9/11: Remembering Amalek

Although this past weekend was not as I expected, that is not why it took me until today to write a post about 9/11. It is true that I spent the day itself taking down bookshelves that we bought from the local Borders, and that the transmission on the truck went out, keeping me camping out at Ragamuffin House in Tijeras with no internet.

But the whole truth of the matter is that the delay was about more than those logistics. It was about the unexpected emotions of that day, brought up, whole from the past. I am not sure why this anniversary was different than the nine that preceded it, but it was. I think part of it was the realization that this year there is still no Freedom Tower, that we have not really dealt with an enemy who murders civilians at work, making war that we are told not to acknowledge. That there are people who would have us put the memory of that day away from us, as easily as we discard the column in the Los Angeles Times, as if the lives of the innocent can be so easily dismissed.

But even though the main-stream media has conspired to keep the images and sounds of that day away from us, I do not need to go to You Tube to find them, for they are seared in my mind's eye as if it had happened yesterday: The tower burning, black smoke in the clear blue September sky; the second plane and the people who jumped to their deaths holding hands, to escape the flames; the towers falling first the second, then the first, in a cloud of smoke and ash that pursued fleeing New Yorkers. And later, the candles lit--this one for the first tower and that for the second--at Friday evening services at the end of that terrible week.

This year the Shabbat of September 10 Torah reading, Ki Teitze, included the commandment to blot out the name of Amalek, and was read thus:

"Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you were coming forth from Egypt; How he happened upon you on the road and attacked you from the rear, killing all of your weak ones (the women and children) while you were faint and exhausted. He did not fear G-d. It shall be that when the Eternal your G-d lets you rest from all your enemies all around you, . . . you shall blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens. Do not forget." (Devarim 25: 17 - 19)

I could not help but translate it in my own mind as: "Remember what Al Quaida did to you in your own land out of a clear sky; How he came upon you at your work and attacked you without warning, killing your civilians and those of the nations while you were attending to your lives. He did not fear G-d. . . You shall destroy the very memory of Al Quaida from under the heavens. Do not forget."

These verses are found among quite a few miscellaneous laws and commandments, rules and regulations, and early in the same portion and in previous portions there are laws and commandments about how to conduct wars. There are different kinds of wars discussed. Those which are defensive, that is when the land is attacked from without, obligate everyone--even the bride under her chuppah--to take up arms against the enemy. Other wars, called the King's wars, which are wars for territory and booty, allow individuals to refrain from taking up arms altogether for various reasons. (In the Book of Samuel, in the Nevi'im, where the people demand a king, it becomes clear that such wars are not considered altogether kosher by the Prophet Samuel who speaks in the name of the Eternal, telling the people that if they get a king he will take their wealth to fight wars of conquest and make their sons run before his chariots). However, none of the wars discussed elsewhere have a Commandment of Remembrance attached to them. The commandment here is unique.

Amalek is depicted as entirely evil because he does not attack the vanguard of the Israelites where the warriors are, thus conducting an honest war. Rather he attacks the rear, where the women and children and animals walk, those who are not warriors and not prepared to defend themselves. The commandment to remember what Amalek did and to blot out the name of Amalek is the commandment to entirely destroy those such as Amalek, who in his cowardice, attacked civilians going about their lives.

This tenth anniversary of the attacks by Al Quaida on 9/11 has been one of great regret and difficulty for many Americans, as we take stock of where we are in terms of defending ourselves against an act of war conducted by terrorists on our own soil and in a civilian place of commerce in New York, as well as against the Pentagon from where our warriors are commanded. The attack on the World Trade Center is an attack like that of Amalek, an attack on those not prepared to to defend themselves, and who were engaged in the honorable act of trade and commerce.

There are two things we ought to be doing, two things that even people of the Bronze Age understood. And we are being told by the leftist press and their masters that we should do neither.

First, we are commanded to REMEMBER. "Remember what Amalek did to you . . . Don't forget." To maintain that memory is important in order to honor the innocents who died that day, and the importance of each life taken, leaving behind an absence and pain to those living who loved them and counted upon them. To take a life, we are taught, is to destroy an entire world: the worlds of those who must mourn, the worlds of deeds undone, the worlds of children never to be.

