
Rabbi Yaier Lehrer
ylehrer@gmail.com
412-820-7000
February 7, 2025
After the Israelites triumphantly cross the Red Sea that had opened up to save them from an Egyptian army, they are attacked by the Amalekites. The Amalekites are thereby established as the embodiment of evil as far as the Israelites are concerned. It is later on in the Torah, as the Israelites are about to enter the Promised Land, that they are commanded to remember what the Amalekites did and to wipe out the Amalekites people.
Unlike with other attacks on the Israelites, no motive is made clear for the attack. There is no territorial or other reason given, just that Amalek “came upon” the Israelites and engaged in a brutal battle. But with God’s unique command to destroy them, one can infer that they had no good reason other than to kill and cause harm to the Israelites.
I recently took a course on Meeting Anti-Semtism with Mindfulness led by the esteemed Rabbi Angela Buchdahl through the Institute for Jewish Spirituality, one of the texts we used tried to make sense of the evil in the world. In the texts from Genesis Rabbah, the midrash talks about a meeting that takes place in the heavens where the ministering angels debate the wisdom of creating Adam. God says let us make man in our image, and some of the angels dispute the wisdom of this act since evil deeds will also come from this creation. But in the end, God creates Adam.
And we see evidence of the possibility of evil in people in the murder of Abel by his brother Cain in a dispute that is not clear but may be related to Abel having made a sacrifice which was accepted by God and Cain made a sacrifice that was not pleasing to God.
Evil has been with us since the beginning. Why evil exists is hard for many of us to understand. Why evil is a part of the fabric of society is troublesome. But we know that the path to defeating evil, the way to weaken evil is to apply the principles that we have been taught in our tradition for many years, and to apply those principles with passion, to be conspicuous about our attitude towards evil. While we are not about to eradicate Amalek, we do have the ability to weaken the evil in this world by committing to taking action.
A couple of hundred years ago, the philosopher Edmund Burke put this idea very succinctly in his famous statement that “the only thing necessary for the triumph of evil is for good people to do nothing.” In other words, our willingness to combat evil by taking a stance or by taking action is the force capable of defeating evil of all kinds, even when it means taking unpopular positions. . Perhaps the easiest and most modern way to encapsulate this idea is to say “if you see something do something.” This is the mission of our people, what we have been chosen to do.
Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi Yaier Lehrer
I believe that the unarmed truth and unconditional love will have the final word in reality. That is why right, while temporarily defeated, is stronger than evil triumphant. Martin Luther King, Jr.