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June 7, 2002/Sivan 27 5762, Vol. 54, No. 38
End the war against Amalek
BARRY COHEN
Editor
One of the subjects pounded into my brain in religious school was the Holocaust. In time, I tired of hearing about how anti-Semitism led to the Holocaust and from disaster was born the modern state of Israel.
Years later, at the University of Michigan, I learned about the first intifada, which erupted in 1987. I never equated the Palestinians with Nazis or viewed them an existential threat.
When the second intifada erupted 21 months ago, I again did not see the violence as the storm clouds of another Holocaust. But as the attacks against the Jewish people spread beyond Israel to Europe, my optimism weakened.
I began to see history circling on itself. Europe 2002 became Europe 1933; The Arab world became medieval. Iran and Iraq became as dangerous as Hitler's Germany.
Then I read an article that restored my rational thinking: Leon Wieseltier's "Hitler is Dead." (New Republic, May 27)
In his piece, Wieseltier distinguishes between anti-Semitism today and in the past. He cites a 1948 essay by Simon Rawidowicz, "Am Ha-Holekh Va-Met" (The Ever-Dying People), which speaks against the "typological thinking" that every enemy of the Jews is the same. This thinking is based upon Amalek, the leader of a nomadic tribe that attacked the Israelites in the Sinai wilderness after they escaped slavery in Egypt.
We read in the Torah that the Jewish people "will be at war with Amalek throughout the ages." (Exodus 17:16) For millennia, we have equated our enemies with Amalek: Haman, the Romans, the Crusaders, Hitler, and now Arafat.
Wieseltier believes modern Jews have rejected this type of reasoning, that we view the Jewish present and our enemies as "discontinuous with the Jewish past," rooted in different sociological, historical and political contexts. He argues that Jews in Israel, unlike those in World War II Europe, possess superior firepower against their enemies and now at last can defend their homeland. And in the United States, unlike in Europe generations ago, anti-Semitism has never possessed political or philosophical legitimacy.
Wieseltier claims that nonetheless, U.S. Jews possess "a dissonance" between the belief in an ever-recurring war against Amalek and the belief in a secure future.
Wieseltier teaches that because the contemporary social and political climate - in both the United States and Israel - is discontinuous with our past, we no longer need to believe, despite the existence of anti-Semitism, that we are reenacting the conflict with Amalek.
In closing, he quotes Rawidowicz, "(That) a nation always on the verge of ceasing to be is a nation that never ceases to be."
Rawidowicz wrote these words to encourage the Jewish people after we survived the Holocaust. It's a message we can take to heart, to help us view contemporary anti-Semitism in its proper perspective, and look to a hopeful future, from a position of strength.
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