Some Jews Pass Over the Haggadah's Curse
“Why is this night different from all other nights?” asks the Haggadah, the text re-enacting the biblical exodus from slavery to national freedom that Jews will recite on April 5 at the ceremonial meal known as the Passover Seder. The Haggadah’s four opening questions—three of which relate to specific customs—are traditionally recited by the youngest one present, a practice that prompts compliments to our ancestors for a pedagogic device that not only engages the children but sets the evening’s tone for inquiry and debate.
Passovers of my childhood were seared with questions. The Haggadah instructs every Jew in every generation “to look on himself as though he came forth out of Egypt.” Since our family had fled from Europe in the summer of 1940 and were among the pitifully few Jews admitted to Canada during the war, we needed no such directive to experience Passover personally. As we moved from the bitter herbs of oppression to the feast that followed, we sensed an all too eerie correspondence between tyrannies past and present.
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A fifth question thus emerged from the Haggadah: Why is the political fate of the Jews different from that of other nations? Looking for answers, I eventually offered my findings in a book, “Jews and Power.” A minority by choice, Jews always had to live “among the nations,” many of which displayed no reciprocal talent for coexistence. Aggressors habitually perceive accommodation as weakness.
That asymmetry and the ravages it sanctioned may account for the pivotal section of the Seder as the Haggadah turns from the exodus to thanksgiving for redemption. The front door is opened to welcome the prophet Elijah, who foretells the messianic coming. But then, with the door still open, God himself is summoned with urgent pleas taken from the biblical books of Psalms and Lamentations: “Pour out Thy wrath upon the nations that know Thee not, and on the kingdoms that call not upon Thy name. For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitations.” Why is a curse so damning, and so vehement that many liberal Jews can’t bring themselves to utter it, included on this festive night? A psychologist suggests that without this purge of our anger, we couldn’t honestly sing the Hallelujahs that follow in the Haggadah.
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Some Jews have removed this section altogether from their Seder recitations. But moral evasion doesn’t improve the world. Jewish history 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.
https://archive.is/PeFCy#selection-144.0-144.1
Ms. Wisse is a senior fellow at the Tikvah Fund and author of the memoir “Free as a Jew.”