Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of Remembrance: Reflections on a Challenging New Year in Israel
This Shabbat is a special Shabbat known as Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of memory.
Now, that can encompass many features of Jewish, and human, existence, but Shabbat Zachor, at least on the face of it, refers to a very specific, and somewhat challenging, memory. It comes from a few verses in the Book of Devarim, the Book of Deuteronomy, the final book of the Torah, when Moses is rearticulating the mitzvot, the sacred calls to action, to the people, as they prepare to enter the Promised Land without him.
And in a few stray verses he reminds them of a challenging experience of theirs that happened just after they crossed the Sea of Reeds to freedom:
זָכ֕וֹר אֵ֛ת אֲשֶׁר־עָשָׂ֥ה לְךָ֖ עֲמָלֵ֑ק בַּדֶּ֖רֶךְ בְּצֵאתְכֶ֥ם מִמִּצְרָֽיִם “Remember what Amalek [another nomadic tribe] did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt.”
אֲשֶׁ֨ר קָֽרְךָ֜ בַּדֶּ֗רֶךְ “How he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear, undeterred, as he was, by any sort of fear of God.”
Remember, the Torah is saying, some of the most challenging parts of your journey to this point.
וְהָיָ֡ה בְּהָנִ֣יחַ יְהֹוָ֣ה אֱלֹהֶ֣יךָ “Therefore, when your God יהוה grants you safety…you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. לֹ֖א תִּשְׁכָּֽח Do not forget” (Deuteronomy 25:17-19).
The ancient rabbis interpreted this commandment, zachor, “remember what Amalek did to you,” as being practiced through the specific tradition to chant these verses from Torah, from the Book of Devarim/Deuteronomy, this Shabbat, even though we’re only up to the end of Shemot, the end of the Book of Exodus, in our weekly march through the entire Torah.
Why this Shabbat? Well, this is the Shabbat that immediately precedes Purim. And on the surface, Amalek is connected to Purim because when Haman is introduced on the scene of the Book of Esther, he is referred to as הָמָ֧ן בֶּֽן־הַמְּדָ֛תָא הָאֲגָגִ֖י, “Haman son of Hammedatha the Agagite,” Agag being the king of the tribe of Amalek when the Israelites battled them under King Saul. So the rabbis prescribed that we fulfill the mitzvah of “remembering Amalek” in conjunction with the holiday, Purim, commemorating the defeat of one of Amalek’s descendants, Haman. On the surface of it, that’s it; that’s Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of remembrance.
Still, we know there is always something deeper at play. What does it mean to commemorate Shabbat Zachor, a Shabbat of remembrance, evoking the memory of Amalaek, someone וַיְזַנֵּ֤ב בְּךָ֙ כׇּל־הַנֶּחֱשָׁלִ֣ים אַֽחֲרֶ֔יךָ, “who cut down all the stragglers”—people who were sick, people who were frail—”in the rear of our marching,” וְאַתָּ֖ה עָיֵ֣ף וְיָגֵ֑עַ “when we were famished and weary”? What does it mean to take a Shabbat to do this? What does it mean for the Jewish people to take our painful memories and put them on the table?
Well, certainly we don’t have to go very far in our memory bank to unearth memories of the Jewish people being picked on, kicked when we were down, struggling, in pain. As recently as last week we had to deal with a supposed “National Day of Hate,” in which a white supremacist group called for quote “mass antisemitic action,” calling on supporters to scrawl antisemitic messages throughout the nation. And that’s only the tamest, most recent example of generations of people treating Jewish people differently, dehumanizing Jewish people, leading to some of the most deplorable of actions, crimes against humanity, crimes that weigh heavily on our bodies and our souls, even if we’re not always conscious of it.
Part of Shabbat Zachor is about giving ourselves the space, the moment to breathe, the time to put this history, this legacy on the table and say—this doesn’t define us.
