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Turning Pesach from a 'wrathful' to a majestic holiday
By Roi Ben-Yehuda
Tags: Jewish, Haggadah, Pesach 

My mother's Israeli boyfriend hates Passover. He loathes the holiday because of a single passage in the Haggadah (the ritual text) which he describes as "immoral and spiritually bigoted."

This passage is the famous (or rather infamous) section which asks of God to exact revenge on those nations who lack divine awareness, and who have maltreated the Jewish people. It reads as follows:

"Pour out Your fury on the nations that do not know you, and upon the kingdoms that do not invoke Your name, for they have devoured Jacob [the Jews] and destroyed his home. Pour out Your wrath on them; may Your blazing anger overtake them. Pursue them in wrath and destroy them from under the heavens of the Lord."
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The passage itself is a combination of three verses from the Bible (Psalm 79:6-7, Psalm 69:25 and Lamentations 3:66). It was compiled and added to the Haggadah during the Middle Ages as a response to the massacres of the Crusades (beginning in 1096), and to the persecution of the Jews during the time of Easter (which usually coincides with Passover). Throughout the ages, the Jews, who had no recourse to violence, vented their indignation by sublimating and spiritualizing their desire for vengeance.

In modern times, in an era in which coexistence is valued by Jew and non-Jew alike, it is no surprise that these words have rubbed people the wrong way: after all, the verses cited in the Haggadah are perpetuating a worldview of religious warfare and animosity. Moreover, the message of "Pour out Your wrath" seemingly contradicts the ethos of Passover with its universal emphasis on freedom and compassion (both human and divine).

Yehiel Weingarten, a Zionist pioneer, expressed perfectly the recoil that many Jews feel towards the passage when he wrote: "I can't hate. And I won't teach our children to hate. I understand the pain of the Jews, the pain and the fury that went into this prayer hundreds of years ago. The ugly face of anti-Semitism exists today, too, but not to the extent where, God forbid, we should teach our children this prayer. The foolish and the malicious can be condemned. They can be pitied. But we can't hate them - and make God part of this hatred."(It is interesting to note that Weingarten wrote this passage in 1936, one wonders if he would have agreed with his conclusion a decade later.)

As a result of such sentiments, many Jews have dealt with this passage by simply ignoring or expunging the verses out of the Haggadah. Most Reform Haggadot, for example, have omitted the offensive section, while many Conservative Haggadot have whitewashed the passage with open-ended translations and apologetic commentary. Even the authors of the orthodox Yeshiva University Haggadah felt compelled to inform their readers that although the passage "calls for retribution and revenge upon those who do not know God, it is not for our own personal revenge and satisfaction that such harsh justice is demanded, but rather to uphold and exalt the Name of the Holy One, Blessed be He, Who is the God of Justice."

The commentary of the Yeshiva University Haggadah is telling: the fear of the authors is that the call for revenge and retribution is personal. It seems to them unbefitting and undignified that such base emotions should make their way into the sacred literature of Passover. It is this realization that drove many to ignore, expunge, or explain these verses out of existence.

But one wonders if such a reading of the apparently troubling passage is warranted. Given all the suffering and persecution that the Jews had endured, should they have had no room to personally express their anger and frustration? Would they have been better off by suppressing their impulse to right the wrong they continuously experienced? Were they not expressing their humanity, when they asked God to punish those that had rubbed them of life?

The problem seems to be our visceral discomfort with the idea of retribution and vengeance itself. We tend to see the emotional phenomenon as necessarily self-destructive, irrational, and dangerous. Our response to such emotions as anger and vengeance is to suppress or overcome them. Yet recent studies in the field of emotions have taken a different view of the subject. Susan Jacoby, for example, has written that our denial of our want for vengeance is comparable to the Victorian denial of sexual desire, the price of which was displaced negative behaviors and emotions. The late Rabbi Arthur Lelyveld noted that vengeance proper - proportional punishment - often produces in us a sense of "aesthetic satisfaction," while philosopher Robert C. Solomon wrote that the impulse for vengeance lies "at the very foundation of our sense of justice."

The United States Supreme Court, in the majority opinion of Greg V. Georgia, echoed Solomon's idea when it stated that: "The instinct for retribution is part of the nature of man, and channeling that instinct in the administration of criminal justice serves an important purpose in promoting the stability of a society governed by law. When people begin to believe that organized society is unwilling or unable to impose upon criminal offenders the punishment they "deserve," then there are sown the seeds of anarchy - of self-help, vigilante justice, and lynch law."

Of course, in stating that vengeance and retribution have value, I am not suggesting that they are an optimal response to injustice. Surely, compassion and forgiveness are nobler responses. Yet, as Robert Solomon has argued, the very concept of forgiveness presupposes the desire for vengeance: For what is there to forgive if you have no need for vengeance?

What I am suggesting is that we begin to recognize that there is something completely natural, healthy, and even noble about the "Pour out Your wrath" verses in the Haggadah. The verses should not be removed or ignored, rather they should be embraced as an expression of our people's humanity.

"Pour out Your wrath" is a passage born out of a people's fanatical love of justice. Yet just as much as the Jews love justice, they are also a people of compassion, forgiveness, and peace. Therefore, it should come as no surprise that in a 16th century manuscript from Worms, the following addition to the Haggadah was placed along side our chosen passage:

"Pour out Your love on the nations who have known You, and on the kingdoms who call upon Your name. For they show loving-kindness to the seed of Jacob, and they defend Your people Israel from those who would devour them alive. May they live to see the sukkah of peace spread over Your chosen ones, and to participate in the joy of Your nations."

Perhaps it is time that we incorporate this beautiful passage into our reading of the Haggadah. At the very least, it will mollify those, like my mother's boyfriend, who have let a single phrase destroy an otherwise majestic holiday.

Roi Ben-Yehuda is an Israeli-American writer living in Spain. He is a regular contributor to The Observers, Jewcy, and AllVoices. Roi holds degrees from New School University and the Jewish Theological Seminary. His blog can be read at www.roiword.wordpress.com
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  1.   great article 17:07  |  Gabriel 16/04/08
  2.   NO IT IS A VISCERAL REMINDER 19:06  |  YITZAK BEN SHLOMO 16/04/08
  3.   WHY NO EMPHASIS ON THESE- Roi Ben-Yehuda ? 19:30  |  YITZAK BEN SHLOMO 16/04/08
  4.   Rethinking about the holiday 22:06  |  Rachel 16/04/08
  5.   Being a proud Jew 00:20  |  Sarah 17/04/08
  6.   Not convinced! 00:44  |  Eyal 17/04/08
  7.   Nice point of view 12:48  |  gabsybabsu 17/04/08
  8.   passover is always changing us, not the other way. 20:44  |  ERICA COHEN 18/04/08
  9.   Wrath!! 00:24  |  Bruce Dickinson 19/04/08
  10.   The Problem with this passage 15:54  |  Amos 20/04/08
  11.   If we were slaves 17:36  |  Art 15/06/08
  12.   Pouring out.... 15:35  |  The Red Baron 05/04/09
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