Shabbat Zakhor (Deut 25.17–19): Is Jewish Memory Racist?

by D. G. Myers 

Originally delivered to the Museum Minyan at Congregation Beth Yeshurun, Houston, Tex., March 18, 2000. © 2000. All rights reserved.

 

The sabbath preceding the feast of Purim is designated Shabbat Zakhor, the sabbath of memory. Its principal distinguishing feature is the reading of a special maftir or completing segment of Torah:
Remember what Amalek did to you on your journey, after you left Egypt —how, undeterred by fear of God, he surprised you on the march, when you were famished and weary, and cut down all the stragglers in your rear. Therefore, when Yhvh your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that Yhvh your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget! (Deut 25.17–19)
The public reading of this maftir is the formal and liturgical act of obedience to the commandment ("Remember . . . Do not forget!") which is contained within it. But the commandment itself is troubling. God calls upon the Jews to "blot out the memory" of an entire people—to perform what seems to be a rite of denial or negation, if not worse. And for a religious message, this seems narrow, grudging, even hateful.

Others have certainly thought so. Three years ago, on the listserv that I moderate for the journal Philosophy and Literature, a writer compared traditional Judaism, as represented by the holiday Purim, to Steven Spielberg’s film Schindler’s List:
Schindler [he wrote] saved people from the Holocaust because they were people, a humanistic world view. Esther, on the other hand, saved Jews because they were "her people," an exclusivist, possibly even a racist action. The message from Schindler’s List is inclusive, while the story of Queen Esther is exclusive, meant to be interpreted over and over, like the flight from Egypt, as a shibboleth of religious piety. The humanistic story of Schindler offers more to everyone in a context of the multinational and multiracial reality of today. (Robert Dennis, PHIL-LIT 19094, 24 Feb 1997)
On this writer’s showing, Jewish memory means putting one’s own tribe before humanity, and that—for him—is the germ of racism. Nor is this writer alone. In a recent history of antisemitism, Albert S. Lindemann of the University of California at Santa Barbara argues that passages in Deuteronomy like the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek "offer justification, for those who seek it, for policies of racial extermination." Lindemann does not stop there. The Jewish insistence upon separation from the nations—the prohibition on intermarriage, the sabbath and dietary restrictions which have made it difficult for Jews even to socialize and dine with non-Jews—lead him to a harsh conclusion: Judaism is an ancestor of modern racism. In Jewish thinking, he says,
religious exclusiveness meshed with "racial" exclusiveness, for in traditional Judaism lineage or ancestry (yikhus) . . . remained categories of central importance, even if they were elusively mixed with categories of belief or conviction. . . . These protoracist notions contributed in vague, often contradictory ways to modern racism, especially to its concern with racial exclusiveness and purity. (Albert S. Lindemann, Esau’s Tears: Modern Anti-Semitism and the Rise of the Jews [Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1997], pp. 72–74)
One suspects that the "ways" in which Judaism has contributed to "modern racism" are "vague" to Lindemann only because he cannot substantiate them. Nevertheless, the accusation is deeply troubling. If it is true that Purim and Shabbat Zakhor are racist, that the commandment to blot out the memory of Amalek offers justification for a policy of racial extermination, then the best thing would be to give up these holy days–to abandon the rite of collective memory altogether. But is it true that Purim and the commandment of zakhor are racist?

I shall argue that, far from being "exclusive" and "racist," it is only by accepting the responsibility of being Jewish that we are "inclusive" and "humanistic." Indeed, I will try to show that Purim and Shabbat Zakhor are the inversion of racism and the basic model of human ethics. But to see what I mean, we’ll have to reconsider the message of these holy days.

An important clue is to be found in the timing of Shabbat Zakhor. The rabbis selected the sabbath preceding Purim because Haman, the holiday’s villain, is associated with Amalek. In the Book of Esther he is introduced as "Haman the son of Hamdata the Agagite" (Esth 3.1). The word Agagite is found nowhere else in the Tanakh. It may be a Hebraic scrambling of a Persian name just as Ahashverosh is not the real name of a Persian king, but how the Jews heard the name Xerxes. In our selection from the Prophets today, Agag is the king of the Amalekites when Saul rides out to destroy them with the edge of the sword (1 Sam 15). And so it is traditionally inferred that Haman is a descendant of Agag—in some versions, even his grandson.

Now if Esther’s author did not intend the name Haman the Agagite to evoke the king of Amalek, the association must nevertheless be of great antiquity. Yet the first time it explicitly shows up in literature is in the Targum Sheni to Esther, an Aramaic collection of midrashim dating to the late seventh or early eighth century of the Common Era—a thousand years or more after the book of Esther was originally written. The first time the name is mentioned in the Targum, it is put to striking effect. You remember the scene. Mordecai is trying to persuade Esther, a Jew who conceals her Jewishness, to intercede for her people. Haman has obtained a royal decree of genocide. The Targum recounts,
[Mordecai] admonished [Esther] that, as the descendant of Saul, it was her duty to make reparation for her ancestor’s sin in not having put Agag to death. Had he done as he was bidden, the Jews would now not have to fear the machinations of Haman, the offspring of Agag. . . . To give her encouragement, Mordecai continued: "Is Haman so surpassing great that his plan against the Jews must succeed? Dost thou mean to say that he is superior to his own ancestor Amalek, whom God crushed. . . ?" (Quoted by Shlomo Alkabez, Menot Halevi [Venice, 1512], in Louis Ginzberg, The Legends of the Jews [Baltimore: Johns Hopkins UP, 1998], 4: 422)
No evidence of racial exclusiveness here. It is true, I guess, that Mordecai appeals to Esther’s yikhus, her family connections with Saul, but his rhetorical strategy is not to arouse her pride, but exactly the reverse. He shames Esther with a reminder of her ancestor’s sin, because he means to goad her into undertaking the holy obligation that Saul shirked—to repair the damage that he caused. By connecting Haman with Agag and Esther with Saul in this way, the unknown author of the Targum Sheni is making an explicit theological point. Esther did not save Jews because they were "her people"; she did not act out of exclusivist and perhaps even racist motives. Her motives are entirely beside the point. Purim is the completion of a task that God had set the Jews many centuries before. And to feast on Purim, then, is to celebrate, not yikhus, but the holy obligation of doing God’s work.

