Sermon for Shabbat 22/23 March
Written by Rabbi Colin Eimer — 25 March 2024
It’s hard to remember now, but Saturday 30th September last, was just a normal Shabbat. It was the middle of Sukkot, but otherwise uneventful. Had I been in Israel that motsaei Shabbat, that Saturday evening, I would probably have done what I had been doing with thousands of Israelis for the previous few months, and joined the street protests throughout the country.
Then the following Shabbat, October 7th, Simchat Torah, Hamas insurgents storm kibbutzim committing crimes beyond description or comprehension, comparable, perhaps, only to Nazi atrocities in the Shoah.
I’ve not been looking forward to writing or giving this sermon. I’ve found it difficult to know what to say. It’s Shabbat Zachor, the Shabbat before Purim. Maybe, I thought, I could salvage something from an old Shabbat Zachor sermon. But what is there to say in a sermon not only 6 months since October 7th but also 30 years since Purim 1994. Then, Dr Baruch Goldstein, a Hebron resident, in his Israeli army uniform, having just come from hearing the megillah, goes to a mosque and machine-guns 29 people at prayer. Dr Baruch Goldstein – not a PhD but a medical doctor, for heaven’s sake.
October 7th changed everything – and yet changed nothing. If the protests in Israel stopped it’s because there’s a sort of Israeli minhag that you don’t protest at a time of national crisis. But the protests are building up again, for there has never been a national crisis as concerted, as long-lasting as the one since October 7th.
And the reasons behind the protests are still there, of course: the Netanyahu government and all it represents: its corruption, its implicit and explicit support for gun-toting West Bank settlers, its swing to a more-extreme nationalism, exemplified by ministers Ben Gvir and Motrich – who will see October 7th as adding fuel to the fire of their belief in a Greater Israel. I’m told that Ben Gvir makes pilgrimage visits to Baruch Goldstein’s grave.
Yesterday morning I spoke with Golan Ben Chorin, our newly-appointed Principal Rabbi. I asked him what will Purim be like in Israel this year? “Very muted,” he said, “very low key. Normally kids will be on the streets, in fancy dress, celebrating. But not this year,” he added.
One of the Purim commands is to drink ad shelo yada, till you can no longer tell the difference between Haman and Mordechai. All jolly good fun, maybe, in the past – but I can’t imagine too many having the koach for that sort of unbridled celebration.
I also had reason to speak with Catherine Florin, one of our members, who has given me permission to quote her. Yesterday morning, she said, she was listening to a phone-in on LBC. It was around the reports of a Jewish house in Clapton which had been fire-bombed, and of a boy wearing a kippah, in a Manchester Hospital A&E being told by nurses – apparently wearing pro-Palestinian badges – to get off the bed he was on and sit on the floor. A caller had suggested that such things are nothing more than were to be expected given what Israel is doing in Gaza. To his credit, the moderator, Nick Ferrari challenged the caller on how he could connect what happened in Clapton and Manchester with Gaza? The caller simply reiterated his “what can you expect?” Catherine was so incensed that she called the programme. She sent me the recording. Responding to the question of that previous caller, she said: “What do I expect? I expect to be treated respectfully and civilly, regardless of my ethnicity, faith, skin colour, nationality, the religious symbol I might wear – just as I hope I would treat you.” Catherine is a lawyer who does voluntary work in a legal centre. “We have Russian volunteers there,” she says. “Nobody holds those Russians responsible for what Putin is doing in the Ukraine. I just find it extraordinary,” she concluded, “that people can effortlessly and thoughtlessly leap from what’s happening in Gaza to “well, what can you expect?””
So what is there to say this year about Purim? As we’ve said this is Shabbat Zachor – the Shabbat before Purim. We read three verses from Deuteronomy (25:17-19) – verses incidentally that Netanyahu cited in a speech 3 weeks or so after October 7th.
Why cite them? What has Amalek got to do with Purim? Haman is an Agagite who is seen as a descendant of Amalek. Every persecutor is referred to as a ‘Haman.’ Indeed, I can imagine some rabbis building a whole case on the fact that there’s just one letter difference between Haman and Hamas.
But there is, of course, no historical link between them. To believe there is would suggest a character trait – like evil – might run through a family across time and space. Linking Amalek, Agag and Haman makes them into symbols, metaphors. No longer specific individuals as such but types, archetypes of the wanton aggressor who attacks the weak and the defenceless in any generation in any place. It’s reductionist thinking – complex issues become black and white. Goodies and baddies. Us and Amalek-Agag-Haman.
Last year, I could have argued that, for one day, on Purim, such reductionist thinking is acceptable. Life is ‘either-or’ rather than ‘this and this.’ Children think that way. So we dress up, read the story, though not as something serious and certainly not as a prescription for future action. Only in a fantasy world do you deal with your enemies by wiping them out. Once a year, though, feel unfettered by social convention, cross-dress, drink a bit too much, make fun of people and so on. But we can only do that because we know that the day after Purim we return to the real world, the world as it is. No fancy dress; no pretending we’re somebody else; no avoiding the complexities of life.
But still, how can we celebrate Purim post-October 7th? Rabbis Amichai Lau-Lavie and Rachel Timoner in New York make some interesting suggestions. “While the threat of Amalek-like hatred is real,” they write, “we must make a clear distinction between myth and history. It is our moral obligation to differentiate between perpetrators of great harm against the Jewish people and those who are ruled by them. And we should emphasise the role of ongoing interpretation, the oral tradition that challenges us to talk back to our texts, especially our texts of terror, face our history, including our shadows and take our inherited legacy to the next level of honesty and humanity.” (Forward, March 7th 2024)
The tendency this year could easily be to make even more noise when the name of Haman comes up. But might there be a more muted alternative? We have had enough grief these past six months: the unspeakable events of October 7th; the deaths of Israeli soldiers and civilians; the deaths of those living in Gaza; the unbelievable, unbearable rise of antisemitism throughout the world.
On Purim we celebrate our survival and legacy. Over the years, the custom has developed of cheering when the names ‘Esther’ and ‘Mordechai’ come up in the megillah. Maybe we make noise then rather than when we hear ‘Haman.’?
In those three verses from Deuteronomy, Amalek successfully picked off the weak and the stragglers in the rear. What Shabbat Zachor should teach us is that the response to the Amaleks of the world is not less but more: not less Jewish life and practice, but more; not less Jewish learning, but more; not less Jewish ethical behaviour, but more. That’s how we strengthen ourselves and equip ourselves to deal with the Amaleks.
Among the what we might call ‘charitable requirements’ connected with Purim is matanot la’avyonim, ‘gifts to the poor.’ This Purim, support all organisations working to provide for the needs of both Israelis and Palestinians, supporting any organisation which argues for the need for co-existence between Israelis and Palestinians. That’s why something like last Sunday’s Iftar here, bringing Jews and Muslims together, was so important. And we need to support each other at a time when many have discovered who – among the non-Jewish people they know – are true friends who have not been using what is reported as happening in Gaza as an excuse for bringing out their latent antisemitism.
In the real world, Hamans are all too real. On Purim we do what we can to forget Haman and those contradictions of life. That’s the easy way but not the real way. We have to return to this unredeemed and imperfect world where everything represented by Haman is conceivable and credible. And then we have to work to bring about a society where the Haman principle is not merely inoperative but no longer even conceivable.