Addressing White Supremacy and Amalek

In America today, we have white supremacy.

In the Torah, we had Amalek.

Amalek is seen as the eternal enemy of our people,

whose members found strength by making us suffer.

Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you

and the land that the Lord your God is giving to you as a hereditary portion,

you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven.

Do not forget.

Our rabbinic sages parsed these sentences and derived two distinct meanings.

Blotting out the memory of Amalek is a military command,

literally to destroy Amalek.

Now facing today's Amalek,

we are reminded that the Torah calls us not just to escape,

but to extirpate Amalek.

We are commanded to do real and literal battle against it.

That means coming off the bench in the fight against white supremacy.

It means putting our reputations and our money and our physical bodies on the line,

but also so that we are ready to answer people with radically destructive and incoherent

versions of history so that we can counter white supremacists,

so that we can counter Amalek and blot them out by

retaining on our lips and in our records their history.

By being bearers of history, we can help guide the future.

Blotting out Amalek need not merely be about military conquest.

Equally important is ideological victory,

and nothing could more readily counter white supremacy than a Jewish community proudly helping our Muslim neighbors.

There is nothing that undermines a white supremacist worldview more than

diverse communities getting along and building together towards the future.