This week's commentary was written by Rabbi Yehoshua Aizenberg, Rabbi Emeritus, Conservative Synagogue of Jamaica Estates, 5766 Honoree for the Rabbinical Assembly Joint Campaign

Two Sabbaths ago, we celebrated Shabbat Shekalim, the first of four special Sabbaths preceding Pesah. This coming Shabbat, Shabbat Zachor, always comes right before the Purim celebration.

Shabbat Zachor takes on its special identity from the extra maftir section that will be read from a second Torah scroll, the concluding verses of the portion Ki Tetzei (Deuteronomy 25:17-19). The text begins with the word zachor (remember) - thus the name of this Shabbat - and it concludes with the admonition "lo tishkach" ("forget this not"). As the eleventh-century Spanish biblical commentator Moshe ben Jacob Ibn Ezra points out, beginning and end work together, and "forget this not" comes to reinforce the call to "remember."

What are all these warnings to remember and not to forget all about? They refer to the narrative in Exodus 17:8-14 when the Amalekites, a tribe of nomads inhabiting the Negev and the Sinai Peninsula, made a surprise rear attack on the famished and exhausted Israelites not long after they fled Egypt. The attack was deemed especially reprehensible since the Amalekites directed their onslaught upon the stragglers, the elderly, and the infirm, without any provocation on the Israelites' part. Forced to fight its first war of survival - which it won - Israel was admonished not only never to forget the Amalekites' treachery, but also to "blot out Amalek's memory... from under Heaven." In the haftarah for this Shabbat, taken from the book of I Samuel (15:2-34), we learn that these words were understood quite literally. Our rabbis instructed us to dwell on these readings most particularly on the Shabbat preceding Purim because Mordechai's lineage was traced to the line of King Saul's father, and just as Saul defeated Amalek and its king, Agag, so Mordechai foiled the plots of Haman "the Agagite" (Esther 2:5, 3:1,10).

What I would like to pursue here is the Torah's repeated emphasis on remembering and memory, stated so emphatically in these verses of Ki Tetzei. As Yosef Hayim Yerushalmi wrote forcefully in his classic Zachor: Jewish History and Jewish Memory, the Hebrew Bible's "injunctions to remember are unconditional, and even when not commanded, remembrance is always pivotal. Altogether the verb zakhar appears in its various declensions... no less than one hundred and sixty-nine times... As Israel is enjoined to remember, so it is adjured not to forget. Both imperatives have resounded with enduring effect among the Jews since biblical times" (5).

The insistent injunction to remember and not to forget, a mitzvah that the Jewish people have so consistently made part of their culture and religious practice, has not necessarily been part of other peoples' weltanschauung. Indeed, some nations are still struggling to find ways and create rituals that will aid in the process of remembering. Take, for example, Argentina, the country of my birth. Thrust into deep political conflict and widespread violence, a military coup shook Argentina in March 1976 - with authoritarian military rule lasting until December 1983. The government, defining itself as leading a "process of national reorganization," implemented a systematic policy of overt and clandestine repression, particularly the infamous "disappearances," using terror as the basic tactic with which to handle the political conflict and wipe out existing opposition. A reliable estimate speaks of 30,000 people "disappeared" in Argentina. Uruguay and Chile are struggling with similar legacies of horror.

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Rabbi Yehoshua Aizenberg, Rabbi Emeritus, Conservative Synagogue of Jamaica Estates, 5766 Honoree for the Rabbinical Assembly Joint Campaign