"Amalek is a symbol of militarism": Purim, Ethnonationalism, and Divine Rupture by Aron WANDER

 

"Amalek is a symbol of militarism":
Purim, Ethnonationalism, and Divine Rupture

 

Aron Wander Mar 13, 2025

Last Purim, a few blocks from where I was living in Jerusalem, a huge billboard proudly displayed an image of Israeli soldiers emblazoned with words from megillah: “Then the opposite happened” (“ve-nahafoch hu”), the phrase that sets off the Jews of the Purim story’s vengeance upon their enemies. The meaning was clear: we, too, will exact a fitting revenge.

 As Purim approaches this year, I’ve struggled with how to relate to it. What does it mean to mark Purim when, for a year and a half, the Israeli government has been using the symbols and themes of the holiday to mobilize and justify horrific violence against Palestinians in Gaza and the West Bank?

 Most prominent among the symbols used to buttress violence has been the nation of Amalek, described in the Torah as attacking the Israelites after the Exodus, in response to which God demands that the Israelites “wipe out the memory of Amalek.” Haman, the villain of Purim, is understood to be a descendant of Amalek, and the Jews’ provisional victory in the Purim story is understood to foreshadow an eventual, eschatological victory over Amalek and the forces of evil. South Africa, in accusing Israel of genocide at the ICJ, drew on numerous Israeli politicians’ description of Hamas, Gazans, or all Palestinians as Amalek as proof of Israel’s genocidal intent.

It is tempting to simply abandon these symbols for fear that attempting to reinterpret them is liable to reify them. But surrendering those symbols won’t cause them to disappear: it will merely mean ceding the field to those deploying them to justify mass death.

At the same time, we should avoid reinterpreting these symbols for purely narcissistic purposes: to make Judaism “good” again, or to divest ourselves of implicatedness in Israel’s violence. In such a case, the goal of reorienting Judaism is not to address the material harm to Palestinians to which these symbols are being put, but rather our own sense of comfort.

There is a middle way between abandoning these symbols and reclaiming them merely for the sake of our own self-image. Some part of achieving a just, liberated future for Palestinians, Israelis, and all those living between the river and the sea will be (re)constructing forms of Jewish identity opposed to ethnonationalism and militarism. Accordingly, we can seek to recover and reimagine Jewish traditions and symbols not in search of some sort of moral purity but instead as part of fashioning that sort of Judaism and taking responsibility for the violence in which those of us tied to Israel/Palestine have been implicated.

For months, I’ve been drawn to the writings of Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel. Rabbi Amiel was a complex, contradictory character: he was a vociferous critic of secular Zionism, understanding it as a project of national egoism, and a strident opponent of militarism. At the same time, he was a committed religious Zionist, and he naively believed Jews might be the first people to craft an “ethical” nationalism. But he was also well aware of the likelihood that they would not. He died in Tel-Aviv in 1946, in the midst of the Holocaust and before the Nakba, but given that he believed a Jewish state must not be built through violence, should guarantee rights to all of its inhabitants, and would be a vanguard of nonviolent revolution, it’s hard to imagine he would have reconciled himself to Israel. In any event, we can draw on his thinking not for his mistaken hopes but with an eye towards his penetrating critiques of jingoism and violence.

In 1929, facing the rise of Nazism, Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel offered a powerful reinterpretation of Amalek as symbolizing the horrors of militarism and ethnonationalism. He begins by noting the Torah’s terse description of Amalek attacking the Israelites: it simply states that “Amalek came and fought with Israel at Rephidim” (Ex. 17:8) without cause or predicate. That lacuna, Rabbi Amiel argues, indicates something profound about the psychology of Amalek:

Even at a superficial glance, we can feel that Amalek is a symbol of militarism: that the sword serves not as a means for Amalek, but rather as its entire purpose. Or, better, that it is the entire content of its existence: those who go to war not for some need or because there is no other option, but as one goes out to a dance. For is it not only in this, in war, that they find a way to define and emphasize their being?1

Militarism, for Rabbi Amiel, carries its own logic and justification: it allows for national cohesion and purpose. Though Rabbi Amiel does believe in the right of collectives to defend themselves against aggression when “there is no other option,” such a case is always a tragedy, and, as he argues later in the essay, violence can never be part of building a more just future.2 For militarism, by contrast, war is to be celebrated rather than mourned – it is exciting and intoxicating.

