Moral Clarity in an Age of Confusion: Shabbat Zachor 5786

This piece was first posted in Hanassi Highlights, 26 February. You can also read it in Hebrew translation, via ChatGPT, here.

Rabbi Jonathan Sacks zt”l once drew attention to a deeply uncomfortable truth: modern Western culture has largely lost the concept of an enemy. We instinctively assume that hostility must be the result of grievance. If someone attacks, there must be something we did to provoke it. Surely hatred must be rational.

Parshat Zachor challenges that assumption.

The Torah commands us: “Remember what Amalek did to you… do not forget.” Amalek attacked Bnei Yisrael in the wilderness without warning, without provocation, targeting the weak and stragglers at the rear. There was no territorial dispute, no prior history, no political grievance. It was aggression for its own sake.

Strikingly, the Torah’s response to Amalek is vividly different from its response to Egypt. The Egyptians enslaved us, oppressed us, and decreed the murder of our children. Yet the Torah instructs: “Do not despise an Egyptian.” Why? Because, as Rabbi Sacks explains, “The Egyptians feared the Israelites because they were strong. The Amalekites attacked the Israelites because they were weak.”

Pharaoh himself said, “The Israelites are becoming too numerous and strong for us.” Their hatred, though immoral and cruel, was rooted in fear and self-preservation.

Amalek was different. They attacked not because they were threatened, but because they encountered vulnerability. That distinction is not merely historical. It is moral and theological. Amalek represents the phenomenon of evil that cannot be reduced to misunderstanding or insecurity. It is the hatred that seeks vulnerability and exploits it. It is the ideology that glories in destruction.

The Rambam explains that the mitzvah to remember Amalek is about sustaining moral clarity: “to remember always his evil deeds and his ambush… to arouse enmity.” The Torah commands us not to forget the existence of such evil. Forgetfulness breeds confusion; confusion breeds danger.

We no longer know who the biological descendants of Amalek are. Since the time of Sancheriv, former national identities have long been blurred. Amalek today is not a genealogical category but a moral one—a  symbol of those forces, in every generation, that seek the destruction of the Jewish people simply because we exist.

As we read Parshat Zachor, its message remains larger than any particular chapter of history. Jewish experience has repeatedly reminded us that not all hatred can be reasoned with, and not all evil can be explained away.

Amalek may symbolize hatred without cause—but Am Yisrael symbolizes covenant without end. On Shabbat Zachor we do not only recall an ancient enemy. We reaffirm our identity as a people sustained by memory and bound to a Divine promise that has outlived every empire that sought to undo it.

Our task is not simply to survive history, but to remain faithful within it -to carry the covenant forward with faith, dignity, and moral courage.

Shabbat Shalom!