Teztaveh 5785 - Confronting collective punishment in this week's Haftarah

Earlier this year I wrote a commentary about collective punishment as it appears in Parashat Vayera:

Notably, of the thirty-two weekly Torah commentaries I have shared on Sefaria since last summer, this one has been viewed hundreds of times, and to date, more than any of my other commentaries. I infer that the question of collective punishment, and ethnic cleansing, are very much in the minds of many student of Torah these days.

In that commentary, I shared information about the legal definition of collective punishment, including this excerpt from the Geneva Convention:

"Geneva Convention (IV) 1949 Article 33 - Individual responsibility, collective penalties, pillage, reprisals. No protected person may be punished for an offence he or she has not personally committed. Collective penalties and likewise all measures of intimidation or of terrorism are prohibited. Pillage is prohibited."

""Collective punishment is a punishmentor sanctionimposed on a group or whole community for acts allegedly perpetrated by a member or some members of that group or area, which could be an ethnicor political group, or just the family, friends and neighbors of the perpetrator, as well as entire cities and communities where the perpetrator (s) allegedly committed the crime. Because individuals who are not responsible for the acts are targeted, collective punishment is not compatible with the basic principle of individual responsibility. The punished group may often have no direct association with the perpetrator other than living in the same area and can not be assumed to exercise control over the perpetrator's actions. Collective punishment is prohibited by treatyin both international and non-international armed conflicts, more specifically Common Article 33 of the Fourth Geneva Conventionand Article 4 of the Additional Protocol II."https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Collective_punishment#:~:text=International%20law%20posits%20that%20no,Geneva%20Conventions%20and%20their%20protocols"

Notably, we are confronted again with collective punishment in the Haftarah for this week, from 1 Samuel 15.

Translated above (in the JPS translation) as "proscribe all that belongs to them". What does this mean? How many people know what "proscribe" means?

I suggest an alternative translation:
"Utterly destroy everything that is theirs."
Utterly destroy. This is what the verb וְהַֽחֲרַמְתֶּם֙ means.
Let's get down to grammar basics. This is from the verbal root - shoresh - √חרם - to utterly destroy.
It is in second person plural, and in the hifil (causative) binyan: "you shall cause them to be utterly destroyed".

It's thought-provoking to note that this verbal root - √רחם - has a contranymic quality: as you will see from the following excerpt from Gesenius, this verb not only can mean "to extirpate, to utterly destroy", "to shut in", but can also mean "to consecrate", "to devote".
In a Sefaria sheet last summer I explored the contranymics of possession / dispossession; the verb for "dispossess" can also mean "to become impoverished", suggesting that when we dispossess others, we somehow become [morally] impoverished ourselves).
Va'etchanan 5784 The Contranymics of Possession
https://www.sefaria.org/sheets/584150.17?lang=bi

With our word from 1 Samuel 15:3 - √חרם - my attention is drawn to a different dimension of the opposites: could this polarity - "to utterly destroy" / "to consecrate" hint at an area in the human psyche where collective violence becomes conflated with devotion and consecration? This is a pressing question worthy of deep exploration, at a time in history when there is so much violence, suffused with hatred and vengeance, around the globe.

"they proscribed [utterly destroyed] only what was cheap and worthless"... does this mean that all of the humans whose lives were taken were "cheap and worthless"?

It is clear at once that these verses from 1 Samuel - which are from this week's (Parashat Tetzaveh) - are talking about collective punishment. Generations before, the Amalekites had treated bnei Israel harshly as the Israelites traversed the Amalekites' territory on their journey from Egypt. Generations before. What is the purpose of killing men, women and children who were born generations after the indisputable offense of their ancestors? Similarly, what is the purpose, what is the justice, of killing men, women and children, who are claimed to be somehow connected to perpetrators of heinous crimes?

Now, hundreds of years later in the narrative, God commands Samuel to "proscribe" the Amalekites - surely a euphemistic translation. The word often translated as "proscribe" actually means "utterly destroy". So, let's be real: God is instructing Samuel to engage in collective punishment, which - at the risk of upsetting some of my readers - I will go so far as to call ethnic cleansing.

Scholar Mark Zvi Brettler, Biblical scholar, co-editor of the Jewish Study Bible among numerous books he has written and edited, Professor of Judaic Studies at Duke University, wrote, almost a year ago, in commenting on this part of 1 Samuel - Destroying Amalek (March 25, 2024):

I am grateful to have found Dr. Brettler's commentary, and wish I'd found it a year ago. The past seventeen months have been particularly ethically challenging. I will close with sharing the ending of Dr. Brettler's essay:

"It is quite possible that the original authors of the biblical passages did imagine killing all Amalekites. Even if we bowdlerize the biblical texts that we assign to students, some will discover these passages, so it is our responsibility to call these texts out. We might share with our students the following strategies for dealing with the problems in this (and similar) texts:(1) The text presents ancient norms of war that are no longer applicable;(2) the Hebrew was misvocalized, and the text originally mandated killing only adult male (combatants);(3) the Amalekites may have never existed (23) and this is a type of theoretical law, never meant to be implemented (24);(4) similar to the previous suggestion, the genocide of Amalek might be understood not as history, but on the basis of “a transference of fears of national destruction” or other psychological explanations (25);(5) much of later Jewish tradition eliminated this commandment;(6) Jewish tradition has never taken all parts of the Bible literally and with equal seriousness (26).But whatever strategy or strategies we choose, we must condemn the ethnic cleansing that the text in its current form advocates. The biblical text risks serving as a dangerous and horrific model. We cannot be silent as our students read these and similar texts—or we, as educators, will have blood on our hands." (emphasis added)
https://jewishstudies.duke.edu/news/destroying-amalek

Notably, in the Jewish Study Bible (co-edited by Dr. Brettler), there is a note to the verb cherem (a note to Joshua 6:18):
"Proscribed" (cherem) set aside and forbidden to use, whether due to consecration to the LORD (Lev 27:28) or because it is an abomination. (Jewish Study Bible, note p. 452)

Today I will say as well: each of us, as we engage with this text, must not be silent. We must question and explore - even in our intimate ethical grapplings with ourselves - otherwise we - educators or not - will have blood on our hands.