On Friday morning I led a funeral.

Friday night I led services.

Somewhere around 3 a.m. I woke up with stomach pains that kept me up longer than I wanted. By Shabbat morning I was functioning, but not exactly clearheaded. Services, Torah reading, teaching. Then home. Lunch. The kind of fatigue that isn’t dramatic but sits in your bones.

I was about to lie down for a nap when I felt it — that little twitch of dopamine-seeking instinct.

“Five minutes of Facebook,” I told myself. I have a self-imposed limit. Five minutes. That’s it.

Of course, five minutes turned into more.

And then I saw a post.

Confident. Sweeping. Morally certain. The sort of thing that feels like it needs correcting.

I was already past my limit. It was Shabbat. I shouldn’t have been there at all. But my mind was sharpening. Crafting the rebuttal. Imagining the clean, precise paragraph that would set the record straight.

And then something else surfaced.

That morning in Torah study we had read Parshat Zakhor, the command to remember Amalek.

“You were tired and weary… and did not fear Elohim.”

Most translations attach the final phrase to Amalek — that Amalek did not fear God. But grammatically, the Hebrew allows another reading: you were tired and weary and did not fear Elohim.

That possibility stopped me.

And I was about to respond.

Amalek and the Theology of Randomness

The Torah describes Amalek as the one who “korcha baderekh” — who happened upon you on the way.

The word korcha is related to mikreh — chance. Randomness.........

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