How to Respond to The Urge for Revenge?

What do we do with revenge? The bloody human urge to get back at those who hurt us, to activate an eye for an eye and a tooth for a tooth, to kick, and punch, and harm, and maim and kill the ones who’ve hurt us or the ones we love no matter who started or how old and cruel the cycle of bad blood? 

We humans - all religions, all races -- inherited old tribal truths and traumatic patterns. We inherited the paths of peace and the ways of war.  And we evolve, we keep evolving, and we must keep evolving, as children do, as nations must. Of course there is the urge to kick and scream and curse and kill. But how can we transcend  the primal urge? What will be the tools to help us use the compass of compassion and navigate our exit routes from the terrible trenches of terror towards the no-man’s land where truce awaits, and then, eventually, the closest thing we can imagine to peace, and beyond? 

We have to start by honestly admitting that we have this  killing gene deep in our psyche and our sacred texts.  We must do what those who face addiction and commit to change must do. Confess, acknowledge, confront and ask for help in moving out of our own way towards salvation.  

The Jewish body of information known as the Bible is just one of the building blocks of our cultural and spiritual inheritance. The Bible includes many layers and perspectives, some of them prophetic peace and some are wrath and war. We Jews have lived through wars and peace, as victims and as perpetrators. 

Inside the pages of our legacy there are multiple narratives and calls that glorify revenge, and justify annihilation of the ones who are our enemies. For many generations these old texts were a vague memory as Jews lives in diasporas, minorites with little power to police or use arms against those who tried and often managed to reduce our numbers, ridicule and rupture our existence.  All that our ancestors could claim was the prayer to the God of Vengeance, for some hope of the oppressed that justice will one day be the fate of our cruel oppressors. And sometimes that happened and often it did not. 

This week, below the bible belt, we read several pleas for vengeance, prayers for blood, hopes for triumph and religious zeal in the service of national aspirations. 

We read the words that were integrated into every Passover Seder -- ‘Pour Your Wrath on the Nations that refuse you’!  We read about the storm and the tempest that are divine tools against the enemies of whoever wrote the psalms -- and were then used as the names for the first war planes used by the young state of Israel in the early 1950’s.  We read our history and witness the recurring themes, with horror. Will we never learn? What will it take for leaders and for neighbors, for those who walk the path of religious faith not just as mere lip service to renounce the paradigms that again and again and again pit us against each other in the so called name of the sacred?? 

In the context of the news from Jerusalem and Gaza City, Beirut and Tehran --   this all seems way too much, too old, too primal and too cruel. 

Can we ever escape this cycle of violence, fear-based terror and either/or mentality?  

Is this naive pacifist nonsense that has no grounding in the cruel realities of politics and hostilities between the children of Abraham in this endless family feud? 

We read of revenge in the Torah text of this week’s portion, with clear instructions by Moses to annihilate the the nation of Midyan - the people whom he found refuge with and married into. We read of the so-called god-given right to self defense by killing children and women and civilians. 

Yes, this is also in our sacred bible.  These are our texts of terror. 

And now that Jews do have power once again and these are not mere histories - we must object, protest and do what others have before us and are doing right now -- admit the fact that we are capable of cruel and inhuman behavior, that our trauma and abuse have turned some of us into vicious killers in the name of self defense that has lost its way and no longer protects us or anyone.  We have to honor our ancestral choice as we criticize the bloodthirsty theologies that no longer serve us just as the misogyny and homophobia and tribalism of the past no longer serve our values. 

And we have to never lose hope that through honest reckoning we will repair and we will, together, through the tears, wipe away the blood, and pave the path for justice and for peace, and echo the boldest claims that also exists in our scriptures and ends the chapter that we just read in the psalms yesterday, hoping that all people on earth will remember that we are created in the same divine image, part of the same family, pieces of the same divine:

“וְֽיֵדְע֗וּ כִּֽי־אַתָּ֬ה שִׁמְךָ֣ יְהֹוָ֣ה לְבַדֶּ֑ךָ עֶ֝לְי֗וֹן עַל־כׇּל־הָאָֽרֶץ׃

May they know

that Your name, Yours alone, is GOD,

supreme over all the earth.”

Tall order? I suppose. But what other choice do we have?

Keep plotting for peace, friends.

Peace must prevail. 

Thank you for joining me below the bible belt. 

Shabbat Shalom.