Angry God, Rueful God: A Homily

My family's seder plate

After the Matzah is purchased in a case of crumbly blandness, the gefillte fish, the grated horseradish ruby and pearl in their beveled glass bottles (the Reform Pesach is largely store-bought, although I know the story of my Great Uncle Sidney, weeping over the horseradish root and the grater, the grey fumes intense), the Haggadot dusted off, the ceremonial silver polished, the shankbone procured, the egg roasted, after all this and the metaphorical sweeping of the leavened crumbs, comes the Seder. Perhaps the loveliest moment in the Jewish year.

The Passover Seder, and its story book, the Haggadah, is full of drama and thrill, very potent it is:

...and this very Haggadah whispers,
"Join us...you're welcome here...you belong,
Among my pages full of smoke and blood,
Among the great and ancient tales I tell."

But no moment more potent, more tangibly fraught, than the reading of the ten plagues on Egypt.

The Haggadah tells the story of the Hebrews' freedom from slavery, and of the Exodus from Egypt. To accomplish this, God stepped in and visited these plagues, each one more horrifying and vivid than the next, on the Egyptians:

Yet, when we recite them during the reading of the Haggadah, it is done with a measure of understanding and guilt.  For God, although he accomplishes these dark and violent miracles, at the same time chastizes the Hebrews for heedless, thoughtless celebration of the vanquishing of Egypt.  In what is for me the most interesting passage in the Passover story, we are reminded that deliverance came at great cost:

"Our rabbis taught: when the Egyptian armies were drowning in the sea, the Heavenly Hosts broke out in songs of jubilation.  God silenced them and said, 'My creatures are perishing, and you sing praises?'"

So as we recite the horrible plagues, we dip our fingers in our brimful ceremonial wine cups, and drop single drops of wine on our plates, ten drops, one for each plague, that as our cup is lessened, we might be mindful of the cost of our freedom.

It is an interesting lesson: God acted on our behalf, but it is almost as if he did so with a regretful humanity; he does not allow us to celebrate the method, only the result.  Brutality was met with brutality, as sometimes it must be, but there is a lesson: we ourselves are less for having been party to it.  And to take it shockingly far, God is less for having accomplished it.  It's a powerful conundrum, and one that I think I understood at least half-way, when as a child I dipped my tiny pinky in the grape juice, ten times, intoning the grim singsong litany of plague, the voices of those at the table also tense and grim, the wine gathering at the center of our Passover china--ten drops, ten plagues, a pool of wine, or was it blood?

Those moments informed my entire belief system as an adult. That our history, both real and liturgical, is full of suffering, redemption, battle, regret. That God, though all-powerful, shares our humanity. That the God of the Jews could be both righteous and remorseful, set an impossible task with consequence both horrible and great. That he could be angry at us, and forgive us, that we could be angry with Him and forgive him. Ten drops, two minutes each year, year after year, to examine the implications of a complex God and His complex actions. This freedom to know God as both perfect and imperfect is what has kept Him alive inside me.