Addressing White Supremacy in America

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.