There is probably no prayer in our siddur more controversial than the 12th blessing of the weekday Amidah. Our current text reads: “May there be no hope for slanderers, and may all wickedness instantly perish, and may all Your enemies quickly be destroyed. May You quickly uproot, smash, destroy, and humble the insolent quickly in our day. Blessed are You, G-d, who smashes His enemies and humbles the insolent.”

If you think that sounds rough, trust me when I tell you that medieval versions were even more hard-edged. “May they be erased from the book of life…” etc.

This prayer was subjected to both protective and ideological censorship.

Because it was often used to attack the Jewish community as malevolent, the text was softened, removing, among other things, the line “may Christians and heretics instantly perish,” which didn’t go over particularly well at the interfaith conference.

Equally fascinating was the censorship that resulted not from fear of outside forces but from changing perspectives of the possible. During the 1800’s and continuing even today, there has been an attempt to shift the emphasis from evildoers to evil per se. So for example, some prayer books substitute the general concept “arrogance” for the more personalized “the insolent,” and call for the repentance of “those who stray from You” instead of “uprooting, smashing, destroying, and humbling” them.

A case could be made that such refinement is a positive development. No doubt it sounds nicer. But I would argue that there is a unique value to the original, more brutal, version. Carl Gustav Jung, the great psychologist, suggested that we all have a shadow side, the darker part of ourselves that doesn’t conform to our conscious ideals. When we ignore this negative part of ourselves, and imagine that we are somehow “above it all,” there is a danger that we will project that negativity onto others. How often, after all, have people who thought of themselves as pious and godfearing been guilty of the most horrible crimes against “the ungodly”? By recognizing, and declaring publicly, that we are not “above it all,” but instead harbor deep-seated animosities justified by millennia of persecution and terror, we can prevent ourselves from mindlessly succumbing to our passions. Instead, while duly recognizing the corrosive reality of evil and, more particularly, of evildoers, we can put our energies looking to the heavens for help.

This is a particularly useful application of the adage, “Let go and let G-d…”