Look Within for the Personification of Evil : Hebron massacre: Jews and their spiritual leaders bear responsibility for scriptural distortions justifying extremism.

The 111 rounds fired from Baruch Goldstein’s assault rifle in the mosque at Hebron didn’t only take the lives of 30 or 40 Palestinians; Goldstein’s bullets also pierced the hearts of every justice-loving and peace-seeking Jew. And, since he was a religious man who chose to murder innocent human beings while they were kneeling in prayer, in a place sacred to both Jews and Muslims, on a day celebrating the Jewish festival of Purim, his shots also rent the holy Torah and sullied the Jewish tradition. What, then,

does the religious community have to offer in response to this obvious act of “holy terror”? It is, after all, the expositors of the tradition who bear an extra measure of shame and culpability for the atrocity and must provide both a moral critique and guidance to fellow Jews.

In and around the Jewish world, one commonly hears that Baruch Goldstein was insane or that he was not a real Jew “because real Jews do not kill innocent people.” Sadly, neither explanation is creditable, as they reflect the apologetic contention that the murderer was not really one of us, not part of our community and, therefore, we are not to blame. Lamentably, Goldstein was very much a part of us. He was an officer in the Israeli reserves and the leading physician in Kiryat Arba, the Jewish settlement adjacent to Hebron. He also was a known extremist. His militant outlook and his violent program were shared by other settlers and his worldview took root in Israeli soil. Most significantly, the strength of his conviction was drawn from the classical sources of Judaism. Goldstein, in short, represents the evil within, the dark side of Jewishness that is the product of centuries of internalized oppression. During the course of the greater part of the last two millennia, we had no power to act on these malevolent impulses. But in post-Holocaust Israel, where we bear the psychic weight of the

6 million while being confronted by a seemingly intractable enemy, whom we dominate, the temptation to embrace the seductive appeal for vengeance is almost irresistible. That is why it is all the more urgent for Jews to acknowledge the allure of this inclination as an initial step in a process of cleansing and ultimately purging ourselves of our demons. In order to move beyond our obsessions, we first must admit that they are ours.

Next comes the most difficult move for traditionalists: acknowledging that the sacred teachings of Judaism contain passages that, when presented uncritically, constitute incitement to violence. Consider the commandment to annihilate Amalek: “Therefore, when the Lord your God grants you safety from all your enemies around you, in the land that the Lord your God is giving you as a hereditary portion, you shall blot out the memory of Amalek from under heaven. Do not forget” (Deuteronomy 25:19). Amalek has most often been identified with the particular foe that persecuted the Jews in each generation, whether they were Haman’s Persians in antiquity or Hitler’s Nazis in the modern period. Recently, it has become common for some Jews to refer to Palestinians as the contemporary incarnation of Amalek. This viewpoint leads to only one logical outcome--Baruch Goldstein and the Hebron massacre.

When scriptural doctrine is bound to temporal ideology--and to a gun--the combination is often explosive. For this reason it is incumbent upon religious teachers to publicly condemn Goldstein’s literal application of the Amalek injunction and declare it immoral and contrary to

Torah. Not to do so is to be an accomplice to the deed and to implicate the Jewish tradition--and even God.

Rabbinic authorities, especially those in Israel, also must clearly assert that the Amalek injunction is of no practical significance. Either it is to be understood as referring to evil in the abstract--the verse reads “blot out the memory of Amalek,” not the people--or, as a parallel text in Exodus suggests, the war against Amalek may be a divine and not a human prerogative: “The Lord will be at war with Amalek through the ages” (Exodus 17:16). It is, however, probable that Amalek symbolizes the evil that lurks deep inside each of us, and that the eternal battle against him is the inner human struggle in which we are constantly engaged.

I would suggest that the test to be applied to all of our teachings is whether we would feel comfortable circulating them before a mixed audience of Jews, Christians and Muslims. Does Torah reflect a universal ethic of tolerance or a chauvinistic legacy of hatred and bigotry? In that vein, it seems that all Jews ought to examine their attitudes toward Arabs and Palestinians. Too many of us view them as subhuman and are indifferent to the consequences bred by such prejudice.

Finally, a question to ponder: Why is it that, in the Middle East, the peace forces are led by secularists while the guardians of faith in both the Muslim and Jewish communities tend to be numbered among the fanatic opposition? Perhaps those of us in pursuit of peace should begin with this problem. It is the key to a future of mutual respect and reconciliation between the children of Isaac and the children of Ishmael.