Half Shekels and Missile Fragments

Every single year, the Shabbat before Purim, we finish off the Torah reading with three verses from the end of a portion in the book of Deuteronomy. There, in those verses, we are commanded to remember what the Amalekites did to us in the desert as we were leaving Egypt, and we are further commanded to destroy their legacy. Although these verses are out of place in terms of our annual cycle of the Torah reading, we read them on that Shabbat in preparation for the holiday of Purim, in which a descendant of Amalek, Haman, reclaimed his ancestors’ legacy and did his best to wipe out the Jewish people.

This past Shabbat, those verses took on a very different significance. I was attending an early morning service, before any sirens had sounded, but we heard planes flying overhead and we knew that the moment for which we’d been waiting for two months had finally arrived.

Shabbat Zachor Explained: The Torah’s Command to Remember Amalek

The timing was no accident. The United States and Israel had apparently waited weeks for precisely the right moment when the Iranian leader, whose name does not deserve to be said, would be most vulnerable. And it was no accident that that moment came this past Shabbat, as we pulled out the Torah scrolls in preparation for the holiday in which we celebrate the triumph of the Jews in Persia.

One of the key themes of the story of Purim, which I learned from the time I was a young girl in elementary school, is that in the lead-up to the story, the Jews were divided. They saw themselves as separate communities, dispersed throughout a large kingdom, and not as part of a larger unit. “There is one nation that is scattered and spread among the other nations” (Esther 3:8), is how Haman described the Jews to Ahasuerus when making his pitch to exterminate them, offering to pay 10,000 silver shekels for the rights to do as he pleased.

Ahasuerus refused the 10,000 silver shekels, although he did give Haman carte blanche. However, the Midrash picks up on this seemingly innocuous detail about money and points out that the Jewish people had already countered Haman a thousand years earlier. Shortly after the Israelites left Egypt, Moses was commanded to take a census of the people by everyone donating a half of a silver shekel, which would then go towards funding public sacrifices. Critically, the amount was not to be changed for anyone: “The rich person shall not give more and the poor shall not give less than a half shekel” (Ex. 30:15).

Why not have everyone give a whole shekel? Why half? Rabbi Shmuel Berenbaum offers a beautiful insight. He says that God is teaching us, with this commandment, that a Jew is not whole on his own. We need other Jews to complete us. To that end, we cannot, as individuals, bring a whole shekel to serve as our headcount because we are not, to paraphrase John Donne, islands unto ourselves.

Moreover, the Midrash comments on this commandment that it was the antidote to Haman’s plot, put in place already a thousand years ahead of when it would be needed. On a simple level, the silver shekels of the Jewish people counteracted the silver shekels of Haman. More broadly, it was the silver shekels that taught each Jew that he is part of a greater whole which served as a merit to stand against the silver shekels with which Haman sought to purchase the rights to the individuals who saw themselves as just that.

In the end, the Purim story turns around when the Jewish people reintegrate as a whole. When Esther asked of Mordechai, “Go and gather all of the Jewish people in [the city of] Shushan” (Esther 4:16), she was not simply asking him to ensure that they prayed for her well-being when she went to the king uninvited. She was charging him with bringing the people together into a cohesive unit. He—and they—answered that call.

It is no coincidence that Purim generally falls within the same week that we read the Torah portion where the commandment of the half-shekel is found, just as it is no coincidence that the mitzvot of Purim are ones intended to engender goodwill between people. We are part of a greater whole, and Purim reminds us of that.

Amalek was the first nation to use any sense of disunity as a pretext to attack. They attacked the stragglers, the ones who were behind, the ones who were outside the camp, and we are charged, in perpetuity, to never forget what they did to us. This past week, as Jews of all stripes descended into their bomb shelters together, we did our part in continuing to counteract the decree of Haman by, once again, uniting as a people.

On Sunday, March 1, an Iranian missile hit a neighborhood in Bet Shemesh, a thriving city about thirty kilometers southwest of Jerusalem. Tragically, there were multiple people killed, and there was a Torah scroll that was removed from the rubble with shrapnel puncturing the parchment. The section that it hit? Once again, not a coincidence: “Remember that which the Amalekites did to you” (Deut. 25:17).

We remember.

In memory of those who perished in Operation Lion’s Roar. May their memories be for a blessing.

Parshat Ki Tisa: The 2 Half-Shekels - Rabbi Yitzchak Breitowitz