There are those who wish us not to remember, like the leftist American shilling for the Islamo-fascists by writing for Al Jazeera who advised that "we get over ourselves." But it is not ourselves that he wants us to get over. It is the sacred memory of those who were attacked, their lives torn from them unfinished that he wants to erase. And there are those, like the New York Times columnist (may his name be erased), who wrote that it is we--and not Amalek--who ought to be ashamed. It is he who ought to be ashamed for giving aid and comfort to an enemy and forgetting what that enemy did to us.

It is also important to not only remember those killed on that day, but what was done to us and by whom. Such memory is necessary in order to respond, to mete out the just due that the enemy has earned by such a cowardly evil. Do not forget--we are told--do not forget to blot out even the memory of the enemy from under the heavens.

In Jewish memory, we connect all tyrants who have tried to destroy the weak, the civilians, the innocent, and the whole Jewish people, to Amalek. From Haman to Hitler to Imadinnerjacket (may their names be erased)--we call them all Amalek. They are to be despised and they are to be destroyed so that their evil does not persist on earth. By their words and their deeds they have shown that do not deserve the respect that memory brings from decent human beings. We, the living, should act so that our lives are free of them.

As civilized people, we no longer think that this means that we ought to wipe out all those related by blood or belief to the Amalek's of the world, but who have refrained from committing such an attack. But the commandment to blot out the name of Amalek does mean the destruction of those who planned and/or financed and/or supported and/or committed this act of war against civilians who were not at war against them. To do so is self-defense, but further it is deterrence. To remember what Amalek did to us and to blot his name out from under the heavens is to demonstrate to anyone who might be an Amalek-wanna-be that this is what will happen.

This applies to bin Laden, who met his death at the hands of soldiers, who were entirely correct in shooting him, for he was at war with them. And it applies to Al Quaida, and to the governments of those places that supported his effort to attack us. By their actions against the innocent, they have given their destinies over into our hands, and it is up to us to determine what it means to utterly blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens.

This 9/11 was subdued. Our memories are still tinged with loss and anger. Not because we need to get over it, nor because we ought to be ashamed. It is so because we are being told that those who are responsible are not responsible, and that we should not fight against them, because it is we who are somehow guilty: guilty for existing, for taking up space on this earth, for our prosperity and our way of life. It is those who commit this sin of moral equivalence who ought to be ashamed.

As we go into the next years, we can continue to cherish the memory. And we can refuse to submit to unearned guilt. And we can determine what it means to blot out the name of Amalek from under the heavens.

Yom Kippur: The Persistence of Memory

"Remember to blot out the name of Amalek

from under the heavens. Do not forget."

--Deuteronomy 25:19, my translation

"Without Jews there is no Jewish G-d.

If we leave this world

the light will go out in Your tent.

Since Abraham knew you in a cloud,

You have burned in every Jewish face,

You have glowed in every Jewish eye,

And we made You in our image."

--Gates of Repentence: The Reform Machzor, Martyrology,

from the Yom Kippur Afternoon Service, p.436-7

"And now survivors stammer, their words are haunted.

Behind their words: silence . . .

What pains were taken to save cathedrals,

museums, monuments from destruction . . .

and in the camps and streets of Europe,

mother and father and child lay dying,

and many looked away."

--ibid., p. 438

For the sin of silence,

For the sin of indifference,

For the secret complicity of the neutral.

For the closing of borders,

For the washing of hands . . .

For all that was done.

For all that was not done.

Let there be no forgetfulness before the Throne of Glory.

Let there be remembrance within the human heart . . .

--Gates of Repentence, Martyrology Vidui, p. 439

NOTE: This blog entry was written in response to a confluence of recent experience: Yom Kippur and the Afternoon Service, the reading of a book, Why Are Jews Liberal? by Norman Podhoretz, and most especially from difficult conversations regarding the book and far more, with The Assistant Village Idiot (AVI), who performed the mitzvah of being an Ezer K'negged (an oppositional helper), although I expect he does not know what that is, and he may not particularly like the role. This is a personal view, shaped by experience and the holiness of memory, and as such it may be difficult for my Christian readers to understand or accept. Understand that I am not talking about individuals here, but about how the intertwining of experience and memory of Europe shape the ideas and attitudes of Jews in North America.

