So much to remember – Ki Tetzei
74 of the 613 mitzvot are in this week’s sidra. Most are ethical laws; one seems somewhat unethical. Coming at the end of the sidra, it proclaims, Zachor et asher asah l’cha Amalek – “Remember what Amalek did to you on the way when you left Egypt”. The critics of this mitzvah are bothered by its apparent vengefulness.
Can you not forgive and forget, they ask? Why harp on an ancient enemy who moved off the stage of history centuries ago?
In a sense it is the same question that is hurled at us time and again by those who do not, will not or cannot understand our obsession with the Holocaust. Not only this year, but throughout the past decades, we have been urged to consign the Holocaust to history.
The question stabs us. “Look and see,” we say, echoing the Biblical prophet, “if there be any pain like my pain!” Many years have passed, but we cannot help ourselves. Even those who were personally not there, even those born long after the event, are part of a hurting people. We cannot think of the Sho’ah without shuddering. The pain will not let us go.
A wave of immense sadness passes across us at the thought of the thousand years of proud, dignified Jewish history and culture on the European continent, of countless communities that sought only to sing their cherished songs and teach their precious children, all brought to a sudden end by a heartless, mindless ferocity that wiped scholars, sages and saints, the old and the young, off the face of the earth.
Abba Eban has written:
“No people in history has undergone an experience of such violence and depth. Israel’s obsession with physical security; the sharp Jewish reaction to movements of discrimination and prejudice; an intoxicated awareness of life, not as something to be taken for granted but as a treasure to be fostered and nourished with eager vitality; a residual distrust of what lies beyond the Jewish wall; a mystic belief in the undying forces of Jewish history, which ensure survival when all appears lost; all these together with the intimacy of more personal pains and agonies, are the legacy which the Holocaust transmits to the generation of Jews grown up under its shadow.”
The Holocaust is our Jewish pain, and we cannot shake it off. But it is a universal human pain, or would be if humanity were wise and responsive enough to recognise it. For the Holocaust shows what can happen in a society taken over by a fanatic, inhuman ideology. It shows that when evil is unleashed, nobody is safe. It shows that when decent people are too fearful or too apathetic to protest, the evil is compounded. It shows that when evil begins to grow like a snowball, there is no stopping its momentum; evil becomes banal – and human hearts cease to feel, minds no longer register, and civilization goes careering into chaos.
That is why people everywhere should share our obsession with the Holocaust, why we should remember Amalek, the ancient symbol of the inhuman enemy of humanity, and pray that by remembering we can begin to impede his progress every time he tries his hand at horror again.
