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GLOBAL RELIGIOUS LEADERS

be negotiated peace. People engaged in Israelites were commanded to fight. Lee Harris began Civilization and its
conflict eventually realise they are not He also said, in The Guide for the Per- Enemies with the words, “The subject of
only destroying their enemies: they are plexed, that the command only applied this book is forgetfulness,” and ends with
destroying themselves. That is what to people of specific biological descent. a question: “Can the West overcome the
Pharaoh’s advisers said to him after It is not to be applied in general to ene- forgetfulness that is the nemesis of every
seven plagues: “Do you not yet realise mies or haters of the Jewish people. So successful civilization?” That is why we
that Egypt is ruined?” (Shemot 10:7). the command to wage war against the are commanded to remember and never
There comes a point at which rational Amalekites no longer applies. forget Amalek, not because the historic
actors understand that the pursuit of However, there is a quite different com- people still exists, but because a society
self-interest has become self-destruc- mand, to “remember” and “not forget” of rational actors can sometimes believe
tive, and they learn to cooperate. Amalek, which we fulfil annually by that the world is full of rational actors
It is not so with non-rational actors. Emil reading the passage about the Amale- with whom one can negotiate peace. It
Fackenheim, one of the great post-Ho- kites command as it appears in Devarim is not always so.
locaust theologians, noted that towards on the Shabbat before Purim, Shabbat Rarely was a Biblical message so rele-
the end of the Second World War, the Zachor. Here Amalek has become a vant to the future of the West and of
Germans diverted trains carrying sup- symbol rather than a reality. freedom itself. Peace is possible, implies
plies to their own army to transport Jews Moses, even with an Egypt that enslaved
to the extermination camps. So driven By dividing the response in this way, and tried to destroy us. But peace is not
were they by hate that they were pre- Judaism marks a clear distinction possible with those who attack people
pared to put their own victory at risk in between an ancient enemy who no they see as weak and who deny their own
order to carry out the systematic murder longer exists, and the evil that enemy people the freedom for which they claim
of the Jews of Europe. This was, he said, embodied, which can break out again to be fighting. Freedom depends on
evil for evil’s sake. 2 at any time in any place. our ability to remember and whenever
In Jewish memory, the Amalekites At times of peace, it is easy to forget necessary to confront “the eternal gang
function as “the enemy” in Lee Harris’s the evil that lies just beneath the sur- of ruthless men,” the face of Amalek
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sense. Jewish law, however, specifies face of the human heart. Never was this throughout history.
two completely different forms of action truer than in the past three centuries.
in relation to the Amalekites. First is the The birth of Enlightenment, toleration, 1 Avot 5:16.
physical command to wage war against emancipation, liberalism and human 2 Fackenheim, Emil L., and Michael L. Morgan.
them. That is what Samuel told Saul to rights persuaded many, Jews among The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim: A
Reader. Detroit: Wayne State UP, 1987, 126.
do, a command he failed fully to fulfil. them, that collective evil was as extinct 3 Lee Harris, Civilization and its Enemies: The
Does this command still apply today? as the Amalekites. Evil was then, not Next Stage of History, New York, Free Press,
The unequivocal answer given by Rabbi now. That age eventually begat nation- 2004.
Nachum Rabinovitch is: No. Maimon- alism, fascism, communism, two World 4 Rabbi N. L. Rabinovitch, Responsa Melomdei
4
Milchamah, Ma’ale Adumim, Ma’aliyot, 1993,
ides ruled that the command to destroy Wars, some of the most brutal tyrannies 22–25.
the Amalekites only applied if they ever known, and the worst crime of man
refused to make peace and accept the against man.
seven Noahide laws. He further stated Evil never dies, and like liberty it
that the command was no longer appli- demands constant vigilance. We are
cable since Sancheriv, the Assyrian, had commanded to remember, not for the
transported and resettled the nations sake of the past but for the sake of the Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks ל“צז was a
global religious leader, philosopher, and
he conquered so it was no longer pos- future, and not for revenge but the award-winning author who served as Chief
sible to identify the ethnicity of any of opposite: a world free of revenge and Rabbi of the United Hebrew Congregations
the original nations against whom the other forms of violence. of the Commonwealth from 1991 to 2013.

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