The desire for revenge is compelling, yet just as equally circular, endless, and invariably self-defeating. In the Bible, the roots of revenge take us back to Cain’s slaughter of Abel. Although the rabbis offer at least three reasons for this first fratricide, in the final analysis nothing really justified it, the reasons coming as an afterthought because we – the readers – cannot accept that such an act has no motivation, let alone justification.
In the Scroll of Esther, revenge is a powerful theme, but just as clearly one that leads to confusion and tragedy. At the outset, King Ahashuerus would have his royal anger vented on his stubborn wife, Vashti, for refusing to appear before him and his merry guests (Esther 1:12-22). But no sooner has his will been done – either by divorcing the lady or, according to the rabbis, her execution – then the king’s anger subsides, and he regrets his decision. Unfortunately for him, he finds there is no way back. Even God cannot change the past; how much less so a king of flesh and blood.
Haman’s rage at Mordechai’s refusal to bow down to him – the newly appointed prime minister – erupts with such fury that instead of seeking revenge on just one man, he immediately plans to destroy the entire people from whom this obdurate protester springs. (Esther 3: 1-7).
However, the text informs us that this hatred is not merely a personal whim but has historical roots. For Haman is “the son of Hamdata the Agagite” (ibid 3:1), thus linked to the enemy of Saul and, farther back yet, to the vicious Amalek who attacked the recently released Israelite slaves from Egypt. It is these Amalekites who provide the halachic basis for the festival of Purim, since the Torah itself commands the Children of Israel “to remember the Amalekites... and you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under the skies” (Exodus 17: 8-16; Deuteronomy 25: 17-19 ). According to this, the whole basis for recalling Purim reeks of revenge, if not indeed of genocide.
All these examples of revenge culminate in the plot by Haman to destroy the Jews, a plot that is uncovered at the last moment through the dramatic interventions of Mordechai and Esther.
However, immediately after this, the Jews themselves are caught up in an act of revenge, unparalleled since their decimation of the Canaanites in the time of Joshua: “And in the capital city of Shushan, the Jews murdered 500 men” (Esther 9: 6), “and also the ten sons of Haman” (ibid 12). “And the Jews assembled on the 14th of the month of Adar and killed in Shushan 300 men but took no spoils. And the rest of the Jews who were in the king’s dominions assembled and defended themselves and gained respite from their enemies and slew 75,000 of those that hated them, but took no spoils” (ibid. 16-17).
Such a response may be considered natural and possibly inevitable. The rabbis seek solace in the historical parallel with Amalek. Just as the memory of Amalek had to be wiped out for their cowardly and unprovoked act, so too must the Children of Israel learn to respond appropriately. Indeed, the result of weakening one’s resolve on this issue has dire consequences. Martin Buber could never reconcile himself to this response, opining that Samuel had simply misunderstood God’s word. Contrariwise, a midrashic tradition states that if you show mercy to the cruel, you will invariably end up being cruel to the kind (Kohelet Rabba 7:36).
Another way the sages responded to the Scroll of Esther was to ignore it. According to Prof. Elhanan Reiner of Alma and Tel Aviv University’s Jewish History Department, rabbinical commentary on Megillat Esther is uncharacteristically sparse, especially Chapter Nine, which focuses on the Jews’ revenge on their enemies. “This is a sign,” says Reiner, “that the rabbis were uncomfortable with the subject, and sought to ignore or neutralize it.”
Even latter commentators – including the medieval ones – are almost totally quiet on this ninth chapter. Was it a question of not wanting to excite their non-Jewish neighbors in the Diaspora? Was their own silence a parallel to God’s hiddenness in the scroll itself?
Among the hassidic masters, most rely on the well-worn Amalek-Haman nexus. Yet, occasionally, there is a comment that addresses the specific issue of revenge. In his book Tiferet Shlomo, Rabbi Dov Zvi HaCohen makes a distinction between simple evil and that of Amalek; the former always contains some “holy spark,” while Amalek possess no such sparks. They are pure evil, exhibiting no desire whatsoever to connect themselves to the sacred. The Jews of Shushan thus not only wiped them out but also refused to touch their possessions or take spoils, which would surely contain spiritually contaminated material.
A theory of radical evil
This theory of radical evil is highly provocative. There is even a certain attraction in knowing that absolute evil exists, totally devoid of human feeling, and that it is incumbent on the rest of humanity to uproot and destroy it. Moreover, something so obvious is presumably easy to recognize.
Reality, however, is often far more complex than such black-and-white assumptions. It is easier to speak of evil in the abstract than to know how to react to it in real life. For response to evil reflects not only on the carrier of the evil but also on those who would extinguish it, on whatever grounds.
Closer to our own day, Michael Elkins in his book Forged in Fury describes the activities of the acronymous group DIN, which carried out acts of revenge against known Nazis and their collaborators in the debris of post-Holocaust Europe. However, their most daring plan – to poison the water of a major German city populated by 1,380,000 men, women, and children – was scotched at the last minute by the Hagana.
If this story is true, then it shows that some Jews at least learned the lesson of their own history and were more concerned for their own integrity than teaching their mortal enemies a lesson.
Interestingly, in the story of Esther, each instance where a decision about revenge is to made, the individual making it – Ahasueras, Haman, or Mordechai (1:16-22; 3:9; 5:14; 9:14) seeks confirmation from some outside source – the king’s advisers, Haman’s wife, or Ahasueras himself. Even the most devious of politicians seek some outside authority – some wise man or adviser – to justify their actions.
If all this were confined to a biblical story, this would be a mere abstract discussion. But the fact that it is biblical ensures that its impact reaches across the generations, with different people learning different lessons from it. In his book Jewish Renewal, for example, Michael Lerner observed that since 1994, Purim has taken on a far more ominous meaning. On that Purim, Baruch Goldstein entered the mosque inside the Cave of the Patriarchs in Hebron and gunned down 29 praying Muslims. Noting that the extremists who supported this act quoted precisely the passages about Amalek and Chapter Nine of the scroll of Esther, Lerner observed that the biblical passage “does not order the blotting out of Amalek but only the memory of Amalek. And where does that memory live? Precisely in our tendency to act out on others what was done to us... The memory remains with us as long as it is unconsciously shaping our actions.”
Prof. Lerner’s psychological analysis of revenge powerfully echoes those of Rambam (Sefer Mitzvot), who emphasizes that the “remembering” is to be expressed in words, and the “not forgetting” in the heart. Rabbi Shimson Raphael Hirsch, too, in his comments on the Amalek passages in the Bible, interprets the remembering of Amalek as meaning never repeating their cruelty.
The tension between these interpretations and day-to-day realities, especially in Israel, help explain why Prof. Nechama Leibowitz, the great Bible pedagogue, was able to say of Amalek that it was “the most difficult passage in the Bible. And woe to the teacher whose students do not read this passage in trepidation!”
The megillah appears to show a sharp distinction between fate and eternal recurrence and free will. While much of our lives are determined by forces outside our control, it suggests that we are just as capable of exercising free choice.
The Mei Marom (Rabbi Yaacov Moshe Harlap) observed that Megillat Esther demonstrates that there is no difference between these forces, and that what appears to be fate and chance is in fact divine providence.■