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. Accident.

Amalek becomes, in rabbinic imagination, more than a people. It becomes a worldview: nothing has meaning, nothing has structure, nothing has consequence. Power rules. Events are random. People are expendable.

The rabbis also note something striking: the gematria of Amalek equals the gematria of safek — doubt.

Not honest inquiry. Not intellectual humility.

The kind of doubt that corrodes. The doubt that says nothing matters. The doubt that drains moral gravity from the world.

When everything is mikreh and everything is safek, everything becomes a battlefield.

And when we are tired and weary, it is easier to slip into that consciousness. Exhaustion flattens nuance. Fatigue narrows compassion. Outrage feels like clarity.

The verse does not say “did not fear YHVH.” It says “did not fear Elohim.”

In the language of Jewish mysticism, Elohim is associated with din, gevurah, binah — judgment, boundary, discernment. Elohim is the name of creation in Genesis. It signals that the world has architecture. That actions have consequences. That reality is not random.

To “fear Elohim” here is not to tremble in piety. It is to retain reverence for moral gravity. To remember that there is meaning, even when it is hidden. That cause and effect operate, even when we cannot trace them cleanly.

When we are tired and lose that reverence, something shifts. We rush. We judge. We correct. We assume we understand the entire pattern.

In that moment on my couch, half-drowsy and half-armed with indignation, I could feel gevurah rising — the urge to impose order, to educate the arrogant, to fix what felt distorted.

Gevurah is not evil. It is necessary. But without yirah — without humility before the hidden structure of reality — it hardens into a kind of contempt. We stop doubting our own righteousness and start doubting whether anyone else deserves nuance. Which is, in its own way, a slide into safek: not “nothing matters” in the abstract, but “this person doesn’t matter enough for me to slow down.”

Purim and the World of Lots

We are approaching Purim, a story set in Persia, in which God’s Name never appears.

Haman casts pur — lots. Dice. Chance. The whole story unfolds through coincidence and political accident: Vashti refuses, Esther is chosen, Mordecai overhears a plot, the king can’t sleep. Nothing looks like Providence from inside the story.

And yet tradition insists that beneath the surface randomness, meaning is operating.

The difference between randomness and calling in Hebrew is sometimes just an aleph.

וַיִּקָּר — it happened.

וַיִּקְרָא — it was called.

The aleph in vayikra is written small. Almost invisible. A whisper of transcendence in a world that otherwise looks accidental. When Moses encounters the burning bush, the text says vayikra — he was called. The same root. The same aleph. The difference between a random fire and a summons is a single, barely-visible letter.

Sometimes the aleph is there but cannot be seen from where we are standing.

When we do not see it, we live in korcha baderekh. Everything is chance. Everything is power. Every disagreement is a war of narratives, and the loudest voice wins.

Righteous Indignation and Hiddenness

Esther’s very name evokes hiddenness — hester panim, the hidden face.

Purim teaches that the Divine may be concealed. Meaning may not be obvious. The aleph may be small.

There is a kind of righteous indignation that feels holy. The urge to correct error, to push back against confidence that mistakes itself for truth. I know that impulse well. There are moments when it is exactly right.

But fearing Elohim may sometimes mean something else: admitting that we do not know the whole story. Allowing the aleph to remain small. Resisting the reflex to turn every disagreement into a public act of correction — especially when we are operating on three hours of sleep after a funeral.

On that Shabbat afternoon, I closed the app.

Not because truth doesn’t matter.

But because I was tired and weary.

And I did not want to lose the small aleph.

Remembering Amalek may not mean identifying an enemy out there.

It may mean guarding against what enters when we are depleted — the theology of randomness, the corrosion of safek, the erosion of reverence.

We live in a media environment that rewards the instant response, the confident take, the sense that every post requires correction and every error demands public address. The algorithm accelerates. Restraint reads as weakness.

But perhaps the work of Zakhor this year is quieter.

To recover reverence.

To trust that meaning does not depend on our immediate intervention.

The aleph may be small.

But it is still there.

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)