Parshat Tetzaveh, Shabbat Zachor

Remembering the Worst to Innovate the Best

"Remember what Amalek did to you as you were leaving Egypt … how he smote the weakest of you while you were weary and tired …" Deuteronomy 25:17-18

"The Jews accepted upon themselves and took upon themselves and their descendants and anyone who associated with them, to fulfill these … days that are mentioned and celebrated in every generation …" Esther 9:27-28

Having just returned from an AIPAC policy meeting in Washington where the main message was Iran's desire to blot us Jews off the face of the map, I feel that I couldn't have landed a better verse than the Torah's warning about Amalek. In every generation, the Torah tells us in Exodus 17, God wages battle against the forces of hatred and death, who focus on the Jews as their central victim. Amalek does not even try to hide its murderous desires, just as Hamas has not made any effort to hide its own campaign to destroy the Jewish entity that we call our State of Israel. We never want to think of things that are so gruesome, but whenever we try to forget Amalek, we are forced to face his viciousness in a different form, but with the same goals.

But we are in the month of Adar, and we are supposed to be happy. How can we find that happiness in such a scary world? In a world that is working hard, from Professor Butz to President Ahmadinejad, to deny Amalek of the past in order to openly perpetrate it in the present, how can anyone find comfort?

From the depths of despair in Persia, as the Jews were nearly wiped out by an evil Prime Minister and a willing populace, from a dark, scary time in our history, came a new way for Jews of all time to celebrate and experience their Judaism. Purim is the only holiday when we are mandated not only to feast, but to help others feast by providing them with gifts of food or money. It is the only holiday when we are encouraged to drink a little too much, or a lot too much, and to purposely make ourselves as confused as possible. It is the only holiday when the prevailing custom is to be disruptive in shul – not to talk, but to scream and stomp at the mention of Haman's name. As much some rabbis through the generations have tried to stop the wild customs of Purim, the Jewish people have kept them.

In fact, the Talmud tells us that the rabbis of the Land of Israel weren't in the mood to allow Purim to exist at all. In Tractate Megilla, Esther asks them to decree the new holiday, to require that the story of Esther be read as part of the Tanach for all generations. The rabbis are skeptical, and it takes some fancy hermeneutics on Esther's part to get the rabbis to agree. But in the end, our tradition tells us that Purim was a time when the Torah was re-accepted, this time without any duress. I would suggest that it was the innovation of such a wildly happy, silly, over-the-top holiday that confirmed that the Torah was here to stay among the Jewish people. If virulently anti-Semitic Persia of old could give rise to the happiest holiday in the Jewish year, based on one or two hints in the Torah, then the Jewish people really had got the message of the Torah: we respond to those who would like to wipe us out with more innovation, with more creativity, with more of the living Torah that God gave us at Sinai.

I am telling Hamas or Haman or Persia or Iran that we Jews are going to react to their threats precisely the way our sisters and brothers reacted two thousand years ago: first, we will defend ourselves with God's help and with all the cleverness of the Jewish people. And second, we will not let them take away the joy we have in being Jewish, the happiness we know being the people of the Torah can give to us.

The beginning of the regular Torah portion that we read this Shabbat, Tetzaveh, gives us the same message: Moshe is honored with receiving the pure olive oil for the great candelabra in the Temple, which symbolized the light Israel sheds on the whole world. But why Moshe and not Aharon, or Betzalel, the great architect of the desert sanctuary? The commentator Rabbi Naphtali Tzvi Yehuda Berlin says it is because Moshe's power was to be an innovative thinker, to innovate Torah ideas that were revealed by God, but which no one had thought about before. Aharon understood the tradition, but that was not enough to illuminate the world. What was needed was Moshe's creativity – that is what God's revelation needs in order to truly fulfill the mission of the Jewish people. And in the days of Purim, Esther and Mordechai were the innovators, giving us Purim and a new response to the viciousness of Haman.

In every generation we will face an Amalek or a Haman. Our answer will be more Torah, greater Judaism, through our looking back to God's revelation, and using our own creative and innovative skills in the tradition of Moshe. And with more Torah, we will find happiness and success, not just to continue and persevere, but to thrive and ultimately outshine all the dark evil in this world.

This Shabbat, let's remember, learn, innovate and get ready to celebrate like we've never celebrated before.

Shabbat shalom and Purim sameach!

Rabbi Asher Lopatin