Kavanah for the Ten Plagues | Passover haggadah by Noraa Kaplan

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Pesach is a joyous time for the Jewish people. We celebrate our ancestors’ liberation and our own lives’ blessings by gathering with loved ones, eating special foods, and, for some of us, by drinking wine. Wine has long been a symbol of joy in Judaism. The Bible praises it for “gladdening the hearts of men” (Psalm 104:15) “making life merry.” (Ecclesiastes 10:19) Wine is already a fairly ubiquitous part of Jewish life—at least twice a week, we make kiddush over it. It’s only natural that it should play a major role in an experience as joyous as the seder.

One of the seder’s most poignant rituals is designed to temper our joy a bit though. We remove drops of wine and grape juice from our glasses at this point in the seder, to symbolically diminish our joy. The seder asks us to remember that our joy is incomplete. Though tonight we rejoice in our freedom, because the World to Come has not yet come to be we must remember that there are still people who are not yet free.

That is the standard interpretation of the ten plagues ritual in leftist haggadot, anyways. One of the nearly ubiquitous features of theme seders is a listicle of “ten modern plagues” that the haggadah’s authors want to draw our attention to. The problem with listicles like these is that they fail to grapple with the original context of the biblical plagues. The text of Exodus makes sure to tell us that the Israelites were not afflicted by the plagues, only the Egyptians, so why should our haggadot list the plagues that affect our communities, or worse, compare others’ oppression with the plagues Hashem smote Mitzrayim with?

The traditional meaning of the ten plagues ritual is a little harder to grapple with, but ultimately, far more radical. We symbolically diminish our joy to honor the Egyptians who died by Hashem’s hand during the plagues. At first brush it might seem counterintuitive, even reactionary to mourn our Egyptian oppressors. Why should we show compassion to people who, at the very least, were complicit in our slavery and attempted genocide? Isn’t it sacrilegious to mourn the people Hashem killed for us?

The scope of devastation that the ten plagues wrought is clearest with the plague of the firstborn. Torah tells us that, “At midnight, Hashem struck down all the firstborn males in the land of Mitzrayim, from the firstborn of Pharaoh who sat on the throne to the firstborn of the captive who was in the jailhouse.” (Exodus 12:29) How could a prisoner, a fellow target of Pharaoh’s oppression, have deserved to be killed? One has to wonder if Hashem killing the firstborn—among whom there were surely children, babies even—was any less cruel than Pharaoh’s order to drown all the male Jewish babies in the Nile.

It would be nice to tell a sanitized and simplified Exodus narrative where every Egyptian was hard-hearted Pharaoh, totally deserving of divine retribution, but that simply was not the case. The price of our ancestors’ freedom was steep—many innocent lives were taken, because of the powerful elite’s arrogance and stubbornness.

With this in mind, it makes sense that the tradition arose to diminish from our joy during the recounting of the ten plagues, to honor the innocent lives that were lost. But what about the not-so innocent lives? Should we let the deaths of Pharaoh, his soldiers and brutal taskmasters sadden us tonight? Is it right to take pleasure in our enemies’ deaths? The Bible certainly thinks so, as it is written, “the righteous will rejoice when they see revenge.” (Psalm 58:11) Liberals and conservatives alike call leftists ‘heartless’ when we celebrate the deaths of fascists and war criminals. Christians especially cite this kind of behavior as an example of leftists’ ‘godlessness.’ Judaism, on the other hand, encourages such behavior, making a wild carnival out of the deaths of genocidal dictators like Haman in the Book of Esther.

Does this mean Jews are less compassionate than Christians? Perhaps it isn’t that our compassion is deficient, but that our understanding of what it means to practice compassion is more flexible, responsible, and expansive. If a powerful politician who’s killed countless people through their policies gets sick, should we pray for their recovery? Most Christians would say yes, but many Jews would disagree. We have to ask ourselves if praying for perpetrators of genocide and carceral violence to live is truly compassionate, or if in doing so we dishonor the memories of the people they’ve killed, close off our hearts to the people they are oppressing.
An alternative to praying for their lives and praying for their deaths is praying for their transformations. This is the view of Bruriah, wife of Rabbi Meir and a brilliant Torah sage in her own right. One time she heard her husband praying for Hashem to kill some troublemakers in his neighborhood who had been harassing him. She refuted the ambiguous verse he justified his prayer with: יִתַּמוּ חַטָּאִים מִן־הָאָרֶץ וּרְשָׁעִים עוֹד אֵינָם, yitamu chata’im min ha-aretz u-rasha’im od einam, traditionally translated as “may sinners disappear from the earth, and the wicked be no more.” (Psalm 104:35) The ambiguity lies in the word חטאים, chata’im, which could mean either ‘sins’ or ‘sinners.’ She said, “If the verse is praying for sinners to die, then how would it be possible for them to then stop being wicked? Rather, pray for Hashem to have compassion for them, so they will make teshuva.” Bruriah suggests that death puts an end to our ability to change, so if we want to put an end to a person’s wickedness, we have to pray for Hashem to have compassion on them, so they can be transformed.
There is a famous midrash about the angels’ reaction to the drowning of the Egyptian soldiers in the Red Sea. Overjoyed that B’ney Yisra’el were finally free, they started singing songs of praise. Furious, Hashem said to them, “My creations are drowning and you are singing?!” At the same time, Jewish tradition has long seen the song Miriam, Moshe, and B’ney Yisra’el sang on the banks of the Red Sea as one of the holiest parts of the Torah. How do we reconcile Hashem’s harsh disapproval of the angels’ song with the sanctity of the Song of the Sea?

For Hashem, each death is a terrible tragedy, because each human life is infinitely valuable and each one of us has the potential for transformation. The Talmud answers that Hashem does not rejoice at the downfall of the wicked, but Hashem does cause humans to rejoice. But why should Hashem do this? Why is Pesach a joyful holiday at all, and not a solemn commemoration of our oppressors’ tragic deaths?

Perhaps rejoicing in the death of oppressors is not incompatible with compassion. Allowing others to rejoice in their oppressors’ demise without judging them is an act of compassion, because after all, it’s only human to do so. Allowing ourselves to rejoice in the deaths of those who seek to kill us is self-compassion—it is the recognition that we are not God, so we can’t always see the world through the eyes of the divine. If we did, there would be no holidays, and there would be no victory. So, of course we should rejoice in our liberation, even if that liberation was not complete. But, our joy cannot be complete either, not until the World to Come. So, we spill ten drops from our glasses, to remember those who died—the innocent and the guilty alike. Our ancestors instituted this ritual to teach us that it is possible to rejoice in victories that aren’t whole, because if we can’t do that we will never see the “day that is all good.” Tonight, let us remember the dead, embrace the living, and pray for transformation.

❉ Why did Hashem choose to bring B’ney Yisra’el out of Mitzrayim violently?

haggadah Section: -- Ten Plagues

Source: Min Ha-Meitzar: An Abolitionist Haggadah from the Narrow Place by Noraa Kaplan