For the past 12 years, I have been conducting a weekly Thursday lunchtime Torah study session with a group of 30 adults. We began all those years ago by reading the Torah from the beginning. Each week we would read a little further into the text, often reading just a few verses and discussing them in depth.

It took us 10 1/2 years to complete the entire Torah. From there, we continued studying Joshua, Judges and other “historical” books of the Bible. For some in the group, this was their first encounter with studying Torah. For all of us, it was a mind-bending experience.

We discovered that to truly encounter Torah is to be confronted with difficult, often painful, narratives and legal injunctions. It is to confront, as well, our own biases, cultural constructs and personal values. Over and over, I watched women in the group become angry, even bitter, at the lack of a real woman’s narrative in Torah. It became a standing joke in the class: Jewish sacred literature, written by men, for men.

This, it turned out, was only the beginning of our wrestling. Why is God described as angry so often? Why permit slavery or capital punishment? And most painful, why does God command all-out war, genocide, against the nations of Canaan, and against Amalek?

I describe my experience as “conducting” the group rather than teaching, because much of the time, I realized, I needed to sit back and let the conversation unfold, occasionally slowing the tempo or underscoring an idea. Much of our discussion required our group to confront their own anger at the text.

I learned that the more I felt the need to defend Torah, the more I really needed to be quiet and let people struggle with the words until they found their own peace with the text.

Which brings us, of course, to Amalek. This Shabbat we will boo and hiss whenever Amalek is mentioned, in the culture of raucousness that is Purim. But the silliness cannot mask the fact that Israel is given a direct command to commit an act of genocide against Amalek, an act that is carried out by King Saul at God’s command in the Haftarah we read.

Our sages, aware of the ethical problem, teach that Amalek is the representative of all that is evil and ungodly in the world. But this is no solution. Amalek easily becomes the catchall for any group feared or hated enough to be demonized. For some fervently religious theologians, Amalek is Reform Judaism, the cause of the Holocaust. To Barukh Goldstein, who on Purim Day in 1994 walked into a Hebron mosque and murdered almost 50 Muslims at prayer, Palestinians are Amalek.

Who is Amalek to you?

Characteristically, the Chassidic masters speak of Amalek not as an external evil but as the darkness that dwells in our own hearts. Do we not see how violence so easily breeds violence and hatred births hatred in return?

The Chassidic teachers interpret the command to “blot out the memory of Amalek” as an instruction in personal character education: Discover those traits within that lead you to wrongful behavior and blot them out. Believing that we are all interconnected, and that violence can never heal hatred, the Ba’al Shem Tov taught that every person we encounter is a mirror of our own souls. If we see some base trait in the other, we are merely being shown what to look for within ourselves.

Yes, there is external evil in the world and it is necessary to fight it with all our power. As Ecclesiastes says, “a time to kill and a time to heal … a time for war and a time for peace.”

But before we commit ourselves to violence, perhaps we should search our own souls to see if Amalek really lives within us.

Rabbi Lavey Derby is the senior rabbi of Congregation Kol Shofar in Tiburon.

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