Our Yom Kippur was quiet and peaceful, a day of welcome rest as well as reflection. I always enjoy the quiet hour under the sycamore trees by the religious school lawn, spent holding hands with the Engineering Geek, as the leaves dance in the slant of autumn sunlight. Yom Kippur is a Shabbat Shabbaton, a Sabbath of Sabbaths of rest and peace, when we put aside all of the distractions of doing in order to pause, to pray and to be.

After that hour, we move back to the Sanctuary, with that particular Yom Kippur honeyed slowness, the preserving of energy, that sense of time-out-of-time that pervades the fasting body and the quiet mind. Time moves differently as we move into that service of memory and mourning that starts with the singing of these words, the melody of which is a cry:

Elie Zion v'areha k'mo b'zirei-ah . . .

For Zion and her cities I mourn like a mother in her anguish,

like a woman who mourns the husband of her youth.

I mourn the exile of G-d's servants, makers of the sweet melody;

their blood poured out like Zion's streams.

For Jews, the persistence of memory is very powerful, for we do not have a heaven or a hell; death is the end of life and living, and the holiness of memory is how those we loved in life live on. For a little while, at least, "we are their earth."

And so we recall it all. And this is done during the Afternoon Service, when we remember it all: Yom Kippur at the time of the second temple; the depredations of the Romans who killed the Ten Rabbis, thinking they could extinguish nascent Judaism; the destruction of Askenaz during the Crusades and Sepharad during the Inquistion. We remember the battered synagogues, the arguments of scholars, the quiet joy of Jewish domestic life; we remember the expulsions, and the rack, the burning of the Talmud, and the burnings at the stake, in Paris, in Lincoln, in Italy and Spain, and even in Mexico City. And we remember the Shoah, where the bodies of six million Jews, the good and the bad, were turned to smoke over the skies of Christian Europe. And we remember those who did and those who did not do; and we remember the not insignificant number of those who tried to help.

This year, we remembered also the words of Bibi Netanyahu, said with quiet dignity before the United Nations:

"Yesterday, the man who calls the Holocaust a lie spoke from this podium. To those who refused to come here and to those who left this room in protest, I commend you. You stood up for moral clarity and you brought honor to your countries. But to those who gave this Holocaust-denier a hearing, I say on behalf of my people, the Jewish people, and decent people everywhere: Have you no shame? Have you no decency?
A mere six decades after the Holocaust, you give legitimacy to a man who denies that the murder of six million Jews took place and pledges to wipe out the Jewish state. What a disgrace! What a mockery of the charter of the United Nations!"

--Text of Bibi Netanyahu Speech at the United Nations, New York, 24 September 2009. Retrieved from FLAME.

What is the purpose of this memory?

There are those who would like us to forget. Some out of desire for power over us, like the present illegal ruler of Iran. Some out of a desire to see themselves and their own as wholly good, even though they hang on to ideas that are capable of creating great evil. Or perhaps they do not yet know how to disentagle the good ideas from the bad. I understand this. For me too, memories of the bad deeds of others like me can bring up an illegitimate shame, making it hard to look at the deeds plainly and thus understand that they stem from the ideas that I must reconsider. And yet, if I do not do so, and admit that some of my ideas are wrong, then I will be party to the repetition of that evil. And the consequences are evil, regardless of my intentions.

There are those who love their own truth so passionately that they cannot bear to contemplate that some of the ideas it promulgated have have led directly to the destruction of European Jewry, and not once, but many times.

There are those who love their religion so much that they evade the reality that all human institutions can slide from a wrong belief to an evil action, from personal faith to public force. And in so doing, in refusing to root out the bad ideas,the mean characterizations, the movement from arrogance ("we have the truth and want only to save them") to destruction ("and therefore it is right and holy to 'persuade' them with force"), they set up the same drama of murder and suffering again and again.

Why do we remember?

Storing and retrieving memory takes a great deal of physical energy.

It takes even more psychic energy. But the payoff for all of that expensive energy is survival.

