"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 !
