Release your wrath

A friend came over yesterday to talk about one of the most problematic passages in the traditional Passover haggadah where we ask God to pour out His wrath:

Pour out Your wrath against the nations that know You not, and upon the kingdoms that call not upon Your name; for they have consumed Jacob and laid waste his habitation. Pour out Your rage upon them and let Your fury overtake them. Pursue them in anger and destroy them from under the heavens of the Eternal.

After much of the seder, after the festival meal, after much reading and singing and talking, after the third cup of wine, we fill the fourth cup, open the door for Elijah, and let loose with that righteous anger. It’s quite the contrast to when we start telling the Passover story early in the evening and say “All who are hungry, let them come and eat. All who are needy, let them come and celebrate the Passover with us.” But we don’t open the door for that part.

Who is the righteous late-evening anger directed against? Surely we are not asking for vengeance against the non-Jews who are at our seders and in our families, nor our actual non-Jewish neighbors with whom we just shared roof rakes and calcium chloride in the midst of a record-setting winter. But ritual language does not just express what was in the hearts of those who wrote it. It shapes how we see ourselves, every one of us who recites and hears those words. It shapes how others see us. And it shapes how our children come to understand who we wish for them to become.

An unbroken continuation of this anger is not what I wish for my son.

My friend’s haggadah had replaced this passage with a Holocaust remembrance passage before the door is opened for Elijah:

On this Seder night, we recall with anguish and with love our martyred brothers and sisters, the six million Jews of Europe who were destroyed at the hands of a tyrant more fiendish than Pharaoh. Their memory will never be forgotten. Their murderers will never be forgiven.

Trapped in ghettos, caged in death camps, abandoned by an unseeing or uncaring world, Jews gave their lives in acts that sanctified God’s name and the name of His people Israel. Some rebelled against their tormentors, fighting with makeshift weapons, gathering the last remnants of their failing strength in peerless gestures of courage and defiance. Others went to their death with their faith in God miraculously unimpaired.

Unchecked, unchallenged, evil ran rampant and devoured the holy innocents. But the light of the Six Million will never be extinguished. Their glow illumines our path. And we will teach our children and our children’s children to remember them with reverence and with pride.

We invite the souls of all who are missing, the souls of all who were snatched from our midst, to sit with us together at the Seder. This invitation was uttered by Seder celebrants in the Vilna Ghetto in 1942...and we repeat it tonight. For on this night all Jews are united in history and in hope. We were all in Mitzrayim. We were all at Sinai. We were all in the hell that was the Holocaust. And we will all be present at the final redemption.

While I like it as a personal reading, it feels too long for the haggadah. So too does my haggadah’s version of the fifth child, the child of the Holocaust who did not survive to ask a question.

Faith should be stronger than hate, and the impulse for peace should be stronger than the desire for vengeance. That may not be true in the moment, but the haggadah is a durable statement of remembrance and hope. So here’s my new plan for after the third cup of wine, shortening and refocusing the Holocaust reading, and replacing the traditional wrath and fury paragraph:

After the third cup, pour the fourth cup.

On this Seder night, we recall the six million Jews of Europe who were murdered in the Holocaust. Their memory will never be forgotten. We draw inspiration from the strength of Jews who held onto their faith and celebrated Passover in the Vilna and Warsaw ghettos and all over Europe even as their communities were being destroyed.

In their names, we invite the souls of all who are missing to sit with us together at our Seder. For on this night all Jews are united in history and in hope. We were all in Egypt. We were all at Sinai. We were all in the Holocaust. And we will all be present at the final redemption.

Open the door for the prophet Elijah. All rise.

We do not know when the final redemption will come, but we open the door for the prophet Elijah at every Seder with hope. We work to cast aside wrath and fury, longing for Isaiah’s description of the time to come when violence shall no longer be heard in our lands. Never again let us be slaves, and neither let us be the taskmasters to others. Let us strive for peace and justice so that we may hear Elijah announce the coming of the Messiah.

All sing Eliyahu hanavi.

That’s what I want to teach my son. Remembrance and faith, connections through the generations, and hope made real by the work we must continue to do.