(continued)
Once again, Amalek knew just the right buttons to push.
The Midrash records the text of the letter they sent back to their respective lands. It's a tour de force of revisionist history, psychological manipulation, and antisemitic tropes that are regurgitated to this very day. It's too long to present in its entirety in this article, but the following excerpts will suffice for our purposes.
“Infinite peace to you! Let it be known to you that there is a man among us, and he is not from our place, but he is from royal seed, and from the seed of Amalek and one of the great men of the generation, and Haman is his name. He made a small and light request of us about a people that is among us, the most despicable of all the people, and they are of haughty minds. They desire our harm and a curse against the king is common in their speech.
“What is this curse of them against us? 'Hashem is the King forever and ever, he abolishes nations from His land' (Tehillim 10:16). And they also say, 'To take vengeance against the nations, discipline against the kingdoms' (Tehillim 149:7).
“And they are ungrateful to those who do favors for them…”
Haman's letter then launched into a lengthy distortion of Jewish history, the likes of which would receive admiration from much of the media and “academic world” today. Here is a synopsis.
Egypt received the Jewish people graciously, let them settle in the best part of the land, sustained them during years of famine, and fed them from the best of the land. All they asked in return was that the Jews build a few palaces for them, a small favor, really. Then the Jews came upon the Egyptians with trickery and made up a ruse about going to the desert to offer some sacrifices. They asked the Egyptians to lend them gold, silver, and garments. The Jews cleaned out the country of all its wealth and ran off like thieves.
Pharaoh, the poor victim, went after them to retrieve his money. The Jews had a man with them, Moshe son of Amram, who used black magic to split the sea – how he did it is unknown – and when Pharaoh and his men followed them, Moshe drowned them all, and repaid their kindness with evil.
Of course, Haman left out some details, such as Yosef saving Egypt from the aforementioned famine, enriching Egypt and making it the most powerful nation in the region, that the Egyptians repaid the Jews' contributions to the country by enslaving them and brutally persecuting them, that they sent police door to door hunting for Jewish babies to murder, that Pharaoh bathed in the blood of Jewish infants to treat a skin disease, that the citizens supported and participated in all of this...small details like that. As they would say today, these details didn't suit the narrative.
But since Haman told people what they wanted to hear and was an official “expert” to boot, the fact-checkers didn't flag his spin-filled letter for missing context, disinformation, and hate speech.
Haman's letter continued by referring to Moshe's disciple, Yehoshua, as “extremely cruel, without mercy”, because, after all, Yehoshua dared lead the Jews into battle after Amalek attacked them in the desert. If you've ever read a media account of Israel's engagements with its enemies, you would know that when Jews are attacked it's because they deserve it, and it is an atrocity for them to fight back, let alone with vengeance, let alone actually win.
That was Haman's point. If he lived today he would receive a Pulitzer and a Nobel Peace Prize, and would be welcomed on college campuses the world over.
His letter then outlined how the Jews stole the land of Israel, used sorcery to slaughter its inhabitants without mercy, and some man by the name of Shmuel cruelly murdered Haman's ancestor, Agag. Then along came David, who destroyed kingdoms without mercy, followed by his son, Shlomo, who built some house that he called the Beis Hamikdash. Wrote Haman: “I don't know what they had inside it, but when they went to war they would enter inside it and perform sorcery, and when they exited they would murder and destroy the world.”
Today they would call it projection...unless they would be nodding vigorously in agreement.
Now that Haman had his readers whipped up into a righteous frenzy against the Jewish people, he dropped all pretense of rationality and went for the kill:
“And from all the good they had, they rebelled against their God, and furthermore their God became old, and Nevuchadnezzar came and burned their house, and exiled them from their land, and brought them among us, and they have still not changed their ugly ways. Even though they are in exile among us, they mock us and the faith of our god.
“Now we have all agreed with one mind, and cast lots to annihilate them from the world, and [to determine] the time when it will be possible for us to destroy them, and the lottery fell in the month of Adar on the thirteenth day. Now, when these letters reach you, be ready for that day, to utterly destroy and kill all the Judeans among you, young and old, women and children, in one day, and do not spare from them any remnant or survivor.”
The letters were then signed by the world leaders and given to Haman to distribute.
These same canards and blood libels against the Jewish people, first put into writing by Haman over two thousand years ago and preserved for us by Chazal, have been recycled throughout history to sanitize pogroms and holocausts in the eyes of vile boors and noblemen alike.
This is how Amalek operates. He spins the greatest of evils into the greatest of virtues, and turns ordinary people with moral defects into soulless monsters. He finds a dark place deep in the hearts of people and corrupts their entire beings. Then he sends them out to do his dirty work, waging war on the Jewish people, and by extension the God he so detests, and by extension fulfilling his age-old desire to destroy the world – all in the name of saving it.
Amalek's tactics have become more sophisticated with experience and the advancement of technology, but the playbook is exactly the same as it's always been. His war against God, the Jewish people, and all of humanity seems to be reaching a culmination in our time.
It's all so clear, if only we are willing to see.
To be continued.
__________________________
Download Tovim Ha-Shenayim as a PDF for free!
If you received this from someone else and want to receive future articles directly, please send a request to endthemadness@gmail.com.
* * *
Dr Simone Gold on Tucker Carlson - Excellent interview
No comments:
Post a Comment