Rabbi Amiel goes on to note a second, related element of Amalek’s orientation. Observing that the Torah explains Amalek’s aggressiveness by virtue of its being “undeterred by fear of God” (Deut. 25:18), Rabbi Amiel declares:

The essential reason for Amalek’s war is that he was “undeterred by fear of God.” But Amalek loves God, for he is always talking about “the beloved God,” “Der Liebesgott” [“the God of Love”], as is said in German. But here is the problem: Amalek only loves God, but does not fear God. And it is not for nothing that he loves God, for he has a god that allows him to do whatever he wants – everything is permitted.3

Who is the “beloved God” that loves Amalek and permits it everything? As Rabbi Amiel writes elsewhere, “The new false gods are the false gods of nationalism… each nation has its own god.”4 In other words, the “god” that each nation worships is a narcissistic representation of the nation itself – it loves the nation because it is the nation, and the nation loves it back for the same reason. Amalek merely carries this dynamic to its logical conclusion: if “god” always loves Amalek, then whatever Amalek does must be good.

What is the relationship between Amalek’s violence and its narcissism? In War is a Force That Gives Us Meaning – a book whose title echoes Rabbi Amiel’s argument – war correspondent Chris Hedges argues:

The enduring attraction of war is this: Even with its destruction and carnage it can give us what we long for in life... Only when we are in the midst of conflict does the shallowness and vapidness of much of our lives become apparent. Trivia dominates our conversations and increasingly our airwaves. And war is an enticing elixir. It gives us resolve, a cause. It allows us to be noble…

The communal march against an enemy generates a warm, unfamiliar bond with our neighbors, our community, our nation, wiping out unsettling undercurrents of alienation and dislocation… Patriotism, often a thinly veiled form of collective self-worship, celebrates our goodness, our ideals, our mercy and bemoans the perfidiousness of those who hate us… The enemy is dehumanized; the universe starkly divided between the forces of light and the forces of darkness.5

For Hedges, war offers a more potent way of organizing our identities and lives than almost anything else: while our day-to-day lives typically revolve around trivialities, war offers us a clear, unambiguous cause to which to attach ourselves through which we also feel joined to a larger collective. We do not celebrate war because we are inherently wicked, but rather because it makes us feel good: suddenly, we know our place in the world and that we are on the right side of history – as Hedges puts it, “[i]t allows us to be noble.” But deriving meaning from the goodness and nobleness of our own collective is also necessarily narcissistic. That narcissism, in turn, drives further militarism: if my collective is good, then surely – like Amalek – it can do whatever it sees as right.

Critically, Hedges argues that these dynamics are applicable to all national collectives. Whereas Rabbi Amiel’s reference to “German” makes it clear he’s thinking specifically of the crudeness and violence of 1920’s German volk-ish nationalism, Hedges notes that any collective can be mobilized in an Amalek-like way by the horror and pleasure of war. In later writings, Rabbi Amiel himself notes this dynamic, insisting that Nazism is “a direct outcome of nationalism.”6

Another important element that Hedges adds is the presence of an enemy: to the same degree that war encourages us to see ourselves as righteous, it frames the enemy as evil. In fact, it is by virtue of our enemy’s evil that we know that we are good. Just as significantly, without an enemy, we would have no one against whom to struggle, and therefore no way of consolidating our own identities.

Reading Rabbi Amiel and Hedges, I thought of my time in Jerusalem. The city had been saturated with nationalism before the traumas of October 7th, but in its wake, there was an even greater surge. Before, it was hard to go a block or two without seeing a flag, but now they were placed every few meters. The slogan Am Yisrael Chai (“the people of Israel lives”) was ubiquitous, and posters venerating the army, demanding vengeance, and celebrating the impending victory were plastered on doors, windows, railings, and buses. Less visible but no less potent was the sense of national cohesion. Before Hamas’ massacre, Israel had been riven by increasingly dramatic divisions: between secular Jews and Haredim, between those opposed to and supportive of the judicial reform, and between the center-right and the far-right. After October 7th, though, the “warm, unfamiliar bond” was everywhere: assuming I shared their politics, neighbors I’d never spoken to and friends I hadn’t heard from in years checked in on me and gushed about their pride in their relatives serving in Gaza. There was a palpable insistence on Jews’ righteousness and Palestinians’ irredeemable evil. “Some people deserve to be in a cage,” a neighbor told me.

