Purim: Fighting Hatred With Love

In the face of senseless evil, be kind to each other.

Haman, like the nation of Amalek from which he springs, represents pure, incomprehensible evil and hatred, a desire to totally annihilate us.

What do we do to commemorate our salvation from this evil? We send gifts to each other; we take care of the weak and the poor; we eat together and enjoy each other’s company. We fight hatred with love.

In the megillah, of course, we also stood up for ourselves and militarily fought back. This stance, too, has its place in Jewish tradition. But we don’t commemorate this redemption with military training. We commemorate it with gift-giving.

In the face of evil, we take care of each other. In the face of hatred, we are generous and kind and inclusive. This is the world we want to live in, not Haman’s.

In the end of the day, there is so much we can’t control, so many forces awry in this world; in the face of everything evil that we worry about, our response on Purim is simple acts of kindness.

As Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., said: “Darkness cannot drive out darkness; only light can do that. Hate cannot drive out hate; only love can do that.” On Hanukah we drive out darkness with light. On Purim, we drive out hatred with love.

The Sefat Emet says that the reason we read Parashat Zachor (last week) on Shabbat is because Shabbat, with its own kind of Zachor, is a tikkun, a fixing, for the actions of Amalek. We fight Amalek, which represents perpetual war, with Shabbat, which represents eternal peace, Shalom. We fight war with peace. We fight hatred with love and kindness.

May we all have a joyous and kind Purim!