In the wake of the recent reading of the haftorah for Shabbat Zachor, where we retell the failure of Sha’ul HaMelech—King Saul—to exterminate the last of the Amalekites, it occurred to me that this unhappy episode raises issues for Pirkei Avot.
The principle that one should judge others favourably, if it
is possible to do so, is enshrined in the third and final teaching of Yehoshua
ben Perachyah at Avot 1:6:
עֲשֵׂה לְךָ רַב,
וּקְנֵה לְךָ חָבֵר, וֶהֱוֵי דָן אֶת כָּל הָאָדָם לְכַף זְכוּת
Make for yourself a teacher, acquire for
yourself a friend, and judge every person on a scale of merit.
This teaching applies to everyone, at all times, and it is
incredibly difficult to get right. There are circumstances where it is practically
impossible to judge a person favourably, for example when that person has committed
a despicable and inexcusable crime for which there is unchallengeable evidence
of guilt. But most of the time it is possible to find something positive to say
about a person who has done wrong. This exercise is important for us. Why? Partly
because it should help us to recognise that we too have good points and
less-than-good points to our personalities and our behaviour: in judging
ourselves by looking through the eyes of others, as it were, we can assess
whether we too deserve to be judged favourably. Also, partly because when we
judge others it is often without hearing another side to the argument that they
have done wrong and should be condemned for doing so.
Let us look at this mishnah in the context of Saul, the
first king of Israel, a man of courage and humility, a scholar and someone who
was even capable of receiving prophecy. It seems quite inexplicable that he
should have failed to carry out the prophet Samuel’s instruction to kill all
the Amalekites together with their livestock, this being an order that came
directly from the God to whom Saul prayed and in whom he fervently believed.
How could he have done this, forfeiting his right to the crown in the process
and triggering a downward spiral of depression and psychotic behaviour that
ended only with his death and that of his beloved son Jonathan? Surely we would
never have missed this unique opportunity to serve God and to rid the world of
the scourge of Amalek!
But maybe we would see things differently if we looked the
Saul’s eyes.
First, from the moment Moses became leader of the Jewish people until the time Samuel instructed Saul to kill all the Amalekites, I don’t think we find any examples of the leaders of Israel receiving messages from prophets, telling them what God wants them to do. Between Moses and Saul comes the era of the Judges—leaders of Israel who were also the links in the chain of Torah tradition (Avot 1:1) and who would be expected to make their leadership decisions on the basis of their own understanding, not on what others ordered them to do. Samuel’s instruction to Saul was therefore unprecedented, and this itself may have left the king uncertain as to what he had to do.
Secondly, the Oral Law teaches that we should seek to
emulate God’s ways: just as He is gracious and merciful, so too should we be
gracious and merciful (Shabbat 133b). Saul may have speculated that a kind and
merciful God would surely not seriously contemplate the complete extermination
of a nation He had created, or of innocent animals that could be brought to His
altar as sacrifices in His honour?
Thirdly, the Zohar (2:154a) teaches that Saul himself was a
prophet and, though prophecy was removed from him when he became king, he
retained ruach hakodesh—a measure of divine inspiration. It is possible that his decision to spare Agag
and the animals was based on a moment of misplaced inspiration.
Admittedly, even if they are aggregated these hypotheses are
not entirely convincing, but they do go some way to seeking an explanation for
Saul’s disobedience to the word of God that does not cast him as a wholly
wilful rebel against God’s word.
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