To this day, ink continues to be spilled in the aftermath of Hamas’ attack against Israel on Oct. 7, 2023 over the proper Jewish perspective on vengeance.
As Pesach arrives once more, eyes will inevitably turn to the Haggadah’s centuries-old short prayer known as Shefoch Chamatcha, in which readers call for God to “Pour out Your wrath against the nations who do not know You.”
In more peaceful times, many Jews have found this prayer uncomfortable, and simply skipped it. But liturgical cherry-picking skirts the pressing societal concern.
As Dr. Ruth Wisse observed in The Wall Street Journal in a prescient essay months before the attack, “Some Jews have removed this section altogether from their Seder recitations. But moral evasion doesn’t improve the world.” The history of the Jewish people, she continued, “is studded with episodes of unprovoked atrocity, and those who try to expunge any judgment against the evildoers risk doing evil themselves. Many Jews who excuse or defend their people’s enemies routinely turn their political anger instead on fellow Jews whom they blame for the indiscriminate aggression directed at them.”
A world which lacks moral clarity and acknowledgement of one’s adversaries’ intentions, in other words, produces not social justice but victim-blaming and ethical decay.
One well-meaning writer, roughly 500 years ago, proposed a compromise measure. Or so we have been told.
In his Haggadah commentary, Rabbi Jonathan Sacks recorded that “in one manuscript from Worms, 1521, there is a unique addition to the Haggadah, alongside Pour Out Your Wrath. It is a prayer of thanks for the righteous gentiles throughout history, who, rather than persecuting Jews, befriended them and protected them in times of danger: Pour out your love on the nations who know You. And on kingdoms who call Your name. For the good which they do for the seed of Jacob. And they shield Your people Israel from their enemies. May they merit to see the good of Your chosen and to rejoice in the joy of Your nation.”
It turns out, however, that this prayer is a forgery.
As Shmuel Lesher has noted in a recent scholarly article in the journal Hakirah, the additional prayer was supposedly discovered by Rabbi Hayyim Bloch (1881-1970) in a Haggadah salvaged from the estate of Rabbi Shimshon Wertheimer (1658-1724). Rabbi Bloch claimed that this Haggadah was edited in Worms in 1521 by Rabbi Yehudah ben Rabbi Yekusiel, a grandson of Rashi.
Researchers have concluded, however, that the prayer was fabricated by the 20th-century Rabbi Bloch himself. No such medieval prayer existed.
The original Shefoch Chamatcha first appears in the Haggadah as part of the Machzor Vitry, compiled around 1145 by Rabbi Simhah of Vitri, one of Rashi’s students. No doubt it emerged from the fearsome crucible of the Crusades, in which Jews were slaughtered by marauding mobs and lacked the political power to defend themselves. As Lesher notes, the canonical text fits well within the ethos of the Haggadah’s narrative. In addition to our national liberation from Egypt, threaded throughout the night is the express wish for the Messianic era to arrive. “Reciting Shefoch Chamatcha at the Seder,” Lesher argues, “is part of our hope for the future redemption. By definition, part of the fulfillment of the ultimate redemption is the retribution and punishment of those who are deserving of it.”
In addition to the aforementioned forged recitation, some have sought self-censorship of the original text or inserted a desire to thank non-Jews who are supportive of the Jewish people. Others have nuanced the lines’ practical application into what they deem to be a more palatable prayer. For example, in the 16th century, esteemed sage Rabbi Eliezer Ashkenazi suggested that the intended recipients of God’s wrath were not the gentiles of his time. “These verses [are referring to] those who deny the fact of the Exodus with all of its signs and miracles,” he wrote. “It is very clear that all non-Jews amongst whom the Jews are scattered, are aware of the Exodus, are convinced of its occurrence and understand its meaning. Therefore, we are saying specifically that God should not pour out His wrath upon those who do know His name … the Christians and Muslims of today do know God and recognize the fact of the Exodus. Heaven-forbid that our religion would require us to curse them.”
Others have emphasized not the identity of who is to receive the call for punishment, but the fact that it is a call and not the committing of vengeful actions themselves. In the 21st century, Rabbi Norman Lamm observed that: “Those who give verbal expression to their enmity are usually the least likely to act upon it. Those who acknowledge, as we do every Wednesday morning [in the Song of the Day], that God is a Kel Nekamot (“God of vengeance”) (Psalms 94:1), are least likely to appoint themselves the official executioners on His behalf. To keep your righteous resentment pent up within, without release, is like not being able to perspire. It keeps the poison inside your system and destroys it. When the steam of indignation at the humiliations and indignities we have had to endure over the centuries builds up pressure within us, we give it release — in this case, by reciting the Shefoch Chamatcha. Then both we and the world are all better for it.”
As Dr. Wisse put it in her essay, “If Jews believed in a God of justice, how else but through some call for justice could we remain Jews? Politically, theologically, and above all humanly, the call to God would actually prove indispensable for a people that does not do unto others as coalitions of evil have done — and in some cases still openly plan to do — unto them.”
While some might continue to debate Shefoch Chamatcha this Pesach, then, we can all agree on the Seder’s central goal – enabling us all to live in a time when violence has been replaced by peace in a redeemed era free from fear, and full of faith.
Rabbi Dr. Stuart Halpern is Senior Adviser to the Provost of Yeshiva University and Deputy Director of Y.U.’s Straus Center for Torah and Western Thought. His books include “The Promise of Liberty: A Passover Haggada,” which examines the Exodus story’s impact on the United States, “Esther in America,” “Gleanings: Reflections on Ruth” and “Proclaim Liberty Throughout the Land: The Hebrew Bible in the United States.”
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