It is there. It exists. It is painful. But we have a beautiful legacy, too. Each of us has painful memories, yes. The Jewish people have painful memories. And, they are ultimately separate from us. We don’t have to let them define us. We can put them on the table, know that they’re there, honor them, and not let them steal our joy.
Part of the way Shabbat Zachor does that, reminds us that we don’t have to let these painful memories take hold of us, is a subtle phrase in the text. It says, “Zachor,” “remember what Amalek did to you,” but then it says, תִּמְחֶה֙ אֶת־זֵ֣כֶר עֲמָלֵ֔ק. “You shall blot out the memory of Amalek.”
So we have “Zachor” – remember; on the other, תִּמְחֶה֙ אֶת־זֵ֣כֶר “blot out the memory.” On the one hand “remember.” On the other hand, “blot out that memory.” Don’t let it define you.
It is possible to let tragic memories define us. Rabbi Art Green teaches that “oppression evokes qualities in ourselves that do not make us proud: anger, hatred, fear of outsiders, a desire for revenge, and a bitterness about our fate that makes change very slow and painful.”
We have had, in many ways, a devastating national history. So much downtroddenness, so much persecution. The Yizkor service, the service of remembrance that we do on holidays like Yom Kippur, Shemini Atzeret, Pesach, and Shavuot comes because the Jewish people lost so many loved ones during the Crusades that they instituted an annual memorial of it. And that has become a healthy way to honor the memories of our loved ones, to honor the painful memories of our past.
It’s also possible to form unhealthy relationships to this past. If we don’t form a healthy relationship to these memories, if we don’t balance the need to remember them but not let them define us, they overwhelm us, turning us into versions of ourselves we don’t want to be.
The rabbis ask what the phrase תִּמְחֶה֙ אֶת־זֵ֣כֶר עֲמָלֵ֔ק “blot out the memory of Amalek” means. And yes some of them say it’s the source of the custom for cranking groggers on Purim, blotting out Haman’s name. But others suggest it’s about the yetzer hara, the inclination within ourselves to do ill, an inclination that is in all of us, the ancient rabbis taught. We’re going to have those instincts—instincts to anger, to revenge, to hate. Shabbat Zachor gives us the opportunity to explore our most painful memories so we can acknowledge our pain. So we can say wow, that hurt. That wasn’t fair. And then heal. Make sure those memories don’t contort who we are.
It has been a brutal month in the State of Israel. 15 Israelis have been murdered in terrorist attacks. The nation is torn apart over proposed
judicial reform measures that would have the effect of allowing any simple government majority the ability to veto all judicial checks on its power, to essentially eliminate intergovernmental checks and balances. And gun battles with Palestinian militants have left over 70 Palestinians dead.
Still it was especially painful to watch hundreds of Israeli settlers set hundreds of homes and cars in a Palestinian town on fire during five hours of civilian violence in response to the murder of two Israeli brothers, Hallel and Yagel Yaniv. We want to see justice for Israelis—for everyone—but not mob rule, not allowing a mob to operate unchecked in a community without soldiers or police intervening.
The existence of the State of Israel is a miracle to me—the nurturing of a memory, the memory of an ancestral homeland. That a people as downtrodden as we have been was able to create a state in the land that had served as the source of our yearnings, our memories, for generations is an incredible, incredible story. It was fueled in part by our zachor, by our painful memories, knowing we had not been safe, free, autonomous in so many lands in which we found ourselves.
But we can’t let distorted interpretations of those memories, corrupted reactions to those memories, run unchecked and untrammeled throughout our system, manifesting in some of the destruction we saw this week in Huwara.
We hold the the twin exhortations of Shabbat Zachor in our hands. On the one hand Zachor. Remember. Give ourselves permission to put our painful memories, our painful history on the table. Look at it. Form a relationship to it. These memories are part of us.
But they don’t define us. In the other hand, timcheh, blot out the corrupted hold these memories can have on us, and move forward in peace.
