Is Wrath As Healthy As Love?

Our own Roi Ben Yehuda has an article in Haaretz about one of the most famous parts of the Haggadah, the section towards the end of the meal where we say:

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.

Isn’t this a little too mean-spirited? Do we really need to ask God to severely punish our enemies? Are fury and wrath really called for?  It’s a funny question to ask, and a very contemporary one. Until fairly recently, I doubt many Jewish communities would think twice about that passage. As Jews have faced persecution and hatred throughout time, it’s easy to imagine that these words were a source of comfort and wisdom to them. The enemies of Israel would be dealt with. Those who tried to devour our people, who destroyed our homes, they had it coming. Today’s humanistic ideals try to whitewash our emotions, but as Ben Yehuda points out, wrath and vengeance are, to a certain degree, completely healthy responses to persecution and pain. There may be portions of the Haggadah that bother us, or that seem callous in light of contemporary wisdom, but there’s still value there. At the very least, we can say it’s important to understand how wounded and angry Jews were for so many generations that this became a part of our story. And if you think about the Exodus itself, it’s not hard to imagine Jews leaving Egypt thinking that they’d like the wrath and fury of God to pour down on the Egyptians who had enslaved them. Ben Yehuda ends his article with a quote from a 16th century Haggadah manuscript from Worms with the following supplement:

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.

The manuscript has been lost, and recently some scholars have called its authenticity into question, but the idea of counteracting wrath with love is interesting. The seder is as much about thanksgiving—for freedom, and tradition, and family—as it is about redemption. Jews are not strangers to wrath or to love, and at the seder, it’s nice to recognize both aspects of our history.