The blessings before the Shema emphasize creation and revelation. The blessing after, redemption. While the gist of the blessing speaks of the divine rescue from Egypt, and the ongoing rescue from the “fists of all tyrants,” the language is anything but mild and pious. In fact, it is one of the most rough-edged prayers in the entire siddur: G-d “exacts payment from our oppressors, paying all our mortal enemies in kind” “He lets us tread upon our enemies’ altars” “granting us…vengeance over Pharaoh.” “He killed all the first-born of Egypt in His wrath” “and “drowned those who chased [us] and those who hated [us] in the depths.”
Not exactly the stuff of an interfaith prayer meeting.
The non-traditional prayer books, including our Sim Shalom, bend over backwards to avoid the problem. Rabbi David Ellenson created the following helpful summary. Several Reform prayer books offered this prayer in the vernacular only, and included only the universalist parts. Many others omit all the parts that seemed too “vengeful” and substitute “who performed miracles in Egypt” for “who sought vengeance over Pharaoh.” An early version of a Conservative siddur substituted “Thus was your marvelous power made known to them” for “their pursuers and their enemies were drowned in the deep.” Our Sim Shalom does something similar, reading “miracles before Pharaoh” in the translation, instead of underscoring divine vengeance.
It’s easy to understand the motivation for all these changes. Calls for blood, on the one hand, and prayerful piety on the other don’t sit well together. In addition, one could argue that if we want a world without bloodshed, we should start with ourselves and not glorify it.
Reasonable enough, but I ain’t buying it, for several reasons. First, given the choice, I’d rather have us sublimate our violent impulses by focusing on the past, rather than refusing to address those impulses and letting them perforce come to expression in the present. Second, we who live in more comfort than Roman emperors have trouble grasping the true depth of evil, and the extent we continue to be threatened by it. The siddur’s references to the “glory of the coming of the Lord,” are a helpful reminder to us of just how bitter the “grapes of wrath” really are. Third, and perhaps most important, vengeance, too, is from the Lord. Pretending that it isn’t doesn’t make it go away. It merely offers a distorted view of the world, and a distorted view of G-d. This helps nothing.
The moral of the story: prayer without truth is not really prayer.