Published: 13 March 2025
Last updated: 17 March 2025
In the lead up to Purim, we read Haftarah Zachor. Zachor means "Remember" and this Shabbat is known as Shabbat Zachor or the Sabbath of Memory.
But reading it this year was different - as so much of our lives are different after October 7. Suddenly Zachor’s themes of memory, forgetting and trauma are painfully raw and alive.
‘Remember what Amalek did to you by the way, when you came forth out of Egypt; how he met you and struck at your rear, all who were feeble behind you, when you were faint and weary; and he did not fear God.’
Today, how can we not think of Hamas as we read those words? How Hamas massacred innocent children, women and men at 6.30am, most of them in their pyjamas on their kibbutzim or dancing at a nature rave.
Zachor is read on the Shabbat before Purim because Haman was the direct descendent of Agag the Amalekite king.
The Torah says that Amalek attacked from behind, aiming at the weak and the stragglers. They attacked "karcha" - which literally means by way of happenstance or arbitrarily. Amalek's entire philosophy is that there is no design or providence in the world.
Comments1
Miriam Frommer19 March at 12:54 am
It is indeed tragic that Israel is in the throes of such a huge collective trauma, as well as the unimaginable pain experienced by the immediate families of the hostages, and Professor Lalor wisely counsels reinstatement of the spiritual dimension by striving for our highest humanity . However an earlier article by the same author, “Trauma: a nation still suffocating in grief”, probably gets closer to the nub of what will be needed viz the ousting of the government which has betrayed them on so many levels, in order to reinstate a sense of justice, a feeling that Israel is a country which lives by the highest moral and religious values.