Wine is joy. Spilling out wine diminishes our joy a little. As angry as we might have been at the Egyptians, we shouldn’t rejoice at their suffering. Even God, the one to whom we entrust this anger, “rejoices not in the downfall of the wicked” according to Rabbi Jacob ibn Habib in his work Ein Ya’akov. Ibn Habib, remarkably, was a contemporary of Abarbanel, also exiled from Spain in 1492, yet he shares this story, attributed to Rabbi Yohanan. “What is the meaning of the passage (Ex. 14, 20) And the one came not unto the other all the night? This means that the angels of Heaven wanted to sing the usual song, when the Holy One, praised be He! said unto them: ‘My creatures are drowning in the sea, and you want to sing songs!’” Would we prefer that the Egyptians not have drowned and caught up to us on the far shore? Of course not. But we’re a little diminished because it had to happen that way.
So, what do we do with our own anger? What if we can’t manage to give it back to God, and continue to harbor it? Anger, and the associated traits of hostility and aggressiveness, take their toll not only on the targets of that anger, in the form of outbursts and destructiveness, but on the person feeling the anger—in the form of heart disease, chronic migraine, eating disorders, and a host of other chronic conditions.
… It’s a measure of inspiration to spill wine even over the death of someone who was trying to kill you. It’s a measure of inspiration, to try to get out of the narrow place that anger itself creates for us, a place where our own well-being is imperiled. To view even necessary anger and violence undertaken in self-preservation, as tragedies… More than once in my career, I’ve had to care both for an abuser and their victim, for people I know are on opposite sides of the same conflict, and for people who think I killed Jesus and control the banks and have the tattoos to attest to it. I have a colleague who spent five years of their career providing psychological support for convicted sex offenders. I have another long-time friend who practices primary care medicine in the jail and a former co-worker who’s the psychiatrist there. Certainly, there’s plenty of room for anger—and instead we pour out . . . ourselves.