THE SERPENT, THE VOICE OF TEMPTATION

“In the face of suffering, one has no right to turn away, not to see. In the face of injustice, one may not look the other way. When someone suffers, and it is not you, he comes first. His very suffering gives him priority. When someone cries and it is not you, he has rights over you.”  Elie Wiesel

The red serpent, red thread clenched in its jaw, had once again slithered out from the deep, and found a new home. From its beginning in the Garden, the Serpent, the voice of temptation, made its way through time, entering the bodies of those who knew not of compassion, justice, mercy, charity, and loving-kindness. He found a home in Amalek, the one who attacked the weakest of the Israelites, the women, children, and the sick, as they escaped across the desert away from the oppressor, Pharaoh, who had enslaved them in work camps.

Without provocation, Amalek (the tribe that God said He would utterly blot out of memory under heaven for what they had done to the Jewish people as they fled Egypt), had led its army against the weakest of the people who had just fled from slavery and were walking through the desert toward freedom. It was the same tribe that King Saul battled hundreds of years later but, defying God’s command to destroy all of them, men, women, children, and animals, he spared their King, Agag, and with him, evil carried on hiding underground only to resurface with Haman, the descendent of Agag. Haman, the one who incited the King of Persia to annihilate the Jews, to wipe them off the face of the earth.

And Haman, persecutor of the Jews, said to his King Ahashverus: “There is one people scattered, yet separate among the nations in all the provinces of your kingdom; and their laws are different from those of every people; while they do not execute the laws of the king; and it is no profit for the king to tolerate them. If it be pleasing to the king, let a decree be written to destroy them.”

And the King of Persia replied: “I have resolved never to be carried away by the insolence of power, but always to rule with moderation and clemency, so as to assure my subjects a life ever free from storms and offering my kingdom the benefits of civilization and free transit from end to end, to restore peace which all men desire. We have been informed by one of the eminent among us for prudence and well proved for his unfailing devotion and unshakeable trustworthiness, and in rank second only to our majesty, there is mingled among all the tribes of the earth a certain ill-disposed people, the Jews, opposed by its laws and to every other nation and continually defying the royal ordinances, in such a way as to obstruct that form of government assures to us to the general good. Considering therefore that this people, unique in its kind, is in complete opposition to all humanity from which it differs, by its outlandish laws, that it is hostile to our interests and that it commits the most heinous crimes to the point of endangering the stability of the realm: We command that those persons appointed to watch over our interests to destroy, root and branch, including women and children, without any pity or mercy, so that, these past and present malcontents being in one day forcibly thrown down into Hades, our government may hence forward enjoy perpetual stability and peace.”

But the attempt failed. The Jews lived on.

And the serpent slithered forward in time, sniffing the air, looking for willing participants. There were many throughout the millennia. The red thread found a home in Muhammad. Soon after he anointed himself Prophet, he expelled two tribes of Jews: the Qaynuqa in 624 CE and the Nadir in 625 CE. In 627CE, Muhammad committed an atrocity against the tribe of Banu Qurayza, a peaceful community of farmers, the last remaining major tribe of Jews in Medina. It is reported that more than 800 men and boys, who had surrendered, were brought in batches to trenches that had been dug for them. Forced to stand over the trenches they were then beheaded. In 628 Muhammad conquered Khaybar, murdering the leaders and taking a wife, Saffiya, after beheading her husband Kinana al Rabi of the Bani Nadir.

Words of hate from Mohammad, a man of religion, slipped as easily as honey off his lips “The last hour would not come unless the Muslims will fight against the Jews and the Muslims would kill them until the Jews would hide themselves behind a stone or a tree and a stone or a tree would say: ‘Muslim, or the servant of Allah, there is a Jew behind me; come and kill him;’ but the tree Gharqad would not say, for it is the tree of the Jews.”

He admonished “The resurrection of the dead will not arrive until you will fight the Jews and kill them…” And his Scriptures spoke of hate for ‘the other.’ “Jews are among the worst enemies of Islam.” This was a man of faith who had beheaded the men and the pubescent boys, enslaved the women and children and seized their wealth. He left the land covered in Jewish blood; a genocide; foretelling another time when Jews would again be sacrificed in trenches.

The red thread moved on, in the time of the universe, between the beginning of time and the end of time it was merely a moment and found a home in Spain, as the Muslim domain fell, and the Catholic world rose. The Inquisition: convert, die, or be expelled. The Inquisition began mid-thirteenth century with the condemning of the Talmud. Thousands of volumes of the book were burned. In 1288 the first mass burning of Jews took place; in France. And spread. In Spain, the red thread found a place to stay in Tomás de Torquemada, the Spanish Grand Inquisitor, who, under Queen Isabella and King Ferdinand, presided over the death of more than two thousand Jews burned at the stake, auto de fe, in Spain. It is estimated that 32,000 “heretics” were murdered the same way by the time the killing spree in Europe ended.

And then there was quiet. Not that attacks against the Jewish people ended, but they remained sporadic, for the red thread was searching for the perfect leader to carry out the actions of Amalek. And with patience, the thread succeeded. It found its next true home in adolph hitler.