Matanot L'Evyonim, cash gifts for the poor, must be distributed on Purim day but they can be collected ahead of time. R' Feldman will distribute on Purim whatever he receives either in person or online.
The notion that Amalek lives on as an ideology is usually attributed to R’ Chaim Soloveitchik, who bases it on something that the Rambam writes. The Rambam says that the wars on the seven nations in the land of Israel have ceased because the nations are no longer distinct entities. Wars and migrations have made them unidentifiable as discrete and identifiable people.
But the Rambam makes no such comment about Amalek. That means Amalek is still around, and R’ Chaim said that that means there is still a war. Since the nations have been mixed up, one cannot talk about a single Amaleki in terms of his or her bloodline. What is left? Their ideas, their approach.
That’s a good find in the Rambam, but is there anything in the verses that tells us that Amalek is still around? Well, in what we just read, we heard that we have to erase the memory of Amalek. That goes beyond them as people. If one wipes out a people, all that’s left is a memory, a cognitive marker. When the Torah is speaking about Zecher, it is speaking about that marker, which is an idea.
The Megilla says that the events that it describes are supposed to be Nizkarim V’na’asim, remembered and done. Today was the remembering part. Purim is the doing part. That is accomplished with a story of a literal war against Amalek. That war was efective in saving the Jewish people but it was not even close to the effectiveness of the war we just read about in the Haftara. It is the story itself that pushes back against the ideology of Amalek. How that occurs is what I want to examine.
How many years go by in the Megilla? When I ask junior high school kids, they say, “six months -- maybe a year.” It seems that way. I suggest that adults keep themselves busy during the reading by following the time-stamps of the story. Children keep themselves alert by reacting to Haman’s name but adults can follow the years.
The story takes at least nine years, from the third year of Achashverosh’s reign until the 12th. It’s not that the events couldn’t be tightened into a year. But the story shows that extending the timeline teaches us something. It shows us that proximate causes of events give an incomplete picture, a picture much too narrow. It’s not a quick story like the splitting of the sea. It is a story where the events unfold over time, each with its own logic. It is only by stringing the events together that one can see the fuller story emerge.
Amalek is about proximate causation, the shortest account of cause and effect. There’s no room for anything else, for any other explanation. That tight and wholly necessary connection is what Amalek wants to use to describe everything in the universe. This is an approach that can affect anyone. As an outlook, any nation including the Jews can adopt it. It squeezes out any other possible cause of an event, and certainly does not admit of the miraculous. It obviously does not allow for the miraculous in terms of events that break natural laws. It cannot, however, rule out the miraculous in terms of the engineering of events that break no natural laws. But to see those types of events as miraculous, one must widen the lens to see the bigger story.
In the late summer of 2014, several terrorists emerged from a tunnel from Gaza into a field on the Israeli side. Gaza is full of such tunnels. The would-be attackers were picked up by an IDF camera and a soldier who was monitoring the feed from the cameras picked up the scene. The soldier called in an air force strike and the infiltrators were eliminated.
The infiltrators were spotted because they had no camouflage. They had expected to come up in a field of wheat with stalks five and six feet high. With that cover, they expected to move quickly toward their targets. But the field had been harvested days before, several weeks ahead of the normal schedule. That summer was before the last Shmitta year. The harvest had to take place earlier than normal so that it would avoid the prohibitions of Shmitta.
In such a case, you can look at proximate causes and the IDF cameras or you can look at the bigger picture. When the lens is widened and more can be seen, then more than just immediate causes can be discerned. It’s not a miracle like the splitting of the sea. No rules of physics were broken. The miracle is in the string of events. That is the type of story in the Megilla as well. The reading of the Megilla is a great communal event. It’s great to be together. But in the midst of that story, a great idea is taking hold, about the only type of miracle that we can behold today. And in that miracle, Amalek is vanquished.
Congregation Emek Beracha 4102 El Camino Real Palo Alto, CA 94306
