplified by Brooke Goldstein’s Lawfare Project.
The problem with these remedies is that affected parties can file suit in federal court, where they can “judge shop” to find an activist district court jurist who will issue a nationwide injunction to block the government’s actions. And it’s an open question whether the Supreme Court would overrule the lower courts, since Chief Justice Roberts and Associate Justice Barrett have voted with the three liberal justices in cases such as Murthy v. Missouri regarding the federal government’s using Internet providers as agents to promote censorship, and the recent funding cuts to the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID), just as two Republican-appointed justices were intimidated in the 1930s by the threat of court-packing to vote to uphold FDR’s New Deal.
In his essay “Haman: The First Antisemite,” reprinted in the Purim 5785 HaMizrachi magazine, Rabbi Sacks presents an intriguing alternative: “Jews cannot fight antisemitism alone. The victim cannot cure the crime.” His prescription: “If we want to fight antisemitism, let us walk tall and proud as Jews and work with all humanity to banish hatred forever.”
