[NGFP-BookClub] shfoch

[berger788]

The paragraph opening with the words sh’foch chamat’cha el hagoyim, is 
a pastiche, or a composition consisting of selections from various 
works, consisting of Psalm 79:6-7; Psalm 69:25; and Lamentations 3:66.

For a commentary on the ritual subsumed under the heading, The Cup of 
Elijah, Rabbi Shlomo Riskin writes in The Passover Haggadah:

Before the fourth cup of wine is poured, a special cup of wine filled 
to overflowing is set at the center of the table for the prophet 
Eliyahu. The front door is opened and everyone rises to recite on of 
the most incongruous passages in the Haggadah: sh’foch chamat’cha el 
hagoyim asher lo yeda-ucha.

Several questions can be raised immediately. why do we open the door at 
this particular moment and not at the beginning of the Seder, when we 
invite strangers to come and join us? Why do we open the door for 
eliyahu, who presumably can manage to visit each person’s Seder, and so 
can surely enter through a closed door? And further, what a strange 
greeting! As we welcome the forerunner of mashiach, we pronounce what 
appears to be a malediction (=curse) upon the nations of the world.

In response to these questions, we must realize that the Haggadah 
reflects all of Jewish history. Because of its proximity to Easter, the 
season before and after Jews celebrated pesach was a time of popular 
excitement about the death of Jesus, which was blamed on Jews and was 
constantly exploited by the Christian clergy to fan anti-Jewish hatred. 
Pesach was the season that revived the blood libel that accused Jews of 
killing gentile babies and using their blood to prepare matsah and wine 
for the Seder. On Seder night, gentiles often staged vicious pogroms 
against Jewish neighbors, making it necessary to open the door and look 
out into the street, lest, God forbid, a dead baby had been placed near 
the house to provide the mob with a pretext to ravage and kill. It was 
not at all rare to see Jewish families driven from their homes and 
Jewish populations from their villages in the middle of Seder night to 
escape certain injury and even death. The German author, Heinrich Heine 
tells such a story in his The Rabbi of Bacharach.

The reciting of sh’foch chamat’cha need not be explained only on the 
basis of medieval history, continues R. Riskin,  with its vicious 
anti-Jewish violence.  The notion of God as Redeemer of Jewish blood 
goes back to the Exodus itself. It was then that Amalek, Israel’s 
arch-enemy and the prototype of the Jew-killer from Haman to Hitler, 
attacked the Jews [Israelites] during their march through the desert. 
Instead of fighting the able-bodied, he [Amalek] attacked the rear 
guard -- women and their children and the aged. With God’s help, Israel 
defeated Amalek in a memorable battle, after which God said to Moshe: 
“I will utterly blot out the memory of Amalek from under Heaven” (Ex. 
17-14)

While we are in the desert of the exile, Rabbi Riskin continues, 
totally exposed to the depredations of our enemies, we must rely on God 
to take the role of go’el (redeemer) and to save us from our enemies. 
Thus, while the Exodus primarily recalls the redemption from Egypt, it 
also reminds us of the enemies on the outside who did not fail to 
attack us and thereby try to snuff out the redemption. We, therefore, 
beseech God to save us from them and pour divine wrath upon them for 
their attempts to destroy God’s Holy People -- as Amalek tried when we 
left Egypt.

The spirit of active revenge is alien to Israel. Israel’s essential 
God-given quest  is for universal peace and justice. In the past, the 
“religion of love” constantly [and consistent-ly] pursued its 
antagonists, and those it considered “not of the faith” with fire and 
sword, with the horrors of the Inquisition and the burning stake. 
Unlike Judaism, it claims that there is no salvation outside its own 
congregation. Jews, on the other hand, believe that all people, 
regardless of their religion merit salvation as long as they believe in 
one God and act morally. The please that “God pour out wrath” is not 
directed to non-Jewish religions but to those who “do not know You” and 
destroy Jewish lives.

Rabbi Richard N. Levy, the editor/trans-lator/compiler of  On wings of 
Freedom, which I referred to earlier, included this reflection in his 
Haggadah:

This door [which we now open] could be the Temple door, opened in 
Jerusalem on the Seder night to receive those who came on foot from all 
around the country to appear in the place where God could most 
intimately be en- countered.

This door could be the door of every synagogue, opened throughout the 
ages to demonstrate Jewish innocence before the slanderers who spread 
rumors of terrible things Jews did behind closed doors on the Seder 
night.

This door could be the door of every Jewish home, opened before hostile 
neighbors to show that the Seder celebration was meant to harm none, 
but to promise justice for the oppressed -- and retribution for the 
oppressors.

This door has also been opened by our oppressors themselves -- by the 
Spanish Inquisition, taking our people out to false trials and 
executions; by the SS troops of Hitler, dragging our people from their 
hiding places or their dining tables; by the secret police of the 
Soviet KGB, hustling our people off to torture in prison or to the 
Siberian wastes.

But door have two sides. We spend some moments now recalling how the 
door has been opened to throw us into the terrifying night of 
suffering, but let us also recall how it has been opened to rescue us 
from that night and hold aloft the hope of suffering’s end.

May God punish those who have thrown innocents into the void, may God 
protect those who have saved them.

[This is followed by (a) a short reminiscence of days in 1939, 1940 and 
1941 when people who be seized for forced labor, almost every day, by 
the Nazis; and (b) another short reminiscence of a small Protestant 
village in Occupied France during the War, where villagers developed a 
system for hiding and protecting Jews within members’ homes; and (c) a 
letter written by 17 members of CCAR [the conference of Reform American 
Rabbis[ who responded to Dr. Martin Luther King’s urgent request to 
join him in a demonstration against segregation in St. Augustine, 
Florida. After they were imprisoned for demonstrating, they sat on the 
floor behind the locked doors of their cell and wrote a letter, 
entitled “Why we Came” culminating with the prayer: baruch . . . matir 
asurim [Praised be the One who opens the door for the captive.]

I must admit that I took the liberty of adapting the words of my 
sources to render them gender-neutral (or non-sexist) in referring to 
the Deity. And so I avoided such third personal singular male pronouns 
as he, him, his, and himself. I do this in my support of the principles 
of feminism.

Respectfully submitted,

Yehuda Berger

-------------- next part --------------
A non-text attachment was scrubbed...
Name: not available
Type: text/enriched
Size: 8027 bytes
Desc: not available
Url : http://lists.ngfp.org/pipermail/ngfp-bookclub/attachments/20060329/ce11950c/attachment-0001.bin