[Avodah] collective punishment

[Elliott Shevin]

R. Micha Berger wrote:
> Rather, he was obligated to fully exterminate Amaleiq. By> killing everyone but Agag, Sha'ul haMelekh didn't fulfil the mitzvah> -- which then turns the killing into genocide rather than mitzvah.
 
Or rather, a justifiable genocide? I mean, you wipe out an entire 
nation for, as I like to put it, the crime of choosing the wrong 
parents--it's genocide. It just happens to be a mitzvah in this case. 
I for one am glad Amaleich's not around and I don't have to 
grapple with what for me is a serious moral dilemma.
 > Timkheh es zeikher Amaleiq implies that the problem is having anything> that makes us think of them and their values. The focus on us, and how> having them around will affect us. I could see constructing from this> a taam hamitzvah that has nothing to do with what they deserve.
 
I think the last two ideas are complementary: they're exterminated because 
they deserve it; having them around affects us badly because they're the 
sort of people who *do* deserve it.
I've always figured "timkheh es zeikher Amalieq" is idiomatic for "destroy."
Remember the rest of that maftir: "al tiskhakh." You can't refrain from 
forgetting if you literally erase the memory. This meshes with what 
I've said in another thread--whatever Amaleikh is needs to be 
destroyed.
 
Nor do I think literally erasing the memory of an evil is a good idea. What 
if Ahmadinejad and his ilk were to succeed in displacing the memory of 
the Holocaust? That would open the path to another, r"l, as would nothing else.
 
This was manifested by the fact that, as news reports regarding certain recent 
debates in the US Congress pointed out, as Hitler Y"S (not literally!) outlined 
his plans for the Final Solution, he asked rhetorically, "Who today speaks of the 
Armenian genocide?"
 
Elly
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