None of these dynamics were new, of course: even before October 7th, Jerusalem was dominated by right-wing nationalism. What was striking, though – if still not surprising – was the way in which former government detractors, liberals, and critics of the occupation joyfully joined the fray, both in Israel/Palestine and in the diaspora: teachers pontificated about the valor and beauty of Israeli soldiers, rabbis insisted on the Israeli military’s moral integrity, and Jewish leaders tearfully sung HaTikvah. Is this not all the sort of narcissistic and militaristic Amalek-ness that Rabbi Amiel derided?

In America, the war vivified long-declining Jewish institutions: finally, there was something concrete around which they could organize and for which they could advocate. Israel has, of course, long been the primary project of mainstream institutions that struggle to articulate any other positive element of Judaism, but the war laid that dynamic more bare than ever before. But as much as identifying with Israel was a powerful intoxicant, identifying against an enemy was also an equally potent boost to American Jewish identity. Fears about Jewish continuity were allayed, ironically, by the energy of the fight against a vaguely defined antisemitism. Some of that antisemitism, to be sure, was real and dangerous. But much of it was actually anti-Zionism or criticism of Israel spurred by Israel’s assault on Gaza. In either case, though, it gave Jewish institutions that had struggled to articulate what it meant to be Jewish and why it was valuable a ready-made answer: to be Jewish is to be in opposition to those we believe don’t want us to be Jewish.

Rabbi Amiel himself noted the ways in which Jewish nationalism had a symbiotic relationship with antisemitism. “Zionism of hate [Rabbi Amiel’s term for secular Zionism],” he declared, “often uses the expressions of hate against us in all places as evidence for its conclusions. Therefore, it announces and proclaims that hate from one end of the world to another, as if it were blessing catastrophes.”7 Zionism drew much of its energy and self-definition from the struggle with a hateful enemy who it, in turn, hated back. In this, Zionism was and is far from unique – countless other oppressed groups have come to define their identity in opposition to their oppressors, only to later discover the poisoned fruits of such a self-definition.

None of this is to discount the real fears and traumas that pushed many Jews towards Zionism; Rabbi Amiel recognized the massive violence Jews faced in Europe, and that it could easily lead Jews to seek their own power in order to survive. And the horrors of October 7th were themselves traumatizing, too. The relationship between trauma and nationalism, though, doesn’t undermine Rabbi Amiel or Hedges’ critique but rather reinforces it: in moments of trauma, we are especially likely to harden our identities and sense of self, to perceive ourselves as uniquely good and those who traumatize us as irredeemably evil. Just as dangerously, we are liable to try to attempt to use nationalism and militarism to overcome trauma – to hope that some sort of national, military achievement, or degree of raw power might blunt the memory of vulnerability.

In Yishai Sarid’s The Memory Monster, the Israeli military plans to stage a takeover of an abandoned concentration camp as a way of commemorating the 100-year anniversary of the Wannsee Conference, where the Final Solution was planned.8 In an interview a year after October 7th, Yossi Klein Halevi, a prominent Zionist writer, admitted that the traumas of that day had shaken Israelis’ faith in “two foundational elements of the Israeli ethos… [That] we would be able to defend ourselves… [and] the Zionist promise to the Jewish people that we would create a safe refuge here.” Halevi’s response to that shaken faith was telling: “[W]hat this war is about for me is reclaiming the credibility of these two essential elements of the Israeli ethos.” Halevi’s hope – or fantasy –was that some level of military achievement might restore that “ethos,” even as months later, such a final victory continued to be elusive. It’s also telling that even as Halevi admitted that at the beginning of the war that “[w]e weren’t reacting in necessarily a sane way,”9 he continued to insist on Israel’s inherent goodness and declare his surety that Israel would never violate the ethics of war, even though by that time a litany of war crimes had already been documented and Israel had credibly been accused of genocide. Perhaps, then, this is how we should understand the Torah’s commandment to “remember what Amalek did to you on your journey after you left Egypt” (Deut. 25:17): remember the temptation to embrace militant nationalism in the aftermath of trauma does to our collective identity.

Given the pitfalls of organizing collective identity through secular nationalism, what does Rabbi Amiel offer as an alternative? He contends:

Secular nationalism brought Judaism a Copernican revolution. That is to say, previously God and Torah stood at the center of all of Jewish thought, and we ourselves, the nation of Israel, and all the more so the land of Israel, revolved around it like a circle dance. Through Zionism, the rotation has been inverted – the Land of Israel has been made the center of all centers, while the Torah and God apparently revolve around it.10