Animals remember and animals learn. They do this in order that they and their offspring might live.

Why do we remember?

Human beings have brought learning and memory to a very high level. We learn from experience in order to protect ourselves, and we pass on those memories in order to protect the lives and the happiness of our children. And for human beings, shared memory among a people and down the generations, leads to a diversity of identity. Experience shapes who we are, what we consider to be important; experience shapes our future choices.

What we choose to remember and what we choose to forget may also create misunderstandings between people with different histories.

This is particularly true when one person or group has decided to forget something that another is compelled to remember.

In the persistence of memory, certain sights, sounds, and even words bring to the surface different memories and ideas for one than for another, all due to the differential of experience between them.

An example: Here are some words from AVI:

"It is not only evangelicals who believe in persuasion in religion, of course, but we are particularly known for it. And particularly despised for it. The irritation, even deep insult, that people feel when we attempt to persuade, is not perceived as connected to the stunning newness of the American experience. Such reliance on persuasion rather than fiat is so natural to Americans now that they believe it is the natural state of affairs. They consider it some vast inconvenience and intrusion when others try to convince them. They no longer remember the alternatives were far worse." (From the blog entry Why Do You Side with Them Instead of Us?)

From AVI's point of view (as best as I can discern it--see below), the newness of the American experience, and the desire to persuade rather than force their viewpoints on others, gives Evangelicals the sanction to try to convert Jews. And just as I don't understand how he could not realize how this is an irritation and a deep insult to Jews (and others), so he does not understand why we should be irritated and deeply insulted. AVI himself points out that most Evangelicals skip over the middle of Christian history in Europe, and therefore they do not understand how perilously close European Jewry came to being exterminated, not once by many times. By Christians*. And I cannot imagine how it would be not to know this fact; and for this fact not to be a central motivation in my life. It is really, really hard to put oneself in the shoes of not knowing something that one knows. This, too, is the glory and the consequence of human memory.

So where AVI sees and loves the Evangelical Christian's desire to talk about their messiah to me, I see and hate the desire to cause the loss by conversion to an already decimated people. Where he sees a world of Christians, growing by leaps and bounds, I see a world without Jews, where "the light in [our] tent will go out." AVI says to me something like: I want to share what I consider to be a great gift with you. And I respond: Clean up your own house first before you tell me that I am doomed to hell because I'm a Jew. This idea is dangerous. (And it is from the perspective of Jewish history in Europe, which is not at all the same experience as Christian history in Europe). And so it goes. I remember things that AVI chooses to forget. He relies upon the American experience that Jews do not wholly trust*.

*I will not discuss AVI's argument here that these people were not Christians, nor the argument that the Nazis, many of whom were secular Christians--that is imbued with the cultural prejudices of European Christianity towards Jews even if not church goers--were not Christians. I consider this kind of hair-splitting to be an evasion of the power of those bad ideas to inform evil actions.

**I remember suggesting to my rabbi that in arguing on behalf of gays that they have the same contractual rights as any other individuals have, we should stand firmly on the individual rights claimed in the Declaration of Independence and protected by the Constitution. He did not think this was a good idea. He did not wholly trust those principles, precisely because the Evangelicals used the first document to claim that this is a "Christian" nation. He did not even trust the non-establishment of religion clause of the First Amendment. The argument he crafted was completely divorced from our founding documents and therefore incomprehensible to Evangelicals. They, in turn, could not understand the rabbi's concern about the individual rights of gays, nor that the rabbi despises their position because the idea promotes the persecution and murders of members of a despised minority, in the same way that Jews were persecuted and murdered in Europe.

Now consider that last line of AVIs again:

"They no longer remember the alternatives were far worse."

When I first read it, I "heard" it this way: Those Jews don't remember that if they don't allow us to persuade them, we will become frustrated enough to force them.

