Purim: Genocide with Extra Steps

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An article penned by my father is currently one of the top posts on the homepage of aish.com (the cheap imitation of the far superior fuckaish.com). In it, he harps upon the single point that has got him out of bed in the morning for the past 40 years: the spiritual reason for antisemitism.

This particular dead horse is one he has beaten very thoroughly, through seminars, films, lectures, and a book with badly drawn cover art that looks like AI, but isn’t, and borrows directly from Nazi propaganda (it must be seen to be believed, in all its unbelievability. No, I won’t link to it). 

His premise is mind-numbingly simple: The reason for antisemitism is because Jews are morally superior in their very essence, enraging the morally inferior non-Jewish haters throughout the generations with their very presence as superior beings. 

As you can see, this is a very small horse. 

To support this claim, two sources are invoked: Hitler’s writings, whose very specific form of antisemitism is cited as an explanation for all antisemitism; and the Bible itself, whose broad, mythic teachings can be twisted into almost any narrative, framing the sons of Jacob in a legendary spiritual fight against Esau and Ishmael. 

Apparently, the stick is pretty flimsy too. 

They don’t value life the way we do, so we have to kill them

In his article, my father explains that the story of Purim informs us how to combat antisemitism:

The Scroll of Esther records that the Jews killed 75,810 of their enemies. Read that again.

There is no handwringing in the text. No apologetics. No moral confusion. These were people who intended genocide. The Jews defended themselves.

Purim forces a difficult but necessary recognition: some people choose evil.

Not everyone shares Judaism’s moral framework. Not everyone values life the way Jews do.

So there it is. The reason genocide is ok is because they want to genocide us. Some people are just inherently evil, ya know? They don’t value life like we do, ya know? And the way ya know, is by referring to a 2,500 year old collection of fairy tales.

I have news for you: the Bible is full of genocide. It repeatedly invokes the need to conquer enemies who were previously living in the land, sometimes saving the women and children as slaves, as with the Midianites (Numbers 31:18), or more often killing them all, as with the pesky seven nations already living in the land (Deut 20:16), and of course Amalek (Deut. 25:19). 

Anyone who invokes the Bible as proof of Israel’s right to the land is saying, clear as day: I justify the Jews genocidally conquering the land a second time, just like they did the first time around. 

It is these same people who will most vehemently deny that there is currently a genocide occurring in Palestine:  “We are justified in our God-given right to genocide, and also we aren’t committing it.”

He who rises to genocide you, genocide them first

I feel like I’m becoming stupider as I write this, but justifying genocide because it says to do it in a book, is still genocide. 

The fact that someone else wrote the book instead of the author himself writing it in prison and then acting upon it, is still genocide. 

Hell, even if God Himself wrote the book, it’s still genocide. It just means that your God is genocidal. 

Framing the genocide as an epic battle of good and evil where your heart is inherently pure and the enemy is rotten to his core and driven by an insatiable and innate desire to kill you, is still genocide. You’ve simply shifted the exceptionalist criteria from having a superior Aryan body to having a superior Jewish soul. 

Writing that you have to kill an entire people because they don’t value life the way you do is both genocidal and comedy gold.

An abstract struggle with genocidal significance

You want to know the one Torah reading a year that women are commanded to actually come to the synagogue and listen alongside the men? It’s the part where Jews are reminded to “never forget to erase the memory of Amalek from beneath the heavens.”

Much like the way Muslim apologetics (who my father, unironically, has committed to combating) explain that the concept of Jihad holy war is just “a spiritual struggle”, I was raised on the idea that the commandment to kill Amalek was theoretical. It was either a metaphor for spiritual growth, ‘The Amalek that lives inside you, bro’, or it was a way to explain past inequities: ‘The Nazis were Amalek’.

Alas. Purim, with its famous “uno reverse card’ switcheroo, invokes the ultimate gotcha: you thought it meant an abstract spiritual struggle? No, silly, turns out we’ll use it to justify the killing of 40,000 women and children as an act of erasing evil. It was only abstract when we were limited to abstractions.

Herein lies the danger in secular and progressive Judaism. When you try to build upon a 2,500 book by abstracting its ideas, ignoring or explaining them away, you always run the risk that someone, at any point, will simply read them more literally. 

The first rule of textual analysis should be: the literal answer is probably the correct one (Shall we call this Shore’s Razor?). Don’t ask me, ask your favorite source, the Talmud: “A verse does not depart from its plain meaning.” (Shabbat 63a)

In this case, the plain meaning is clear: some people deserve to die, as a people. Justifying that because they all, inherently, supposedly want you to die, as a people, is just genocide with extra steps and more poppy seed cookies. 

One of Purim’s key instructions is to get so drunk that you can’t differentiate between good and evil. It appears that many people don’t want to limit themselves to just one day a year, preferring to get drunk on its ideas and lose sight of their basic human decency on a daily basis.

Purim is a celebration of the mask coming off, the revealing of one’s true self for one day of the year. And the results, what we are finding behind many people’s masks, are horrifying.

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