Whereas Zionism places the nation, the state, and the land of Israel as its highest ideals and “dances” around them, Rabbi Amiel insists that Judaism has always placed God and the Torah at the center. To some, that may seem just as nationalist an alternative: doesn’t the Torah evince an intense particularism, and doesn’t the God it describes “choose” the Israelites? It may also strike some as dogmatic – doesn’t orienting around the Torah simply mean following the letter of the law as an Orthodox Jew? But Rabbi Amiel appears to be gesturing at something deeper: the fundamental ambiguity of both Torah and God. In the words of one medieval Jewish commentator, Rabbeinu Bahya:

How great is the Torah, for it can be interpreted many different ways, such that one word can be interpreted differently according to the vocalization… therefore, it is necessary that a Torah not be vocalized so that it can be interpreted many ways. This also reveals the power of God’s great name, whose content changes according to its vocalization.11

Neither God nor the Torah can be fully pinned down: the Torah’s meaning is always dependent upon interpretation, God’s name cannot be pronounced, and God Godself has no image. Accordingly, an identity organized around God and Torah will – ideally – never be fully closed: just like the Torah and God, it too will be subject to a certain ambiguity, inconsistency, and ineffability. We can never be quite sure exactly who we are.

Of course, it is precisely the religious Zionism that Rabbi Amiel championed that claims to put both Torah and God at the center, and it is even more crudely nationalist than secular Zionism. However naive Rabbi Amiel may have been, though, we should not mistake his vision for Ben Gvir’s: whatever its pretensions, religious Zionism is little more than a cult of narcissism and power whose ideals are the armed settler, the hilltop youth, and the land. There is perhaps no better example, in fact, of a framework in which “the Land of Israel has been made the center of all centers, while the Torah and God apparently revolve around it.”

Rabbi Amiel’s fatal flaw is instead that – for all of his awareness of the necessity for an identity with gaps and inconsistencies – his vision is still one in which Palestinians form an anonymous background. For all that Rabbi Amiel imagines that a Jewish state will guarantee rights for all of its inhabitants, must be oriented around God, and cannot be built through violence, he does not describe Palestinians as equal subjects with their own desires, fractured identities, or divinity who would have a role in determining the shape of that state.

This is all the more disappointing because Rabbi Amiel himself is attuned to the ways in which our identities are made ambiguous not only through an encounter with God but also through our encounters with each other. He relates an incident in which, during the first World War, he boarded a train full of Polish soldiers and – fearful that they might beat him – fled to a car in which the only living soul was a dying Polish soldier. “He could not hit me with his hands – his Esau hands – or his feet – his Esau feet, for he lay on a bench fluttering between life and death,” Rabbi Amiel relates. “At first, not only did I ignore him, but there was a hidden gladness in my heart, for his wounds were the only guarantee he would not harm me.”12 And yet, as the soldier groaned louder and louder, Rabbi Amiel fled. “It was clear to me that it was not from his eyes that I fled,” he concludes. “It was from God’s eyes, which see all, and which I saw in the eyes of the dying man, who is also created in God’s image.”13

Though at first, all of the Polish soldiers are murderous Esaus and he is an innocent Jacob, his traumatic encounter with the dying soldier upends the neat categories and shatters his identity. The soldier, like Rabbi Amiel, is created in the ineffable image of God, and Rabbi Amiel – like the soldiers he fears – tries to numb himself to the suffering of a fellow human. When he leaves the train, he realizes that all of society is structured so as to allow us to run from the traumatic impact of other’s pain: “All people flee from the day of their birth until they die; they flee so long as they have life and give their lives to fleeing.”14

Despite Rabbi Amiel’s own shortcomings, his critique is still apt. So much of Israeli society is dedicated to that flight from seeing Palestinians literally and figuratively. Villages depopulated in the Nakba are papered over with trees; Israel builds bypass roads in the West Bank so that settlers can commute without seeing the villages into which they’ve penned Palestinians; the ethnic cleansing of Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza is cloaked in bureaucratic terms and philosophical jargon that dulls the impact of an airstrike on an apartment building, the shooting of a teenager, or the bulldozing a house; Israeli news is full of pictures of hostages and dead soldiers but almost never show the faces of the tens of thousands of Palestinians killed by Israel or the obliteration of Gaza.

What paths forward are there? What resources are there for constructing Jewish collectivity in Israel and the diaspora that rely neither on the narcissism of nationalism nor on the exclusion and repression of Palestinians? What forms of identity could contribute to liberation, justice, and peace for all Palestinians and Jews?

