Deuteronomy 25:17 Remember what Amalek did unto thee by the way as ye came forth out of Egypt.
Deuteronomy 25:19 Thou shalt blot out the remembrance of Amalek from under heaven; thou shalt not forget.
The foundation of all morality begins with a rejection of evil. There can be no morality without a rejection of evil, only vapid self-righteousness. Without rejecting evil there is no good, there is only lip service and rhetoric because without separating good from evil, good becomes contaminated by evil. Becomes contaminated by moral equivalence, by excusing evil, by tolerating evil and in the end defending it.
To secularists, liberals and an entire generation raised in the shadow of the cultural values they have erected, this entire passage seems vicious, genocidal, nationalistic and otherwise repugnant.
"So," they will argue, "Amalek attacked the Jews and killed some people. The thing to do was to reach an understanding with them and find a way to live in peace with them. Why hang on to a grudge let alone blot out a people. That's not the way civilized people behave."
The greatest plague of our time is an inability to comprehend and confront evil. We live in an era that styles itself as the most moral, yet has no clue about the very basic nature of morality.
All morality begins with a rejection of evil. The modern West cannot reject evil and has become infected by it and the more we tolerate evil the more degraded our societies become. The more our political and religious leaders lose an ability to distinguish between good and evil, the more they collaborate with evil in our foreign policy, our culture, our values, our policies and our basic concepts of right and wrong.
Zachor. Remember. This is the basis of rejecting evil. To remember that it is evil. When we forget that it is evil, we no longer know what to reject. How do we remember that it is evil, by remembering the evil it has done. How do we remember that fire burns. We remember because we were burned by it or we saw others burned by it. How do we remember evil, the same way. Trying to remember evil as abstract formulas doesn't work, it isn't strong or enduring enough. Abstract formulas quickly grow hazy, morality based on abstract theorizing is easily susceptible to manipulation and equivocation. Only a remembrance based on the evil deeds themselves endures.
Remember what Amalek did to you. Only when you have done that are you equipped to blot out every part of evil, at the last even the remembrance itself. Remember every aspect of evil. Remember that he attacked the weak, that he cowardly attacked those who lagged behind. Remember because this is his nature and because he will do it again.
On 9/11 Muslim Terrorists murdered more than 3000 Americans. It was neither their first attack nor their last. It succeeded because we had forgotten that we had enemies and we had forgotten to blot them out.
We are still forgetting. 5 years later the eradicators of memory have been hard at work. The liberals have never stopped crying that the war on terror is brutal and misguided. The 9/11 Skeptics, their name itself derived from Holocaust deniers, are gaining prominence arguing that it never really happened, that the Muslims never did it. To all of them we answer, Zachor, we remember. We remember what happened and who did it.
Zachor. We remember those who danced and cheered. We remember those who killed. We remember our enemies and remembering them is the first and foremost line to fighting them. As has been proven in Iraq and at home, we cannot properly fight the enemy if we do not remember who they are. If we forget that they are Arabs and Muslims, not a few extremists, but multitudes who hate us and seek our destruction.
After the Holocaust the Jews swore to remember, they swore Never Again, but we forgot. We let the Holocaust be diluted, Hollywoodized, universalized, turned into a history lesson about right wing tyrants and finally a weapon for the very butchers of the Holocaust in Germany and across Europe to use against us as we fight off the next generation of Amaleks seeking to destroy us. We gave in to the tributes and the Hollywood premieres. Schindler's List, Life is Beautiful, Paper Clips. While we watched the reels of the past, we forgot that remembrance is not for the past but for the future. Remembrance is not a cemetery but a door. The past becomes the future again when the cycle isn't broken. The evils of yesterday quickly return to haunt tomorrow in another shape.
Zachor. On July 4th, on September 11th, on December 7th, on the 27th of Nissan, the 14th of Adar, we do not merely remember the past, we fight a war. A war of memory. We fight a war against the destroyers of memory, against the erosion and entropy of remembrance by the passing generations. On the days of remembrance we rise up to defy these forces, we rise to defy evil and grant to our children a legacy of remembrance and a commandment to continue the fight for us when we are no longer here.
