Jewish Fear & Killing the Enemy

Dear Friends,

Drowning in images of death and rhetoric spilling from distraught bodies, it is clear to me how afraid everyone is. Whether or not we are feeling through this tragedy with similar or divergent ethos, know that my compassion for you remains. We are all shaped by disparate histories, and we can never know completely why someone comes to feel the way they do. Even if we believe another’s perspective will bring further injustice, the only way to affect change is through vibrations of love. We move into trust through experiences of feeling safe and seen. 

In Jewish mythology, the archetype of evil is represented by Amalek — an enemy tribe that attacked the Israelites as they traveled through the wilderness after leaving Egypt. Amalek did not wage just war. They ambushed the Israelite camp from the back, where the elderly and the frail, the women and children were placed for safety. Because of their embodiment of evil, there is a command in the Jewish tradition to wipe them out, the men and women, children and infants, the Torah is explicit, even their animals. And this is the mythology that Israel is invoking as it destroys Gaza. The biblical prerogative to annihilate evil.

Everyone in this horrific saga is assessing the humanity of the opposing camp. How distinguishable are the innocent from those with genocidal intentions? (They exist on both sides). How much responsibility does a citizen bear for the decisions of its government, to enact terror or occupation? Violence against the Other becomes conscionable when we collapse this vast internal landscape of the humanity of the Other, into a single, narrow, hateful projection. The ethics of war and liberation have everything to do with our understanding of the Other, and yet, the very thing which makes another group Other, is the lack of substantial relationality with human beings that compose that group. If our assessment of Palestinians or Jews is not rooted in relationships, then the external data we consume to inform ourselves only reifies what we already feel. Maybe our sense of the Other has more to do with our distrust of ourselves than with anything concrete in their experience?

I imagine the command to obliterate evil made a foothold in the tradition because it was something we witnessed in every generation. It was an internalized mirror. We created an imaginary prerogative, because we yearned for a lived experience of safety where evil was annihilated. But it was a dream. Never until now, we’re Jews capable of annihilating anything. Throughout the history of religion, there are always interpreters who read the texts as referring to externals – but all of the mythic entities have internal referents. The mystics and the healers and the trauma specialists all know, it’s an inside game. The Kedushat Levi, an 18th century chassidic master knew it too. He writes,

“Every person in Israel needs to erase the evil part that is concealed in his own heart, that is known by the name Amalek. Whenever the seed of Amalek is found in the world it is found in the human being, since every human being is a little world. This is the reality of Amalek, the force of evil inside every human being, which arises each time we are brought to sin. Regarding this inner aspect, the Torah demands us to remember evil.” (Kedushat Levi, Shabbat Zachor)

There is profound, deep rooted fear and insecurity in the Jewish community. We have been brutally oppressed for centuries, and we have every reason to believe that no one will protect us but ourselves. But what has played out thus far, in the not so short, not so long history of Israel, is a repetitive cycle of distrust and death, you kill us, we kill you more. Even if Hamas is destroyed (along with thousands and thousands of children), the forces which gave rise to this iteration of evil – the strangling injustices of occupation, born from the fear of the Other within the Jewish psyche that predicates their necessity – will not have changed at all. We will repeat this cycle of terror and annihilation over and over again. 

The violence of both Hamas and the Israeli army, is causing mutual hatred and distrust to fume. The horrors committed by Hamas have refueled Jewish fear and hatred of Palestinians. And the cruelty of the IDF, decimating a sieged civilian population, fuels the pro-Palestinian hatred of Jews. As the war continues, antisemitism, islamophobia and racism boil, and it will become scarier and scarier to be a Jew anywhere (though not as scary as being a Palestinian in Gaza or the West Bank). Paradoxically then, the act of wiping out evil for the sake of Jewish safety, only feeds the fire of Jewish vulnerability. And though it will necessitate facing all the dark wounded depths of the Jewish psyche, there is another way.

The road to peace will be long and terrifying, and it begins by attending to our own woundedness. There are threads to untangle between Jewish trauma and antisemitism. Sometimes antisemitism is real. People hate Jews for invalid (because they “run the world”) and valid reasons (dropping bombs on children). But regardless of validity, the acting out of that hatred should be condemned by every movement claiming to fight against oppression. But much of the antisemitism discussed in the American Jewish community, and almost all of the antisemitism named around Israel, is used as a false shield to deflect from the very real atrocities of occupation. Our woundedness has us terrified of the Other, even when our privilege and safety is unprecedented. Most of the protesters calling for a ceasefire don’t hate Jews, they just want to see a free Palestine, where Palestinains can live in equality and peace, as all human beings deserve. What we see in their cause is a reflection of our own wound. Can we learn how to affirm the justice of their yearning, as we tend to the needs of our own people? Can we be more honest about our fears and privileges, the injustices we bear and enact?

We are watching what it means to believe that evil is something on the outside, something that can be eradicated. We must try another way. Peace will be worked one vulnerable conversation at a time. Peace will be made by collaboration through difference. In the midst of making something together, Others will become friends. It will take generations. It’s not upon us to complete the work, but neither are we free to desist from it (Pirkei Avot 2:16).

Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Zach Fredman