“As a concentration camp prisoner, the monotony of his work detail is suddenly broken when he is brought to the bedside of a dying Nazi. The German delineates the gruesome details of his career, describing how he participated in the murder and torture of hundreds of Jews…explains that he sought a Jew from whom to beseech forgiveness. Wiesenthal silently contemplates the wretched creature lying before him, and then, unable to comply but unable to condemn, walks out of the room…all the Jewish respondents thought Simon Wiesenthal was right in not forgiving the repentant Nazi mass murderer, and the Christians thought he was wrong.”
While I don’t consider myself to be consumed by religious extremism or hatred, this fascinating article brought home to me that Judaism accepts and even requires the identification and hatred of evil. Those of us who have grown up or are currently living in countries influenced by Christian thought may instinctively find ourselves contrasting this Jewish concept with the fundamental Christian teaching that all people, no matter how evil, are worthy of love and forgiveness. The article vividly depicts how this contrast is viewed from the Christian perspective:
“A Catholic nun who is struck by the hatred Israelis bear for their enemies, Johanna, tells of an Israeli Hebrew teacher “who was very close to us. She told us how her young son hates Saddam... She said it with such enthusiasm. She was so proud of her son.” “I realized,” Johanna concluded, “that hatred is in the Jewish religion.” She was right. When Queen Esther had already visited defeat upon Haman—the Hitler of his time, attempted exterminator of the Jewish people—and had killed Haman’s supporters and sons, King Ahasuerus asks what more she could possible want…Esther said, “If it pleases the king . . . let the ten sons of Haman be hanged on the gallows.”
Can we identify a religious principle which underpins this required hatred?
The paradigm of evil in the Torah is represented by Amalek – a nation which the Torah instructs must be eternally recalled and opposed. In his commentary on the Torah, Rabbi S. R. Hirsch understands the Amalekite ideology and ethos to be the antithesis of Jewish morality. Amalek does not hate nations that are its equal in power and armament, but rather regards their military preparedness as a sign of respect for their sword. Amalek fights them but honours them since they share its principles. But Amalek harbours deadly hatred for those whose spiritual and moral values idealise a society which transcends and refuses to be dictated to by the power of the sword, which teaches that the powerful are duty-bound to assist, rather than exploit, the weak. Thus, when the nation who embodies these values took its first step in history, Amalek rushed to “massacre your stragglers, all those who trailed after you when you were faint and weary”.
Judaism Reclaimed identifies a chilling similarity between this ideological depiction of Amalek and the belief system presented by Adolf Hitler in Mein Kampf. Hitler develops (perhaps selectively) an understanding of Friedrich Nietzsche’s theory of master and slave morality in which the superior, Aryan “ubermensch” was being compromised by the “slave morality” of those who insist on idealizing acts of kindness and mercy toward others (identified as Jews and those influenced by “Jewish morality”). It was, he claimed, the Jews’ perpetuation of the “slave morality” to serve the weak (spread via the Church, democracy, and Western civilization) that compromised the master race’s inherent entitlement to dominate humanity.
Jewish teachings are full of examples of how nothing stands in the way of true and genuine repentance. Rabbinic sources seek to demonstrate the extent of this principle with their depictions of bloodthirsty biblical figures such as Nevuzzeradon and Menashe being accepted as righteous converts and penitents. Nevertheless, in opposition to Christian theology which calls for even the most evil oppressors to be forgiven indiscriminately as a form of imitatio dei, Judaism believes that the ongoing existence and pursuit of such an ideology of evil is understood to challenge God’s sovereignty in the world, and certainly His core moral teachings. Thus, the ideology of Amalek and those who adhere to it, cannot be loved, forgiven or in any way reconciled with.
Further reading: The Virtue of Hate, by Meir Y. Soloveichik, here,
First posted on Facebook 18 January 2020 here.
