[Last week was] Shabbat zachor, the Sabbath of remembrance, in which we add an extra reading about the attack of Amalek on the Israelites as they left Egypt. We are instructed to blot out the memory of Amalek and not to forget, a directive that subsumes not only the historical Amalek but evil generally and genocidal butchers specifically. Haman, the villain of the Purim holiday, which falls on Sunday, is considered to be a descendant of Amalek. Some consider Hitler to be as well, at least metaphorically.

The e-mail I received from JTS today is written by Rabbi Marc Wolf, who addresses Amalek and Haman. He quotes Rabbi Marc Tanenbaum, who in 1976 said this: "It is evident that we live in an age of violence and terror. There is not a continent on the globe that is not despoiled by terror and violence, by barbarism and by a growing callousness to human suffering."

Amalek, Haman, terrorism. You see where this is all leading, right? Palestinian terrorism? Ahmadinejad's threats to wipe Israel off the face of the map, right?

Wrong!

It's all leading to Darfur.

Indeed, the concert on Ta'anit Ester was a benefit for Darfur. Iran's genocidal intentions toward the Jews was not mentioned once, the entire evening, even though the holiday of Purim takes place in Iran, even though Iran's leader threatens openly to annihilate the Jews, even though the Jews of Persia undertook this fast to prepare them to defend themselves against their enemies. None of those connections were alluded to or spoken of, even by a descendant of Iranian Jews who sang some Persian Jewish songs.

I would disagree with Pillage Idiot that this bespeaks an avoidance of particularism. If that were the case, Ahmadinijad would have been mentioned along with Darfur, because a universalist approach would include many examples of genocide or threats of genocide. No, this is particularism with a vengeance, the particularism of the "progressive community," in which Darfur is a cause only so far as it can be used to embarrass the West and in which Jewish annihilation can never be a cause, the particularism of leftwing Jews which so abhors the idea of placing Jewish concerns first that it places them last.

As Edward Glick puts it in an article which nails the Jewish community in which I spend much of my time:

As for Jewish parochialism, one-world Jews often make the case against it in noble terms: "As universalists both in spirit and in ethics, and as a world-scattered people who, except in Israel, always live simultaneously in two cultures, why shouldn't we Jews take the lead in erasing and eliminating narrow national and sectarian differences?"

The Hebrew concept of hemshech -- the continuation of the millennia-long Jewish journey -- is foreign to them. Saving the larger world is much more important than saving the Jewish world, and that includes Israel. While they may not want to see the Jewish state perish, many of them, especially in the professoriate, will not sit shiva if it does.

At a time when intermarriage is rife, when even Jews who marry other Jews have the highest negative birthrate of any subgroup in the United States, when U.S. Jewry is declining in number, percentage, prestige, and power, when Islam seeks to subjugate all other faiths, when the Koran still preaches that "The unbelievers are your inveterate enemies," when Iran threatens Israel with nuclear destruction, when European Jews face levels of anti-Semitism not seen since the days of Adolph Hitler -- what are the present priorities of so many of our spiritual leaders and their congregants?

He then goes through the usual laundry list "social justice" concerns our rabbinate consider worthy of pulpit time. Which they are, in proportion. But as Glick says, by trying to cast every social issue as a "Jewish issue," they turn the dictum of Rabbi Hillel (which they love and quote ad nauseum) on its head:

There is a new Jewish sociology in America today: Consumed with gratuitous guilt, more and more Jews are preoccupied with Tikkun Olam (the Repair the World). As proof, they cite Hillel's apothegm in Pirkei Avot (Sayings of the Fathers), "If I am not for myself, who will be for me? But if I am only for myself, who am I? If not now, when?" However, while they quote Hillel incessantly, they do not really understand him.

Hillel purposely chose "If I am not for myself, who will be for me?" as the first sentence in his triad of thoughts. However, by inverting Hillel's first two sentences, these Jews demonstrate their politically-correct relationship to the universe: For them, every single issue is a Jewish issue. Traditional Jewish concerns, like group survival, are passe.

. . . . Pursuing Hillel's vision is a virtue. But any virtue carried to an extreme becomes a vice. One misinterprets Hillel if one concludes that he taught that saving the owls, the trees, the whales, the salmon, the frogs, or even the total environment is more important than saving the Jews. Hillel preached prioritization: Before the Jews can save anything or anyone, they must first save themselves.

"Progressive" Jews have made Darfur their pet cause the past three years, and it certainly deserves to be high on the agenda of any group which feels a moral responsibility for the poor and oppressed of this earth. But much of the "progressive" response is a feel-good exercise without many practical proposals (Glick touches on that also), and Ahmadinijad's threats are barely spoken of, except to bemoan that any aggressive response from the West will make things worse. (I could invoke the joke about the Jews in the train to Auschwitz, but I've used it too many times already.)

To indulge in a bit of amateur psychologizing, I can't help but wonder if the intense emphasis on Darfur, while real threats to the Jewish people are given cursory attention if any, is an example of displacement. I am glad Jews are putting time and effort into ending the genocide in Darfur, although most of them support ineffective approaches such as "diplomacy" (whatever that means in this context, probably the same thing it means with regard to Palestinian-Israeli relations). I do object to placing real threats to the survival of the Jewish people at the bottom of the list, and to not mention them, on the holiday celebrating the defeat of a genocide initiative by the same country threatening one now, is inexcusable.