In The Holocaust and the Nakba, Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg seek frameworks for structuring Palestinian and Israeli identities in ways amenable to binationalism. Given that both peoples will continue to live in Israel/Palestine and continue to identify with their respective collectives, how can they avoid the pitfalls of reifying and replicating nationalist dichotomies, on the one hand, and of trying to forge a new, homogenized identity on the other?

As a middle path, Bashir and Goldberg propose a paradoxical ethic of “empathetic unsettlement” in which collective identities are fractured by encounters with others’ traumas – in this case, the Holocaust, the Nakba, and the legacies of European colonialism and ethnonationalism:

On the one hand, it [empathetic unsettlement] recognizes the fundamental, inherent otherness of the individual who experiences the trauma… On the other hand, and despite the recognition of the radical and ineradicable otherness of those who experience trauma, empathetic calls for a sense of empathy toward them.15

In other words, a precarious middle path must be forged in which one can respect the Other as radically different without that difference giving way to full-on alienation, and in which one empathizes with and is productively unsettled by the Other without demanding they assimilate to one’s own identity. Critically, the node of connection is trauma: the very thing that so often causes us to retreat into our identities also represents the possibility of openness and transformation. In acknowledging another person’s trauma, Bashir and Goldberg argue, are able to see “an ‘other’ in whose core experience there is something that goes beyond the symbolic and political contours that purport to represent him.”16 In other words, we can recognize that they, like us, are not fully coterminous with their identities: they, too, are an individual full of contradictions and fissures. While Bashir and Goldberg insist that both “many Jews and Palestinians are trapped in… a fetishized, exclusionary, deadly, and closed traumatic narrative”17 and that both have a responsibility to disrupt their national identities, they also argue that the task is not symmetrical: Israeli Jews have far more power than Palestinians and are the ones responsible for and who benefit from Palestinians’ foundational trauma, the Nakba.

The paradoxes and ambiguities of Bashir and Goldberg’s approach are only more urgent and unsettling today. Palestinian national identity has been hardened by decades of traumatic oppression at Israel’s hands; Israeli identity has become far more closed and brutal in the wake of the October 7th massacres; and Israel’s destruction of Gaza and ethnic cleansing of the West Bank has made it harder than ever to imagine a robust, binational future. Identity in the diaspora has no doubt solidified, too. Palestinians have been subject to state repression in Europe and the US. And though most mainstream Jewish communities have unhelpfully tried to collapse the distinction between anti-Zionism and antisemitism, making antisemitism far harder to track, it’s clear that it’s been rising. Again, these are not symmetrical processes – in all of the above cases, Palestinians have been the victims of state power, and it is Israeli identity that most urgently needs to be disrupted in order to stop the unending violence in Gaza and the West Bank. Nevertheless, it’s still true that the more Palestinian and Israeli identities each harden, the more they reinforce each other.

The Jewish mystical tradition notes that the gematria of Amalek is equivalent to that of safek (“doubt”). Perhaps we might read this association in light of Rabbi Amiel’s analysis as suggesting that we are most tempted into Amalek-ness — to take refuge in and double down on nationalism — precisely in the moments in which the gaps, fissures, traumas, and doubts at the core of our identities are revealed. But if we instead admit the presence of those fissures – if we look through the cracks in the mirror rather than continuing to stare at own reflections – perhaps we can see through to one another.

1 Rabbi Moshe Avigdor Amiel, Derashot El Ami, vol. 3, “The Sword and the Book” (Jerusalem: Ha-Ivri, 1929), 132.

2 Ibid., 134.

3 Ibid., 133.

4 Amiel, Le-Nevukhei Ha-Tekufah (Brooklyn, NY: Morriah Offset Co., 1943), 39.

5 Chris Hedges, War Is a Force That Gives Us Meaning (New York: Public Affairs, 2002), 3, 9-10, 63.

6 Amiel, op. cit., 39.

7 Ibid., 291.

8 See Yishai Sarid, The Memory Monster, trans. Yardenne Greenspan (Brooklyn, NY: Restless Books, 2020).

9 Isaac Chotiner, “Why No Real Antiwar Movement Has Developed in Israel,” The New Yorker, October 24, 2024.

10 Amiel, op. cit., 284.

11 Rabbeinu Bahya on Deuteronomy 7:2.

12 Amiel, op. cit., 46.

13 Ibid., 47.

14 Ibid.

15 Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg, “Introduction” in The Holocaust and the Nakba, eds. Bashir Bashir and Amos Goldberg (New York: Columbia University Press, 2019), 23.

16 Ibid., 24.

17 Ibid.

Many Thanks for Reb Avrohom Cheskel (Eibi) Weisfeld !