Amalek & U.S.
Self-examination and counterattack.

By Rabbi Daniel Lapin, president of Toward Tradition.
September 18, 2001 9:05 a.m.

isciplined and constructive analysis must now replace the pointless replaying of Tuesday's horrors. President Bush is planning the nation's response. As an Orthodox rabbi I turn for guidance to the pages of that very Book from which our nation's 17th- and 18th-century founders were most comfortable seeking wisdom and solace.

In the book of Exodus we find an apt Biblical model for the situation at hand. I refer to the Amalekite attack on the ancient Israelites shortly after their hurried departure from Egypt. For this, God commanded the Jews to make unceasing war on the Amalekites — but not only that. Jewish tradition points out that the stated location of the attack, Rephidim, is to be read not as the geographical name of any place but instead as a Hebrew word, a plural noun, alluding to the moral turpitude of the Children of Israel at the time shortly prior to the attack. God suggested that Amalek's attack was to be analyzed as a call to self-examination.

From the Amalek story we may extract two lessons. First of all is the obligation to root out evil of the kind that sends airliners smashing into the World Trade Center. Second, not every victimized nation or group is perfectly virtuous.

I realize this may sound outrageously insensitive, for many Americans are committed to the view that being a victim, as America was victimized this week, should immediately grant you immunity from all criticism. Thus the equation of victimhood with virtue has led some observers of turmoil in the Middle East to blame Israel for the fact that more than twice as many Palestinians have died in the present conflict as have Israelis. The conclusion for the morally untutored is simple: because Palestinians are dying in greater numbers, they must be the morally justified party in the conflict. But it is simply wrong to grant moral prestige on the basis of suffering. It is a core Jewish value, when confronted with catastrophe, to probe broadly and arrive at a detailed moral balance sheet.

I advise that we Americans do the same thing. I can't speak to the strategic question of how best to identify and destroy our nation's enemies. But we have been guilty of three dreadful mistakes during the past few decades, and they need to be addressed as surely as our assailants need to be punished.

The first mistake we made was to forget, amid peace and prosperity, what the face of sheer evil looks like. This forgetting has been easy for us. We are taught it in the schools, where children are instructed that there is no such thing as evil, only differences in point of view. You see, to admit the existence of evil means we would have to define evil according to someone's morality and we all know that in a multi-cultural society this would be wrong.

Knowing that there is evil carries with it many practical advantages. For instance, captains of commercial airplanes used to carry side arms, but politicians who didn't believe in evil long ago disarmed them. Armed pilots could have made quite a difference for the good on Tuesday.

A second mistake was to emasculate the CIA. In recent years, international sanctimoniousness about human rights trumped considerations of American security. The entire CIA structure was methodically undermined and demoralized by penalizing all operatives who might have violated the human rights of their targets.

Third, we Americans have ignored the real-life lessons that many of us learned in our fourth-grade schoolyard. The class bully was always encouraged by passivity. Sooner or later, you realized, you would have to bloody his nose. The longer you took to do the inevitable, the more demoralized you became.

Or, do you remember the unpleasant rich kid? He used to try to buy friendship with money. Did he ever win a most-popular-kid-in-the-class award? Of course not. He won only contempt and resentment. That, I'm afraid, is what America gets for its foreign aid. We should tell Mr. Arafat, Your people laughing and celebrating in the street at our agony has just ended your stipend.

When confronted with tragedy, the Jewish way is, then, to assess one's own moral condition. But — and here is the tricky part — while the victim gauges his faults he is also commanded to strike back in devastating force. In short, the strategy is counterattack accompanied by an equally remorseless attempt to identify the flaws that made the attack possible in the first place. Let us pray that something positive may come out of our suffering. If we Americans contemplate the lessons of Amalek, I believe it will.