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I had the privilege of spending this week in Alon Shevut visiting my son at Yeshivat Har Etzion and my daughter at the Beit Midrasha L’Nashim in Migdal Oz. It is, therefore, appropriate to share some Torah from “the Gush.” So, I will share a thought from Rav Mosheh Lichtenstein’s sefer on the Haftorot.
This week we read Parshat Zachor in which we recount the story of the nation of Amalek attacking the Jewish people in the desert and the subsequent mitzvah to wipe out the memory of Amalek. The Haftorah, from Sefer Shmuel, tells the story of King Shaul’s attempt to fulfill that mitzvah. Ultimately, Shaul fails because he does not listen to every aspect of God’s commandment to him. He leaves the best of the animals and Agag, the King of Amalek, alive.
Rav Mosheh Lichtenstein explains the significance of this failure in light of a fundamental religious challenge. Whenever we fulfill one of God’s commandments, we are challenged to act completely out of commitment to serving God absent any ulterior, personal motives. The more closely one of the mitzvot aligns with a person’s baser, harder to control motives, the harder it is to act purely out of commitment to God.
Sometimes, the Torah even forbids an action because, even though it can sometimes be the right thing to do, we are too likely to tap into our base emotions when engaging in it. Rav Mosheh quotes the prohibition against revenge as an analogy. Sometimes, revenge is in fact justice. Extracting a price from someone as a consequence of what they did wrong, is sometimes the right thing to do. But it is very hard to do without reinforcing one's own feelings of anger and aggression towards the other. Therefore, one explanation of the prohibition against taking revenge, is that God tells us it is better not to engage in appropriate revenge, because it is too likely to be done for inappropriate reasons.
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