Just around the time last motzei Shabbos when U.S. forces were digging their way down to find Saddam in the sand and dirt of the now infamous spider-hole in the village of Ad-Dawr, a lot more digging and scouring in the sands was going on – metaphorically speaking – in shuls across America.
The long list of kinsmen and henchmen of Esav and of Seir the Chorite that takes up 43 pesukim – and at a prime location! – at the end of Vayishlach is there precisely to be dug through, and so, so carefully: In a famous midrashic comment on “Vayeshev Yaakov,” Rashi asks us to imagine that we’re scouring these lists of names like a person who’s gone and dropped a gem in the sand – there he is, sifting it so gently, so watchfully, this darned sand, until he finds the precious gem. The gem, of course, is Yaakov and his tiny band.
It was some irony that U.S. troops were searching in their sands for the dross of humanity; and mother of all ironies that they, too, like the man in the Midrash, had to sift that dirt ever so carefully to find the goods intact.
But the parallels appear to run deeper than that. Buried deep among these pesukim is the first mention in the Torah of Esav’s grandson, Amalek. The unwitting reader might hardly single him out for attention among all the other strange names that flit across the pages here — Yaalam, Gaatam, Dishan, Dishon…
And very similar was the rise of Saddam Hussein: An early career as a Middle Eastern hitman and gangster hardly called him to the attention of the experts; neither did a swift coup d’etat. He was no more than your stock Mideast strongman, someone you could sell poison-making equipment to but by no means the first to use poison gas in that region.
And then suddenly he’s raining Scuds on Israel. And it’s at this point that sophisticated observers began to identify in Saddam something that we may soberly label the Amalekite Effect: The Gulf War, we now know, induced a fateful sea-change in the Israeli philosophy of defense. Ever since 1948, every Israeli government had been committed to the policy of “Israel must look after itself” – and made sure that the world knew it. There might on occasion be hesitation (as in 1967) or even knowing inaction (as Golda Meir chose in 1973), but ultimately Israel always hit back.
Then came the Scuds in 1991 and the Likud government of tough, no-nonsense Yitzhak Shamir acceded to American demands to do nothing. In her book Shvuya baChaloma, the Israeli media historian Nurit Gertz has argued that the experience left both the Left and the Right utterly disoriented. The Left, the old warriors of Mapai, would now have to reconcile itself ideologically to the loss of the principle of self-reliance, by invoking Israel’s ties to the “family of nations,” whereas the Right would slip into a cognitive dissonance, continuing to talk of striking back even after it was clear that Israel would not.
Meanwhile, the mass public flight from Tel Aviv exposed the sham behind the image of an Israeli people which holds onto its territory at any price. Psychologically, Israel was now vulnerable as never before, and the swift result was the falling away of all existing taboos against truck with terrorists and against a Palestinian state in Eretz Yisrael. Oslo followed – and sacred taboos have continued to topple to this day.
This, it can be argued, was Saddam’s Amalekite Effect: Like the madman in Rashi’s comment on Amalek (Devarim 25, 18) who plunges into the scalding pool and makes it easy for others to enter, his reckless challenge to Israel critically weakened the Israeli power of deterrence so painfully built up over five decades of fighting.
How many physical and spiritual heirs of Amalek face us today? Who really knows the answer? But the method and Jewish timing of Saddam’s capture certainly should send a signal to the Jewish spirit.
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