by David Trimble

At the conclusion of this week’s portion (Deuteronomy 25:17-19), God instructs the Israelites concerning the memory of Amalek’s atrocities.  Reminding them that Amalek attacked weak and vulnerable stragglers as Israel made its way toward the land promised to them, God first enjoins Israel to “remember,” then to “wipe out the memory of Amalek from under heaven,” then to “never forget!” 

A new interpretive possibility emerged for me as I read this short but powerful passage.  I was struck by the phrase, “When the LORD your God grants you safety [or, gives you rest] from all your enemies around you, in the land that the LORD your God is giving you as a hereditary portion...”  If Torah provides a key to the historical role of the House of Israel in the redemption of the world, then this passage clearly refers to a time in the future.  Jews are indeed in the ancestral land of Israel, but they certainly have been granted neither safety nor rest from all their enemies around them.

Examining the passage with this lens, I was reminded of the concept of chosen trauma, from the work of Vamik Volkan, a Turkish Cypriote psychiatrist who has dedicated his life to the practice of peace.  The “choice” in a people’s chosen trauma is to select from among the many traumas in their collective history in order “to add a past generation’s mental representations of an event to its own identity.”  Here, in the passage from Deuteronomy, God Himself instructs the Israelites to conserve the memory of their persecution by Amalek.  Human beings are social animals, and, looking back as far as we can see into our history, we have consolidated collective identity by distinguishing a particular “us” from a particular “them.” Sadly, chosen traumas are at the core of cycles of retribution, such as now possess the peoples of Israel and Palestine.

I am compelled by how this passage interweaves and resonates with two passages in Genesis that move me at the deepest levels of my being, the stories of Jacob’s dream vision of the ladder (Genesis 28: 10-19) and of Jacob’s encounter with the Divine on his way to encountering his brother Esau (Genesis 32:23 - 33:17).  Each of these passages is tightly interwoven with the complicated relationship between Jacob and Esau (Amalek’s forebear) and the sacred particularity of the places of encounter, which are part of the land that God will give to Jacob’s descendants as a hereditary portion.  Jacob, who has taken the firstborn’s birthright from his older brother Esau, fears Esau’s retaliation.  He has his first encounter with the Divine fleeing from Esau, and his second years later, just before his terrifying encounter with Esau himself.  The land, which is part of the birthright that Jacob has taken from Esau, is an integral element of both stories.  We can interpret the attack by Esau’s descendant Amalek on Jacob’s descendants, as they were on their way to claim their birthright, as part of a retaliatory cycle, which God seems at first to encourage, as part of the formation of what will become the Jewish people: Remember who you are by remembering what has been done to you.

After God dispersed humanity from Babel, God set the intention to bless the peoples of the world by Abraham’s descendants.  Amalek was himself one of Abraham’s descendants.  I believe that the future unfolding of that blessing is contained in the sequence of injunctions in the passage.  In the early phases of our history, God tells the Israelites, “remember what Amalek did to you;” rely on the distinction between yourself and your enemies, thereby preserving yourself as a distinct people.  The time will come, however, when you will live in peace with those who have been your enemies.  In order to achieve and preserve such a time, human beings will need to relinquish their attachment to discourses that drive cycles of retaliation.  So, “you shall wipe out the memory of Amalek from under the heaven.,” i.e., let go of your attachment to your chosen trauma (It is noteworthy that Israel is bidden to wipe out Amalek’s memory, not Amalek and his people, particularly as Torah includes in other places Divine instructions to destroy peoples, such as those of the land that Israel is to occupy).  “Do not forget” this complex instruction, which can be read by one who yearns for the Messianic age as a message of hope for the future from a source as ancient as the formation of the Jewish people.