But does Purim offer justification for a policy of racial extermination? It is instructive to compare the scene in the Targum Sheni to the scene in the original book. There Mordecai persuades Esther by telling her:
Do not imagine that you, of all the Jews, will escape with your life by being in the king’s palace. On the contrary, if you keep silent in this crisis, relief and deliverance will come to the Jews from makom acher—from another quarter —while you and your father’s house will perish. And mi yodea—who knows —perhaps you have attained to royal position for just such a crisis. (Esth 4.12b—14)
This passage is the closest that the book of Esther comes to mentioning the name of God. It is unlikely that makom acher are code words for God, even though makom became a name for God in the rabbinic period. Yet this passage implies a theological view nevertheless. As the biblical scholar Jon Levenson has pointed out, the phrase mi yodea ("who knows") is used elsewhere in the Tanakh to express "a guarded hope that [penitence] may induce God to relent from his harsh decree, granting deliverance where destruction had been expected" (Esther: A Commentary [Louisville: Westminster/John Knox, 1997], p. 81). Consider, for example, the prophet Joel, who also belongs to the Persian period:
Rend your hearts rather than your garments, and turn back to Yhvh your God. For he is gracious and compassionate, slow to anger, abounding in kindness, and renouncing punishment. Who knows–mi yodea–but he may turn and relent, and leave a blessing behind. . . ? (Joel 2.13—14a)
From this angle it is significant that Esther’s response to Mordecai’s theological insinuation —mi yodea—is to declare a fast among "all the Jews who live in Shushan" (4.16). Her impulse is the formula of Yom Kippur: "Fasting, prayer, and charity remove the evil decree!" But if she did not believe that it would influence a "higher power," even if she is too embarrassed to speak God’s name, then why would Esther declare a fast?

Thus Esther begins her new career as a champion of her people with a theological affirmation. And this is crucial, because it suggests that she acts to "save her people" not out of tribal loyalty, but out of the deep-seated conviction that her people’s experience has providential meaning. Mordecai has brought this home to her by clarifying for her the exclusiveness of Haman’s threat. Such exclusiveness is precisely what provokes the terror of genocide. For genocide is aimed at me and my kind, which means there is no escaping it, not at you and your kind, which raises the possibility of escape—but not for me and my kind. Haman’s genocidal threat establishes Esther’s responsibility to her people because it defines, for all time, the ultimate cost of belonging to her people.

Esther is less a national heroine, then, than a baalat teshuvah, a born-again Jew. Now usually teshuvah is translated "repentance," although it literally means "turning." I want to suggest another meaning, which is based upon Esther’s story. For what Esther does in response to Mordecai’s persuasion is to reidentify with the Jewish people after a long period of "passing" and denial of her Jewishness. She accepts responsibility for her people. And this, I believe, is the real meaning, the full meaning, of teshuvah. To "turn back to Yhvh your God," in the words of the prophet Joel, is to identify with the people whom God has chosen and to enter into the responsibility which God has assigned to them. For it is not their race which distinguishes the Jews, but their responsibility. "You shall be holy to me," God commands in Leviticus, "for I Yhvh am holy, and I have set you apart from other peoples to be Mine" (20.26). What looks to an outsider like racial exclusiveness is really the exclusiveness of commitment to God.

And this is why neither Purim nor Shabbat Zakhor "offer justifications for a policy of racial extermination." Their message is rather that to be a Jew is to identify with the people for whom these holy days have providential meaning. To blot out the memory of Amalek and to feast on Purim is to identify with the intended victims of genocide; it is not to celebrate the destruction of the perpetrators, but to rejoice in our people’s deliverance from them. Indeed, when a suicide bomber in Tel Aviv killed several Israelis on the eve of Purim four years ago, including children in costume, Purim carnivals across the country were cancelled, because an identification with suffering takes precedence in Judaism over the need to rejoice.

And this is the heart of these holy days. Jewish memory expresses a readiness to substitute for others whom we do not even know. It entails what the great Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas calls an inversion of identity. We are identified, not by our image of ourselves, but by the others whose place we are prepared to take. We reach out of ourselves in order to return to ourselves. And this action of identifying with others is the genuine "inclusiveness" and "humanism" that Judaism’s critics have called for; or, to be more exact, these holy days provide the basic model of human ethics. Just as Purim represents Esther’s willingness to count herself among Haman’s victims so too Shabbat Zakhor represents our willingness to substitute for the Jewish dead—by never forgetting them. What is more, Jewish memory expresses our readiness to act in God’s stead. In Exodus, you will recall, Yhvh tells Moses,
Write this for a memorial in a book, and read it aloud to Joshua: I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. (Exod 17.14)
But we do not recite this passage on Shabbat Zakhor. Instead we acquiesce to the wording of Deuteronomy: "you shall blot out the memory of Amalek. . . ." We shift the burden onto ourselves. We do so because, as Jews, we accept the holy responsibility of completing God’s work. Through Jewish memory, by obeying the commandment of zakhor, we identify with the people to whom God assigned the responsibility of finding ourselves in others.

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