In a shiur given on Parshat Yitro a couple of months ago, our friend and teacher Rav Binny Freedman focused on the Israelites’ conduct in the battle against Amalek. He suggested that it was this battle, and not all of the plagues and wonders in Egypt (including the Exodus itself) that moved Moshe’s father-in-law Yitro and inspired him to join the Israelites in the desert.
The Israelites did not defeat Amalek in the desert. They did not destroy them, which has led to the Jews being saddled with the mitzvah of destroying Amalek up to this day—a mitzvah of which we are reminded annually at Purim. The Israelites merely repelled Amalek (much as we did Hamas in Gaza a few months ago).
What was so much more significant about the battle with Amalek than the plagues in Egypt? For starters, the battle with Amalek was waged by the hands of the Israelites themselves; the plagues were Hashem’s work. Yitro was a Midianite priest, and probably had some sense of the power of God. But the sight of a ragtag bunch of ex-slaves, freshly liberated from their toil, fighting a great enemy who preyed on the weakest and most vulnerable of an already weak and vulnerable people, and holding their own in the bargain—I can understand how that could make an impression.
Rav Binny brought an interesting 20th century source to his shiur. The leader of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising of 1943, Mordechai Anielewicz, was killed during the course of that uprising. But among the rubble of Mila 18, the headquarters of the uprising, his diary was found. In it, Anielewicz had made an entry shortly after the first days when the Nazis attempted to enter the ghetto and were repelled. Anielewicz wrote that after all the hype and propaganda about how invincible the Germans were, he was astonished that a bullet could actually kill a Nazi Übermensch. The Warsaw Ghetto Uprising was not successful in saving Jewish lives, but it did show that a handful of Jews were capable of holding the Nazis at bay for longer (three weeks) than the entire Polish nation, which lasted all of one week in the 1939 German invasion. (I would add that five years later, the same rabble of ex-slaves that escaped the ovens of Europe found themselves facing another supposedly invincible army, mustered from seven Arab states. They did not destroy those Arab states, but they did forge a state of their own in their midst.)
What was so remarkable to Yitro was that a people could change from being downtrodden for hundreds of years and rise up to defend themselves. By the time Mordechai Anielewicz and his fellow fighters scattered around Europe in bands of partisans rose to the challenge, it had been thousands of years of persecution and murder. Rav Binny pointed out that Operation Cast Lead (the recent Gaza war) was not a separate war from those in Lebanon, or 1967, or Yom Kippur, or even the Arab uprisings in 1929 and 1936. It’s all one war that started as soon as Jews from other lands began coming back here in numbers. And it’s not over yet.
Today is Yom HaZikaron, Memorial Day for the Fallen of Eretz Yisrael. It is dedicated to the memory of the soldiers who fell in battle in Israel’s too many wars, as well as to the non-combatants who died because they were Israeli, including the most recent casualty, 13-year-old Shlomo Nativ z”l of Bat Ayin, a settlement across Gush Etzion from Efrat.
I grieve that we live in the times we do. I grieve that Israel and the Jewish people have as many enemies as they always have (and perhaps even more). I grieve that Israel has to dedicate such a large percentage of its budget and resources to keeping its citizens alive and safe. I grieve that the degrees of separation between Jews anywhere in the world and Israelis who have lost loved ones to war and terrorism are so few.
But at the same time, I am grateful to live in a time when Jews have our own country, our own government, our own defense forces, and the will to defend ourselves against those who wish to hurt or destroy us. I set aside today as a day of sadness, but also gratitude. We still need Hashem, as the Israelites in the desert needed Him, but we are no longer helpless.
Shimshonit 
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