Sermon: Tetzaveh – Zachor: Blot out the memory but do not forget

Written by Writings & Sermons by others — 4 March 2013

Just over a month ago I returned to Alyth after three months Sabbatical serving as a Rabbi in Cape Town, South Africa.  In the run up to my departure in October many kind members of Alyth gave me sage advice about how to live there safely.  There was quite a spectrum of advice that I heard.  The general theme though was – be vary careful.

 

When you are driving around Cape Town keep your doors locked and your windows closed.  When you pull up at a traffic light leave a few metres between your car and the car in front so that you can escape if a car jacking is threatened.  Don’t ride a bicycle or you will find it stolen from under you.  Join a gym so you don’t ever think about going jogging – it’s just too unsafe.  With advice like that it’s a wonder that my family let me go!

 

Well I got there and for my first few days I was terribly terribly careful.  Then I began to notice that I was the only person leaving a gap at the traffic lights.  Folks in convertibles with the roof down were cheerfully pulling up chatting to the traffic light peddlers. Men and women on bicycles sped past in lycra without a care in the world.  After restricting my jogging only to the Sea Point promenade where I had been told it would probably be safe, I followed the advice of my new Cape Town friends and spread my wings to run around many more of the beauty spots in the city.

 

Yes, at the Synagogue, Temple Israel where I was serving, people did have horror stories to tell of violent robberies that had occurred to friends and family, but they did not tend to have taken place in Cape Town and they were mostly, thank goodness, some time in the past.

 

Temple Israel has been around for very nearly 70 years, a haven of thriving Reform Judaism serving nearly three thousand adults and children throughout the city from three federated Shuls.  There’s much to say over the coming months about my experience there but today I want to focus one unmissable aspect.

 

The beachfront along which I first jogged was until twenty years ago reserved for white people only.  The area in which I was living in a guest flat at a Shul member’s home was in an area from which all non-white people had been excluded fifty years ago and only allowed to return to live at the end of the oppressive Apartheid system.  This system had deliberately and methodically kept white and black people separated and in a pernicious hierarchy for many decades, building and aiming to entrench a yawning inequality which had been the case in South Africa since it was settled by European immigrants in the seventeenth Century.

 

I was there in Cape Town in the first year that the graduating class from High School were the first generation that had never experienced apartheid first hand – the “born frees” as they were known.  I can only share my own impressions of what I saw – and my impressions were questioned by some members of the Shul in Cape Town as well as ex South Africans here in London.

 

Temple Israel itself is a Jewish community that includes people of all of the races of South Africa. Together with white members of the Synagogue are black and those whom the South Aficans called coloured people who have been born Jewish and people who have converted into Judaism, some because their partner was Jewish and they wished to be as well and some lishma ¬– people who converted out of sheer love for Judaism.   Through them and through other members of the Synagogue who worked or volunteered there I got to go right outside of the middle class enclaves of Cape Town, to spend time and get to know people in the mostly shantytown townships of Vryground, Khayelitsha and Langa.  I also got to understand the fate of the flat land with isolated churches marooned in it I passed every time I drove from the Southern Suburbs of Cape Town to the City Centre.  This area was called District Six which, as a mixed area, had been razed to the ground in the 1960’s and early 1970’s by the Apartheid regime

 

In these places you learn the meaning of our chilling second Torah portion this morning where we are commanded to blot out the zecher of Amalek – something we are told we must never forget.  Seemingly an utter contradiction.

 

What does zecher mean?  Literally remembrance or memory or even power of whatever Amalek represents. It is from the root word which applies to God upholding the Covenant, to making Shabbat real, to God helping a woman to overcome her infertility. From bible times onwards Jewish sages have considered the Amalek whose zecher we must blot out not to be a people, for the Amalekite people were no longer identifiable even two thousand years ago but rather to be an ideology.  The ideology of Amalek is self serving violence and oppression – this is the zecher, the power or remembrance we have to blot out.

 

This interpretation is central to the Purim Megillah of Esther which we hear tonight and tomorrow morning where Haman, the oppressive politician who gets the King to decree the destruction of the Jews is linked back through our Haftarah portion today to the Amalekites.  It is central to every Purim spiel which has mocked the cruel dictator of its day for their Amalekite ideology of self serving violence and oppression.  Blotting out the zecher of this ideology is a command to Jews to be at the forefront of challenging violent and oppressive regimes so that they cannot build a reputation to be remembered by.  Jews must lessen the power of oppressive ideology by challenging its effects and putting right its wrongs.

 

This is what I saw in the townships of Cape Town, where people were trying hard to set up and volunteer to help in good schools that would bring children out of the poverty their parents had experienced through apartheid, where Jews and others were helping with start up business schemes and training, lifting the current generation our of poverty, where Jews were working with local township people to challenge the domestic violence that has found an easy breeding ground where there is little hope.   Blotting out Amalek includes bringing basic services like electricity, safer sanitation and water supplies to knocked together shacks so that what white South Africa can take for granted is person by person becoming available to all.

 

What Apartheid did to South Africa is slowly, slowly being blotted out, as I heard from a young man who had grown up in a shack in Langa and who now had trained to work in a Call Centre, taught by a member of Temple Israel.  He now has a regular income and could see that slowly slowly Langa was getting better.

 

The Amalek lesson says though that just as you blot out the effects of pernicious ideology do not forget.  Do not forget what we can do to one another through violence and oppression so that we can learn to get away from it in the future.  The District Six Museum in Cape Town is full of such memory – to ensure that the destruction of a community is remembered for the richness pulverised.  A complementary exhtibition on the Jewish immigrants who were also swept out of District Six was held at the Jewish Museum whilst I was there at the same time.

 

So even though you see the effects of Apartheid piece by piece being blotted out, you must as a Cape Townian remember that there is still such a long way to go before equality of opportunity is achieved in South Africa – so never forget the journey that has been travelled and is still to be travelled.

 

Maimonides wrote  “It is a positive command to remember evil and not to forget it in our hearts so that we will always learn to hate it  (Laws of Kings 5:5)”

 

 

The lesson of Amalek is also a personal lesson to us.  We must try not to let the wrongs we have personally suffered in the past from other people or other ideologies be so powerful that we cannot get over them, transcend them.  We must blot out their zecher.  But at the same time we should not forget them, for denial of the truth of our life histories is not helpful.  It is from confronting the truth – much as South Africa’s Truth and Reconciliation Commission did to start out the process of blotting out Apartheid  – that we can grow healthily into the future whether as a nation or as individuals.