Pour Out Your Wrath/Love
Sermon: 8 th Day of Pesach, Rabbi Esther Hugenholtz Pour Out Your Wrath/Love What do we do with anger? Anger is an important and defining emotion in the Hebrew Bible and we might be inclined to recoil from it. The Israelites get angry, Moses gets angry, God definitely gets angry. In our contemporary politeness, we may not always know how to meet that anger and there may be a real philosophical disconnect between the source of anger and its expression. God identifies as ‘El Kana’, a zealous God, and this may only layer onto our discomfort with the notion of anger and retribution. What human behavior merits God’s wrath? I suspect all of us here would reject such toxic theology outright. We scrub and sanitize our texts or obfuscate their meaning. But how intellectually honest is it? Meanwhile we sit with the anger radiating off the pages of our tradition. By ignoring or dismissing anger, we are not examining its sacred mechanism. Just like in the human psy...