The Fifth Pour
Pam Ehrenkranz
There ' s a lot of pouring at a seder , most notably , four cups of wine . Yet there is one more pouring : Shfoch chamat ’ cha - A request for God to pour out the Divine anger against the nations that have " consumed Jacob and laid waste his home ," 15 and to destroy them .
An out and out call for God to destroy our enemies . Feeling relatively safe and secure , many of us have tried to soften this seemingly gratuitous call for anger by adding a prayer for the righteous gentiles ( one written 400 years before the Holocaust ), or to use this moment to remember the victims of the Shoah . We have , over the years , tried to find ways to explain this ancient text as a lens into the period of time in which it was written and to distance ourselves from it because it makes us uncomfortable . I have , for years , always looked for a poem or prayer to offset this passage at our seder .
But this year ' s seder will be different from all my other seders : I will say shfoch chamat ’ cha with no additions , no qualifications . Avoiding saying this paragraph is a failure of imagination , and most certainly , a failure of empathy . The rabbis composed this paragraph in response to the crushing destruction of the Crusades . The reference to nations who “ know not ” God is a direct inference to Pharoah and vicious leaders like him . Softening the Haggadic text means that we have missed the
15
Ps . 79:6-7
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