Rabbi Zelizer
So what shall we do with the morally challenging Haftorah of this Shabbat morning? It quotes the chapter from the Book of Samuel where King Saul is admonished by the Prophet Samuel, that Saul.s kingship is removed from him because he did not follow God.s order to exterminate .man, woman, infant, suckling, ox, camel and ass?. Is this the Tanach that we venerate? Why is this the portion that we elevate just prior to Purim to be chanted every year on the Shabbat prior to Purim? Is this what we want our Bnai-Mitzvah to chant? Punishment is removed from the perpetrator to the child?
Jordan did a good job at raising these moral questions in his D.var Torah. Let me try to give some answers.
It goes without saying that the Haftorah was written in a time when this kind of total vengeance was common place, including among an emerging unified ancient Jewish nation who was struggling to prevail over its enemies. But it should also be pointed out that this Haftorah is only the first word. Let me tell you about some of the later words which dealt with it. It cannot be expected that the rabbinic tradition one thousand years later, would just delete this portion from Samuel. You and I can delete what we write and do not like. The rabbinic readers could not do that because the Tanach is considered sacred and the orders, in their mind, came from God.
But their later words do put this Haftorah in a different light. They do so in a discussion in the Talmud (Yoma 22B) which imagines King Saul disputing God.s order. With some hutzpah Saul discusses another passage in Deuteronomy in which there is an unsolved murder in a town of Ancient Israel. Deuteronomy requires that in that case the neck of a red heffer is broken, as a sacrifice. Why? Because the Book of Deuteronomy regards violence in a city as not just an individual crime, but the product of some collective guilt . perhaps not paying close attention to the social causes of violence. The Talmud has Saul challenging God: .Why should the innocent cow be slaughtered because humans have sinned?. He continues . obviously referring to this Haftorah from Samuel, .Im Gedolim Chatu, Ketanim Mah Chatu. If adults have sinned why should children be punished . what is their sin? To that impudent question the Talmud says a .Bat Kol roared from the heavens rebuking Saul.. . .Al Tehi Tzadik. . which means literally don.t be such a tzaddik. Or in colloquial terms .don.t be such a wise guy.. In other words stop asking difficult moral questions. So that the later word is that of our tradition within limits, itself questions the earlier word of this Haftorah. But alas then the question comes to a mighty halt.
Of course, to be fair, that hutzfahdik to God is not the whole story. After all some say, Amalek were terrible anti-Semites. So terriblet that their future progeny were anti-Semites! Even Hitler is conceived as a future descendant. And Mahmoud Ahmadinejad and Hugo Chavez! So in insisting on exterminating the children, one is preventing the future birth of a Hitler, Ahmadinejad or Chavez. Some argue that. The problem is that the Book of Ezekial in the Tanach says .Asher Yaheta Yamut. . .Only the one who actually sins is punished.. That is, sins of the parents are not visited on the children. So that Ezekial itself is a later word which challenges the earlier word of this Haftorah.
What of the descendants of Haman? What happened to them? Perhaps by knowing their ultimate story we can shed light on this Haftorah. One of the most fanciful statements in the Talmud is that of Sanhedrin 96:B, that portrays the descendants of Haman .Mbnai Banav Shel Haman, Lamdutorah B.Bnai Brak. . The descendants of Haman studied Torah in Bnai Brak, which you recall from the Haggadah was and is a center of Torah study. What an imagination the author of that passage had! Actually, this fiction may be the most insightful and truthful of all.
A woman named Yetta Halberstam a respected author in Israel writes in an Orthodox union magazine called Jewish Action wrote in 2006 of a startling and untold chapter form the Shoah. Three-hundred descendants of Germans . including Nazis, have converted to Judaism and live through-out Israel. Let me tell you a little of what Halberstam writes. Dr. Daniel Brown . name changed to protect him . is a modern Orthodox Jew living in Jerusalem whose own children study in a modern Orthodox Yeshivah. He says that one of the last untold chapters of the post-holocaust era are the hundreds of children of Nazis who have converted to Judaism and live through-out Israel. His own story is noteworthy. .My grandmother.s name was Irna Patra Hitler,. says Brown. After the war she dropped the .t. changing her name to .Hiler.. Hans Hitler . her second husband . was the Fuhrer.s nephew. But he didn.t resemble him in any discernable way. He was soft and gentle. But his wife, my grandmother, was a sworn Nazi. She believed in the Nazi ideology before, during and even after the war. She was proud that her father-in-law was Hitler.s brother. She managed a cafén Berlin where she knew that all the Nazi elite patronized that establishment. She considered her family .nobility.. Brown himself is a college professor in Israel. He converted to Judaism, not because of his Nazi origins, but because of serious theological differences between Judaism and Christianity which bothered him. In 1977 he decided to go to Israel to further his studies at the Hebrew University. He took classes in Hebrew literature and Jewish philosophy, fell in love with Israel, and ultimately studied at Yeshivat Mercaz Harav and converted to Orthodox Judaism in 1979. He married another German convert who was also an academic.
Brown says that most of these German converts are averse to publicity and remain reclusive. One who does not is a Dr. Aharon Shear-Yashuv who is the chairman of Jewish studies at Bar Elan University. His former name was Wolfgang Shmidt.
But some have recently become more public with their stories. There are people like Mattatias Goering. Great-nephew of the notorious Luftwaff Chief Herman Goering, who keeps kosher, celebrates Shabbat and wears a yarmulke; Catrim Himmler, great-niece of SS Commander Heinreich Himmler, who married an Israeli. There is Oscar Eder, a former member of the Luftwaff who changed his named to Asher, married a holocaust survivor and currently works in Israel as a tour guide.
So the Talmud.s imagination that the children of Haman are studying Torah in Bnai Brak is not so fanciful! Perhaps it was the most accurate of all.
So what have we learned this morning that helps us with this Haftorah? Certainly, that the Haftorah stays, because in a sacred tradition one cannot delete what is sacred, no matter what we would prefer and substitute something else. It was the product of the time when this kind of vicious retaliation was common place, even among Ancient Israel. But we also learn that this first word is not the last word of our religion. The bold questioning of this Haftorah in the Gemara, putting that impudent question in the mouth of Saul . that is a later word which raises the kinds of moral objections that we ourselves have! And that later word itself is still not the last word. The last word is that indeed the Amalakites themselves may become dedicated and religious Jews! Things can change! In our own day perhaps the descendants of Mahmoud Ahmadinejad the president of Iran, will study Torah in Jerusalem, or the descendants of Hugo Chaves . not because the State of Israel is exterminated, God forbid, but because the attitude of extermination will be exterminated, and their descendants will see the wisdom and moral advantage of learning Torah . even in Jerusalem, and living a pious Jewish life. Outrageous imagination? Not as outrageous as defendants of Haman studying Torah in Bnai Brak, or the descendants of Nazis studying and living as pious Jews in Jerusalem today.
Shabbat Shalom.