Question

I listened to the podcast with Dushy—fascinating as usual.
Regarding Amalek: have you heard Rabbi Joseph Dov Soloveitchik of Boston’s novel idea, in the name of his father, that “any nation that schemes to destroy Israel becomes, according to Jewish law, Amalek”? He goes on to qualify this by saying that this applies only to the part of the commandment that concerns waging war against that nation as a murderous nation, but not to the part of the commandment involving the destruction of isolated individuals and erasing every trace, which is unique to the actual descendants of Amalek. And with this he explains why Maimonides does not write regarding Amalek, “their memory has already been lost,” as he does regarding the seven nations (The Lonely Man of Faith, p. 101, note).
From what I understood from your remarks, such an interpretation really does, in practice, connect the logic and morality of destroying evil with the concrete commandment of blotting out Amalek. But according to that logic, if a nation were to decide to wipe out all Australians—that is, the Jews—we too would have to go out to war to destroy evil (though of course, for some reason, as far as I know there has never been such a thing in history…).