“You must remember what Amalek has done to you, says our Holy Bible. And we do remember,” said Benjamin Netanyahu on 28 October. There’s no point wasting words over the lifelong secular conman’s sudden interest in biblical texts, or even in asking whether it’s kosher to follow an injunction to wipe out enemy tribes if your main object is to prolong a war in order to stay out of jail.
I’m more interested in how the Amalek passages have guided Jews more often, lately, than the ones I was told to remember as a child: “You shall not wrong a stranger or oppress him, for you were strangers in the land of Egypt.” Some version of that injunction is repeated 36 times in the Torah. It’s hard not to wonder if it corresponds to the number of righteous people for whose sake, says the Talmud, the world keeps turning.
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