However, Netanyahu’s objection elides the passage’s violent legacy, which is not an exclusively Jewish one. Europeans used it to justify murdering Native Americans, and Hutus used it to justify massacring Tutsis. It’s been deployed against Catholics, Protestants, Muslims, and Jews (sometimes by other Jews), and quoted by Afrikaaners, Germans, and other European colonial powers against those who resist colonization.

Still, the passage’s most significant and potent repurposing has been by right-wing Jewish extremists in Israel: It likely influenced the actions of Baruch Goldstein, who murdered 29 Palestinians while they were praying in the West Bank city of Hebron on Purim morning in 1994, and was invoked by settlers last year as a rallying cry for the pogrom committed in the Palestinian town of Huwara.

[…]

The rabbinic tradition’s reckoning with the biblical text does provide some solace. In this canon, the understanding of Amalek is not fixed, but understood and interpreted variably. (The Israeli right consistently chooses to return to the Bible while eschewing the rabbinic tradition that has interpreted it, even though it’s hard to think of anything less Jewish than sola scriptura—the Chrisian idea that the Bible alone has sole authority.)

Crucially, the rabbis chose to preserve the voices of those who expressed discomfort with a text that commands murder: The Talmud, for instance, imagines King Saul arguing with God over the injunction. And as early as the Mishnah, written some 2,000 years ago, the rabbis insisted that Amalek no longer exists as a distinct entity, thus obviating the commandment; later commentators note the ethical challenge this passage poses and warn against celebrating or sanctifying it.

In some cases, the tradition reworks the basic moral logic of the text. An interesting strand of interpretation blames not Amalek but the Jews themselves for Amalek’s deeds.

The Talmud, for example, states that the mother of Amalek, the progenitor of the nation that later bore his name, sought to convert to Judaism but was rejected, leading her to have a child with Esau’s son instead. Other texts similarly place responsibility on the Jews, whether for spiritual shortcomings—such as being lax in their observance of Torah and mitzvot or being ungrateful, disobedient, or not trusting of God—or for ethical shortcomings, like being unjust in their business dealings or not taking care of the vulnerable.

There is also a long and rich history of reading Amalek symbolically, such as a strand of Hasidic thought in which Amalek represents the ongoing struggle of eradicating the evil inside of ourselves.

While I’m grateful to have the richness of the rabbinic tradition to complicate the biblical text, I also mistrust my own impulse to seek relief in it. Given the calamity of the present moment, it feels insufficient to embrace a tradition that “fixes” the problem. Part of me actually feels more partial to confronting this disturbing biblical text directly—the pain of reading it matches more faithfully the pain of this moment than the satisfaction of an erudite explanation that explains it away. […] This is another way of understanding Zakhor: We remember Amalek because it hurts on every level—Amalek’s attack against the Jews, the bloodthirst against the Amalekites that followed, and the legacy of living on with this commandment.

And still, at its best, interpretation is not simply a way of explaining away difficulties; it is a project of world-building—of letting texts be changed by the world and the world by texts. Taken as a whole, the rabbinic tradition offers a model for inventive reading that breaks down the rigidity of a decisive command. Examining past rabbinic treatments of earlier texts helps to make clear our own positionality as active participants in the chain of tradition.

Returning to that lineage provides a path toward an alternative understanding of the command to destroy Amalek. Several rabbinic commentators, attempting to explain why Amalek’s actions were so reprehensible, argue that Amalek ambushed the Israelites for no reason and without warning, attacking the weakest and most vulnerable. The commentator Nechama Leibowitz picks up on this linkage of the gravity of Amalek’s sin to their disregard for the vulnerable.

She observes that the Torah describes Amalek as “lo yarei Elohim” (lacking fear of God) and notes that other biblical uses of the phrase “fear of God”—when Abraham expresses his fear that a foreign kingdom would kill him, when Joseph agrees to release his brothers after accusing them of spying, and when the midwives refuse to murder the Israelite male infants in Egypt—refer not to belief in God or fear of God’s wrath but to the subjects’ attitude toward the vulnerable.

“The criterion for ‘fear of God’ in a person’s heart is in relation to the weak and the stranger,” she writes. The sin of Amalek, then, is one that remains pervasive today—the use of force against those with less power. That is a force worth eradicating, “a war against Amalek in every generation.”

This helps explain Rashi’s comment that “God’s name and God’s throne are not complete until Amalek’s name is fully wiped out.” This work of making God’s name whole is not in God’s domain to enable: What is required is actually a human change, a reordering of our society and how we treat one another.