|
|
March 14, 2003/Adar2 10 5763, Vol. 55, No. 29
Morality, duty juxtaposed by God
Torah study
RABBI NEIL GILLMAN
Vayikra/Leviticus 1:1 - 5:26
Sometimes, our liturgical calendar confronts us with striking juxtapositions. Consider this Shabbat. We begin the book of Vayikra, almost exclusively devoted to temple rituals. The drama of the patriarchal narratives, the story of redemption and the Sinai revelation are all behind us, and we now have a catalogue of sacrifices.
This is also Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat of remembering, the Shabbat before Purim. To our Torah reading, we add the concluding verses of Devarim, chapter 25, commanding us to remember to extirpate the memory of Amalek. In the haftorah, we learn that Saul, the first king of Israel, was commanded to do just that. But he decided to spare the life of Agag, the Amalekite king together with the best of their cattle. As punishment for his disobedience, he was stripped of the kingship. The later tradition establishes that Agag's line eventually led to Haman. Thus the link between Amalek and Purim.
I feel a creeping sense of tension with the story of Saul and Amalek. Saul is a tragic figure. He did not ask to be king. God appointed him. Nor was it his decision to destroy Amalek; again, it was God's command. He yielded to the wishes of his soldiers and spared the choice cattle. But twice he acknowledges his guilt and pleads for forgiveness. To no avail. Samuel tears the robe from his shoulders, symbolically tearing away his kingship.
Then, the most poignant lines of the entire narrative: "Samuel never saw Saul again to the day of his death. But Samuel grieved over Saul because the Lord regretted that He had made Saul king over Israel."
The last chapters of Saul's life are marked by his descent into madness; he is haunted by God's rejection and by the popularity of his successor, David. At the end, he falls on his sword rather than be killed by the Philistines. This frames the story around the tension between God's absolute authority and Saul's rebellion against God's command, a grievous failure because he was the king and expected to set an example of obedience to God.
The tension that some of us feel in this narrative stems from our intuitive sense that there is another moral standard that even God must accept, and that such a standard might spare innocent animals. But that other moral standard is not necessarily independent of God's will. See, for example, the last words of the Book of Jonah where Jonah is taught that God's compassion extends even to the animals of Nineveh. Are the Amalek animals in a different category because Amalek did not repent of its sins whereas Nineveh did?
There is another issue that pervades this passage, the notion that absolute evil must be totally extirpated. In the later tradition, Amalek becomes the metaphor for implacable evil. The message is that when dealing with this kind of evil, there is simply no room for compassion. Spare Agag, and you get Haman. But how are we to distinguish between absolute evil and tolerable evil?
And overriding these issues, this Shabbat, there is the paradox that our Torah reading deals with God's command that we worship God with animal sacrifices. But when Saul claims that he spared those animals precisely in order to sacrifice them to God, Samuel tells him that what God really demanded from him was not his sacrifices but his obedience, in this case, to the command to obliterate the very memory of Amalek.
These are but some of the issues that our liturgy forces us to confront this Shabbat. None of them is easily resolved.
Rabbi Neil Gillman is professor of Jewish philosophy at the Jewish Theological Seminary.
|