The war is fought not only on those days. It is fought every day, fought against denial and deception, against propaganda and deceit. Today we fight against those who claim that the terrorists had just claims to kill us, against those who claim the best way to fight terrorism is to give in to their demands, we fight those who claim the attacks never happened, that the terrorists never carried them, we fight against those who claim it is counterproductive to remember what happened, that the best way is to move on. We fight against all these and many, many more. Zachor.
May God, our Father in Heaven, Commander of the Hosts, lead us in these and all the other wars we fight daily so that good may one day prevail on this earth.
Comments
Amen!
ReplyDeleteAmein! "You don't reason with evil. You destroy it." --Duncan, (Talmud on Steroids)
ReplyDeleteThey are ugly people to say the least.
ReplyDeleteI think they should leave earth on that alone.
War on terror is working too.
ReplyDeleteWe have to keep it up til they are done.
Beautiful, righteous, humane blogging. Thank you. Please forgive my error in not visiting your site for the past few weeks.
ReplyDeleteFirstly, I don't know why you feel the need to conflate religion with morality ("To secularists, liberals and an entire generation raised in the shadow of the cultural values they have erected, this entire passage seems vicious, genocidal, nationalistic and otherwise repugnant"). In fact, religion is, unsurprisingly for a doctrine that remains largely unchanged over thousands of years, externalises morality, is open to interpretation and inspires fanaticism among its followers, religion is a major force for instability and violence in the world today.
ReplyDeleteInterestingly, you haven't defined what evil is. So, you've given 9/11 as an example of an evil act, because you consider killing 3,000 to be an evil act. This is fair enough - if that's not evil, I don't know what is. But surely if killing three thousand civilians illegally is evil, then killing 100,000 (as in Iraq) is too? And surely arming and supporting a dictator (Suharto) that embarked on a campaign of genocide in East Timor, killing 200,000 people (a third of the population)...surely that has to be evil aswell?
Of course, in those last two examples the US/UK was responsible. This seems to defy your implied assertion that "the modern West" is good, and must learn how to reject evil.
Lastly, you don't say HOW we are to reject evil. For instance, I would say that trying to combat terrorism (an evil) using bombs hasn't worked and won't work. Trying to combat it using a two-pronged strategy of a) hunting down the terroists and trying them as criminals and b) addresing the legitimate grievances much of the world has with the West to ensure radical groups like al-Qaeda remain isolated an ostracised (and so easier to deal with) in the societies they operate in.
Firstly religion is the source of morality. There's ultimately no morality without religion, anymore than a plant can survive for long without its roots. The right religion that is.
ReplyDeleteReligion is indeed a major force for instability. The wrong religion is a cancer that eats away at the world. The right religion has the potential to destabilize the self-centered static world people try to create, for one that's truly meaningfull.
From there we get our definition of evil, hatred of God.
It's ironic that you cite Suharto's Indonesia, which is yet another example of the worldwide Muslim genocides liberals keep whitewashing except when they can use them to bash their own countries, as you are predictably doing. You cite the bogus figure of 100,000 dead in Iraq, while utterly ignoring how many Saddam killed, because again liberal morality hinges on hatred of their own countries, rather than hatred of evil.
Is the West perfect or all that good? Certainly not. History tells us otherwise. So do current events. The West, particularly America, is good by contrast to most of the Third World and the innate savagery of the followers of Islam. The West has the potential to ennoble itself despite its flaws but that potential is speedily vanishing and it is vanishing because in fact many of its citizens gleefully choose evil in the name of multi-culturalism or tolerance, but those are merely disguises in the end for their real impulses.
Saying that combating terrorism with bombs and guns doesn't work is as silly as saying that a fight can't be won because it hasn't been yet. Thousands of terrorists are dead, repeated internal Al Queda communiques testify to the fact that they seem themselves in big trouble and stretched thin. We are winning, it just as simple or as straightforward as a Hollywood movie but then real life wars rarely are.
As to your proposal.
Hunting down and trying the terrorists as criminals, doesn't even work with our own domestic criminals. Even with the toughest anti-drug laws, fighting drug cartels using criminal codes has done little good. You can consult the Kerensky government to see how much good their criminals codes did against the Communists or how much good the German legal code did against the Nazis.
You can meet violence with violence or choose surrender. As for the solution lying in appeasing "legitimate grievances" I can assure you that bringing the Muslim Brotherhood to power, nuking Israel and massacring every single Jew in the West will do absolutely nothing but sate their appetite with more "legitimate grievances"
Post a Comment