Many Passover haggadahs include a reading that begins “Pour out Your wrath,” asking God to exact vengeance on those considered enemies. What is the origin of this passage, and how might Jews understand it today?
After the festive meal, as the third cup of wine is poured and the door is opened for the Prophet Elijah, we encounter some of the most violent and disturbing lines of the seder.
They combine verses from two psalms and from the Book of Lamentations:
Pour out Your wrath upon those who do not know You and upon the governments which do not call upon Your Name. For they have devoured Jacob and laid waste his dwelling place (Psalms 79:6-7). Pour out Your fury upon them; let the fierceness of Your anger overtake them (Psalms 69:25). Pursue them in indignation and destroy them from under Your heavens (Lamentations 3:66).
These lines, which tap into anger and call for vengeance in no uncertain terms, understandably make many readers uncomfortable. So uncomfortable, in fact, that many modern haggadahs remove them entirely or embrace more palatable iterations. A popular alternative, believed to date back to the 16th century, replaces “Pour out Your wrath” with “Pour out Your love.” A version reads:
Keep My Jewish Learning free. In this season of freedom, help us keep Jewish connection and meaning free for everyone. Your support ensures that anyone seeking Jewish wisdom can find it here, without needing to cross the red sea (or a paywall).
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
For 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.
Even if the haggadah you use opts for love over wrath, or excises this reading completely, it’s worth considering why such vengeful rhetoric would have been added to the haggadah at all. “Pour out Your Wrath” appeared for the first time in Eleazer of Worms’ 13th-century commentary on the 11th-century Machzor Vitry. That prayer book was written during the Crusades, which wrought death and destruction upon European Jewish communities — violence that the crusaders often used seasonal blood libel to justify.
We know that these controversial lines, added to the haggadah in medieval France, were drafted in response to persecution. But why do they appear where they do in the haggadah? Each of the seder’s four cups of wine corresponds to an expression of redemption in Exodus 6:6, and the third cup of wine maps to the phrase “I will redeem you with an outstretched arm and through extraordinary chastisements(shfatim gedolim).”
It is important to note, however, that this exhortation is neither a call for human beings to take the law into their own hands nor is it a blanket call to target non-Jews. Rather, it asks God to punish “those who have devoured Jacob and laid waste his dwelling place.” The rabbis of the Talmud explain that even if a person curses everyone considered an enemy, God will punish only those who are actually guilty — and even then, only if those calling for the punishment are truly righteous.
Actualized or not, some may consider calling for divine vengeance against those who persecute the Jews to be an entirely reasonable proposition. While I might feel sure that violence is never a helpful response — that, in Gandhi’s famous words, “an eye for an eye leaves the whole world blind” — others might take a more nuanced position. Anger, they argue, is an appropriate response to violation, and to tell victims that their anger is inappropriate is itself oppressive.
Rabbi Jonathan Sacks even saw “restraint” in the haggadah’s inclusion of these controversial lines, writing in The Jonathan Sacks Haggada:
For centuries, Jews suffered a series of devastating blows — massacres, pogroms, forced conversions, inquisitions, confinement to ghettos, punitive taxation, and expulsions, culminating, in the very heart of ‘enlightened’ Europe, in the Holocaust. Yet these verses … are almost the only trace left by this experience on the Haggada, the night we recall our past.
One final idea that may be helpful is the connection between this text and the instruction to rid ourselves of hametz, or leaven. Since hametz has long been understood to symbolize corruption, as scholar Geoffrey Stern has explored, we might understand these verses as a metaphorical call for divine punishment of those, whatever their background, who would persecute good people, and lay waste to what is sacred. I, for one, find this reading more appealing than calling on God to wipe out some demonic ‘other.’ Ultimately, though, I do hope more for an influx of divine love to sweep away all separation, false consciousness, and unkindness everywhere on earth.