I read it that way because I know the history of the Protestant Reformation in Germany, and what Martin Luther did. At first, he urged his new Lutherans to be kind and loving and persuasive to the Jews of Germany. He was certain that this would naturally cause them to see his truth, and that they would convert. His disappointment when this did not happen led to persecution and murder of the Jewries in Lutheran areas. In his polemical study of the roots of Nazism, Freethinker Jim Walker writes:

"No apologist can claim that Martin Luther bore his anti-Jewishness out of youthful naivete', uneducation, or out of unfounded Christianity. On the contrary, Luther in his youth expressed a great optimism about Jewish conversion to Christianity. But in his later years, Luther began to realize that the Jews would not convert to his wishes. His anti-Jewishness grew slowly over time. His logic came not from science or reason, but rather from Scripture and his Faith. His "On the Jews and Their Lies" shows remarkable study into the Bible and fanatical biblical reasoning. Luther, at age 60 wrote this dangerous "little" book at the prime of his maturity, and in full knowledge in support of his beliefs and Christianity.
Few people today realize that Luther wrote 'On the Jews and Their Lies.' (He also wrote such works like "Against the Sabbatarians.") Freethinkers should become aware of the anti-Semitic influence that Luther has brought on the world. His vehement attack on Jews and his powerful influence on the believers of the Germans has brought a new hypothesis to mind: that the Jewish holocaust, and indeed, the eliminationist form of anti-Semitism in Nazi Germany may not have occurred without the influence from Luther's book "On the Jews and Their Lies."

--From Martin Luther's Dirty Little Book: On the Jews and their Lies, A Precusor to Nazism, by Jim Walker. Retrieved from Nobeliefs.com.

(It is important to realize that Luther did not invent Christian anti-Judaism, but that with this book, he proved it was not just a Roman Catholic problem in the West. There is also here and elsewhere a great deal of evidence for a direct line of thought between Luther and the Nazi eliminationist ideology. Roman Catholic thought had previously forbidden the destruction of European Jewry on the grounds that they should rather be kept in misery to demonstrate the consequences of not accepting the deity of Jesus, although Bishops often turned a blind eye to murder and mayhem against Jewish communities. But Luther, in his break from the Catholic Church, actively promulagated the outright elimination of Jews from Europe. This 'dirty little book" was quoted extensively in Nazi literature and propaganda).

Upon re-reading the whole of what AVI said, however, I believe that AVI did not intend that. Rather, the antecedent to the phrase "they don't remember . . ." implies that the "they" AVI is talking about is "Americans." Americans, not Jews. Perhaps what AVI meant was: "Americans don't remember that this idea of persuasion is unique to America and that the European version was force." Perhaps AVI doesn't even know about Martin Luther's rabid anti-Judaism and his contribution to Nazi ideology.

But I don't know that for sure, and cannot until it is confirmed by AVI one way or another. And I still hear the implied threat in those words. A threat whose implications come from the persistence of my memory. From the experience that has been handed down to me by my teachers. The experience that says "beware of Christians who befriend you in order to convert you. When you decline, they will force you or kill you."

And there are those who do not want us to remember.

Whether out of the desire to destroy us or out of love and the desire to make us over in the image of their own traditions, it does not really matter to us. The consequences are the same. A world without Jews.

Rather, through the persistence of memory, I see a world of diverse belief and tradition. A world in which all of us recognize that the initiation of force against others by individuals for any reason is immoral and will lead to great evil. Even the minimal force applied by Evangelicals in their sometimes overzealous attempts to publically persuade, in the schools and the military academies, and (as once happened to me), in a Starbucks--an inconsiderate interruption of a study session among Jewish women.

And at the very least, if Evangelicals want Jews to side with them on certain issues of mutual interest, it would help if they would educate themselves on who we are as Jews, and what our memory and experience call us to do and to refuse to do, and to be and refuse to be. They could stop the evasion, learn their own history, and develop compassion for those who have very bad memories about Christianity.

On Yom Kippur we remembered. Yesterday, in reading AVIs blog, I remember why we remember. Last night, I had my nightmare again. The one with the round-faced European Jewish children behind a veil of smoke and ashes; the sound of gunfire and rough commands in German. "Juden, raus!"

Such is the persistence of memory.

"Who will dream You?

Who will remember You?

Who deny You?

Who yearn for You?

Who, on a lonely bridge,

Will leave You--in order to return?"

--The Gates of Repentence, Yom Kippur Afternoon Service, p. 437.