This week’s Torah portion breaks my heart as Gazans suffer
- Rabbi Amy Eilberg
- 4 days ago
- 4 min read
I have always loved Parashat Ekev. It contains a wealth of majestic, powerful and beloved language.
But preparing to write about this week’s parashah, I found an utterly heartbreaking passage right at the start of it.
As Moses brings God’s words to the people on the eve of their entrance into the land, God says, “You shall destroy all the peoples that the Lord your God delivers to you, showing them no pity…. You need have no fear of them.” Just as God did to Pharaoh and all the Egyptians, “thus will the Lord your God do to all the peoples you now fear. The Lord your God will also send a plague against them, until those who are left in hiding perish before you…. The Lord your God will dislodge these peoples before you little by little…. The Lord your God will deliver them up to you, throwing them into utter panic until they are wiped out….” (Deuteronomy 7:16-21)
At this moment, I honestly can’t remember how I used to understand this passage. But over the past few weeks, just as the world has awakened to the mass death, destruction and starvation in Gaza, this passage is unbearably painful.
God is asking us to do what? This is what God’s people is commanded to do on its way into the promised Holy Land?
There are many ways we can deal with difficult texts in Torah. I am reminded of the tochecha, or rebuke, in Leviticus 26, in which God promises terrible curses on the people if they are to disobey God. In many communities, this passage (a long one) is read quickly and in a whisper (b’lachash) because these curses are just too terrible to hear.
Over the years, some Jewish leaders have suggested reading in a whisper/b’lachash the condemnation of male homosexuality (for example, Leviticus 18:22 and 20:13). Through this ritual act, we communicate that this passage is Torah but that we express our profound moral disagreement with it.
Often we deal with difficult texts by reinterpreting them, creating a layer of meaning that we can find sacred, or even daring to suggest that God could not have intended the plain meaning of the verses. The Zohar, for example, reinterpreted the verses that condemn Amalek (Deuteronomy 25:17-19) not to refer to an actual group of people and their descendants, but to the evil impulse within each of us. “Blot out the memory of Amalek” becomes an exhortation to work on ourselves until our baser instincts are tamed, or at least until we have learned not to act on them.
Still, since Baruch Goldstein killed 29 Muslims at prayer at the Ibrahimi Mosque in Hebron on Purim 1994, that holiday has not been the same for me. I had always loved Purim for the invitation to frivolity in a painful world and for the opportunity to give thanks when we have been spared life-threatening danger. Many commentators have said that the story is an obvious farce, describing the Jews using an impossible level of force against their murderous neighbors. Besides which, I love costuming.
But all of that presumes that we will not take the story literally and that we will take it as a work of religious literature. Once Goldstein took it literally and used the verses on Amalek (read on Shabbat Zachor, just before Purim) to justify a heinous act of murder, I could no longer laugh at the joke and delight of Purim. The holiday has been broken for me ever since. I know that for a significant number of Israeli Jews, Goldstein is a hero and that his reading of the Amalek verses is the right one. I can still observe Purim, but without joy or a full heart.
Perhaps the time will come when I will find a way to redeem Deuteronomy 7. But this year, when Israel has turned its initially just war against Hamas into a war of brutal retaliation against all the people of Gaza, I cannot fathom how these words could be sacred for me again. Knowing that large numbers of Israeli Jews, for various reasons, have been infected with the poisonous desire to conquer, avenge and destroy other human beings, I cannot bear the text imagining God issuing such a command.
I recently read Peter Beinart’s excruciating book, “Being Jewish After the Destruction of Gaza: A Reckoning.” The book title itself is deeply evocative. I suppose I have personally encountered another dimension of this reckoning, as I discover Torah passages that were once sacred and beautiful to me and are now laminated with images of rubble and starvation in Gaza.
To be clear, I do not suggest that we take scissors to the Torah, excising passages that we judge to be immoral. This is our people’s sacred text, and we continue to honor it and wrestle with it with all our might when we encounter passages we experience as morally reprehensible. Only in the privacy of our own hearts, we may wonder if the Ever-Living God could actually have written such things.
I pray with all my heart that by the time you read this, a tide will have turned and the healing will have begun in Gaza. Until then, I continue to wrestle and pray over these texts.
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