(Can't remember her source, whether it was the Ahavat Chaim or something else.)
This reminded me of the many accounts recalled by Holocaust survivors, in which the Nazis carried out specific acts PURELY for the sake of demoralizing the Jews.
Many, many survivors recall the Nazis trying to break their spirit before breaking their bodies.
As the Holocaust survivor Lea Fuchs-Chayen wrote as a frum 19-year-old girl in Auschwitz in her memoir From the Depths I Call:
My head is beginning to clear a bit, and I realize I shall have to pull myself together and be very strong so that I should live as a human being until they kill me — and not as a raving lunatic, which is the what the Germans would like to reduce us to.
– page 58
...the purpose of the Germans was to reduce us, before killing us, to something like animals...
– page 62
In the memoir The Uprooted by Yehoshua Eibeschitz, who survived ghettos and death camps as an unmarried Chassidish youth on his own, recalled his experience at one camp, in which a Nazi official (a prestigiously educated fiend with a doctorate) arranged for all the Jews to stand before him while he spent hours pontificating at them on the futility of their existence and of Torah, and other demoralizing words.
He sat in a chair on a platform under a tent while the starved traumatized Jews stood at attention, exposed to the elements.
And this Nazi doctor did this frequently.
And it doesn't even make sense.
How on earth does it feel remotely enjoyable or worthwhile to speak before terribly suffering human beings for hours about the supposed worthlessness of their lives and religion?
Also, despite sitting in a tent, it was still windy, rainy, or hot for this Nazi doctor.
And these camps tended to smell very, very bad (because of the Nazi-enforced lack of hygiene and other forms of barbarism).
And he's looking at people whom, if we saw them, our hearts would go out to them and we'd do anything to help them.
Yet he clearly enjoyed mentally torturing them.
Even for a bad person, his way of doing so seems very boring and physically uncomfortable.
Yet that is the soul of Amalek.
Amalek so relishes seeing a demoralized Jew, Amalek will sacrifice his own time, comfort, and money just to see sadness on the face of a Jew.
And that, said the rabbanit, is why we Jews must understand that when a person or group is trying to demoralize us, our response should be simcha and bitachon and emuna.
This includes even the moments we are alone, with no one else around to see us.
(While Amalek is clearly not Jewish, there are different types of Erev Rav souls — one of which is Amalekite — residing within biological Jews. So that's why we see so-called Jews acting like Amalekites. At the soul-level, they aren't real Jews at all, though they may seem to possess Jewish lineage.)
So this is a good message to keep in mind when we're showing ourselves to anyone we suspect might be Amalek (including showing ourselves via writing — yes, I'm applying this to myself too).
We need to look Amalek in the eye and say, "No, I'm NOT afraid. I'm NOT cowed. I'm NOT giving up."
And our simcha and strength MUST based itself on God.
None of this: "Well, we have our own country" or "the Israeli Superman!" or "our technology is soooo..." or anything like that. Because none of that provides the source of our strength and optimism in the face of global hatred and attempts at genocide.
It has to be this: "I'm brimming with strength and joy because I stand with the God of Am Yisrael. And I KNOW He's on MY side — because I'm on His Side."
So keep smiling (even if you have to paste it on your face, so to speak).
And if you can't smile, then at least look invincible and full of emunah.
Don't let the Amalekites get you down.