ZACHOR

ZACHOR: THE PNIMIYUS OF ERASING AMALEK

ZACHOR 5785 BILVAVI #387
ORIGINAL HEBREW SHIURIM, TRANSCRIPTS, TRANSLATIONS AT WWW.BILVAVI.NET

Practically speaking, one should try an exercise of emunah every day, in order to erase Amalek, trusting Hashem in spite of being unsure about something.

In this way, a person keeps erasing “Amalek” from his heart. It is the simchah of leaving behind our doubts. With the help of Hashem, may this illuminate the rest of the world, until the time when Hashem will erase Amalek completely, when His Name will once again be “One”

(Purim_019_Yom Kippur Is Like Purim)

Amalek has the same gematria as the word “safek” ספק, doubt, as is well-known. Amalek represents an evil force in Creation that can induce doubts into the Jewish people. But for every force that is evil, there is something else equally powerful on the side of good that can oppose it. Therefore, we can find holy doubts as well.

There is a statement in the sefarim hakedoshim,
אין שמחה כשמחת התרת הספקות
“There is no happiness like the clarification of doubts”
(sefer Toras HaOlah, authored by the Rema m’Pano).

Doubts are the antithesis to being happy.
When doubts cause us to be sad, that is when doubt is evil, and such doubts are coming from the side of tumah (impurity), making a person confused and tangled up inside his doubts, resulting in a state of misery.

However, there is also a concept of holy doubt (safek d’kedushah),
and this is when a person realizes: “From where is the doubt coming from? Is the doubt simply coming from my own self – or maybe Hashem put the doubt in my heart, and He wants me to have this doubt?”

When this is our attitude toward our doubts, then we transform the doubt into an increase of our emunah.
We realize that the doubt was that it was Hashem’s very will that we should be doubtful or afraid about something. And since it is Hashem’s will that we should be feeling the doubt or the fear, we can be happy about this, because we know Hashem wanted us to experience it. This is essentially how we can transform all of our doubts – the “Amalek” within - into kedushah.

What is holding back people from feeling happy when they are in doubt about something?  
It is because people usually think that doubts and fears are always a bad thing to have. People think that nothing good can be said about a situation where a person has no idea what to do. That is a mistaken attitude. When we feel ourselves in doubt, it is really an opportunity for us to realize that the doubt came from Hashem. The ensuing happiness we will feel after realizing this is an obvious gain.

When people find themselves in doubt, it causes inner anxiety: “I can’t decide...” or “I don’t know enough...”, and this is usually viewed as a sign of weakness. This causes us to become frustrated when we have doubts. The proper attitude we are supposed to have is to change his perspective about this, realizing that Hashem placed the doubt in his mind.

The way to counter Amalek’s evil of safek/doubt, then, is by being happy when we are in doubt, with the understanding that it is Hashem’s will that we should be unsure about something.

In fact, we need to be able to be uncertain about everything [except for our emunah in Hashem, which we should always be certain about], and in spite of the uncertainty we need to be happy anyway. If a person achieves this attitude, he fixes the evil of Amalek in its entirety.

On a deeper level, all of our life is inevitably full of doubts and fears, because we must always be afraid that maybe we aren’t acting properly, and that maybe we aren’t doing what Hashem wants from us. What are we supposed do with all of these fears, and how can we be happy with them? It is to realize that all of our doubts and fears were placed into us by Hashem! (from Bilvavi Part V, p.345-p.349).