The Assassin

In a scene from the classic film “The Godfather,” Don Vito Corleone (Marlon Brando) says to his son Michael (Al Pacino), “Revenge is a dish best served cold.” He then explains to his son the “fine art” of assassination: put your enemy to sleep; make him feel like you are his best friend. Once he drops his defenses, get close to him. Do not roar like a lion; do not make a battle cry like a tiger. Just smile. When he opens his arms to embrace you, put a knife in his heart, and be cool about it.

Don Vito the Godfather’s advice was not new. If Don Vito had traced his lineage, he would have found that he was a direct descendant of Amalek, who was the grandson of Esau. Esau’s soul was rooted in the pit of evil, the primordial snake, the nachash. Their strategy of eliminating their enemy goes back 5,777 years, as far back as Adam and Eve in the Garden of Eden. Don Vito didn’t invent his mode of assassination, which he passed on to his son Michael. He received it from his father, who received it in an unbroken chain of dark-side tradition all the way back to Amalek.

Haman’s big mistake was his public declaration to annihilate the Jews. That was a break in the pure Amalekite tradition of assassination. If Haman would have continued to initiate regal feasts at the palace while ensnaring the Jews with glatt kosher food and Badatz wine alongside getting them to mingle with Persian women and tricking them into believing that he was their best friend, then our people would have been in big trouble. This would have been reminiscent of one of the snake’s big victories in the days of Bilaam, when he caused 24,000 Jewish young men to lose their lives in the fiasco of the Baal Peor and the Midianite women.

Who is this assassin, this Amalek, this deadly snake? In order to win the war, we must familiarize ourselves with the enemy.

Hold it – the Amalekite snake, the assassin aka the evil inclination, now jumps into your brain. “What war? What enemy? Stop reading this nonsense right now!” The assassin wants you to think that he’s your best friend and that there’s no war going on. He wants you to think that he loves you so that you’ll embrace him. Once you do, he stabs you with a poison-tipped knife so sharp that you can’t feel a thing until it’s too late and the lethal spiritual toxins have already destroyed your soul.

If you love your own soul and the souls of your loved ones, keep reading.

No truly observant Jew would walk into a non-kosher restaurant or into a house of ill repute. Everyone avoids willful and premeditated sin just like they avoid lions and tigers. Yet, Amalek is the snake, who is much more cunning than lions and tigers. Like Don Vito Corleone said, don’t roar or make battle cries. Be cool.

The assassin Amalek – the snake – wears a Purim costume all year long. He dresses up as your very best friend. Just as he told Eve to go ahead and enjoy life – just eat an apple – he tells you to enjoy life. Why should the secular population enjoy the wealth of knowledge, enlightenment and advancement on the wonderful world wide web? Get an iPhone and start enjoying it too! “I want the best for you,” says the assassin. “Why should you be behinds the times?”

The same snake that got Eve to eat the apple is the same snake that gets Menachem and Yitzchak in the year 5777/2017 to close their Gemaras. What’s worse, even as the venom of the forbidden sites, the social media and the chat rooms enters their spiritual veins to the extent that they no longer have any desire to pray or learn Torah, they think that the assassin is their best friend.

Whereas a young man with emuna proudly counts the number of Gemara pages that he has succeeded in learning, the victims of the Amalekite assassin in today’s yeshivas proudly count the number of songs on their mp3’s.

“What’s wrong with listening to songs and talking about Chassidic singers?”, one 17-year old yeshiva boy asked me.

“It’s because your head is in the mp3 and not in the Gemara,” I answered. Once Amalek gets a young man to close that Gemara or open his eyes outside the study hall, that young man is easy prey. That’s the danger of the snake – the Amalekite assassin: before he inserts the knife, he gets his enemy not only to drop his defenses, but to think that the assassin is his best friend.

On Purim, we remember the assassin and the war against him. On Pesach, we leave bondage in Egypt. But suddenly in the desert, right after receiving Torah on Shavuot, we discover that the assassin is still around. What’s worse is that today, he’s more dangerous than ever. Can we defeat him? With Hashem’s help and with emuna, we shall destroy him once and for all.