Remember Amalek

Today we read the chapter Remember (parashat yizkor) that starts with "Remember Amalek what he did to you in the desert when you were escaping from Egypt and you were weak and exhausted. He followed you and destroyed those straying behind and the sick and the weak..."

Paradoxically, the chapter also instructs us to erase and to delete the memory of Amalek under the heaven.

The result is that there are no Amalekites and no one remembers them. Only we are mentioning them all the time.

Since every generation we are attacked when we are weakest, it is fitting to imagine that it is always Amalek that is torturing us in the desert. Amalek, always the same Amalek, attacked us when the remnants of the death camps in Europe were trying to re-form in Israel. Three thousand years from now we shall still remember this Amalek, although no else will.