I consulted a friend of mine about this issue, and he drew my attention to the verse in Jeremiah 10:25: "Pour out Your wrath upon the nations that do not know You, and upon the families that do not call upon Your name; for they have devoured Jacob, yes, devoured him and consumed him, and laid waste his habitation."
It seems that the Sephardic Tachanun is based on this verse. Could it be that the intention of the Tachanun is only about those nations who "devour Jacob," and not all nations as such?

The verse is perfectly fine where it stands. But the wording of Tachanun does not seem binding to me. If you want, interpret it as referring to those nations, or omit it.

What’s the problem? Wipe out those nations that have not known You.

I happened to come across this exchange. What empty-headed bleeding-heart nonsense. Someone who went through the Holocaust wouldn’t understand this pointless, insensitive question at all. And what’s more, where does Your Honor get the audacity to so casually permit removing a passage just because he doesn’t like it?

Someone who went through the Holocaust of six million wouldn’t understand this bleeding-heart question at all (ptui on him), yet he supports a Holocaust for billions of gentiles around the world. Truly a model of taste and sensitivity.

To the questioner

Put your mind at ease. Even today’s gentiles, the overwhelming majority of them, are savages without understanding. They are like the cat that was trained to be a waiter, and the moment it saw a mouse it dropped the tray and ran after it. In any case, there is indeed reason to wipe out one who does not know the Lord, as it says regarding the sons of Eli: "Now the sons of Eli were base men; they did not know the Lord." In the period of the Hebrew Bible, and according to what I claim this is also true today—openly in the East and hidden in the West—someone who did not know the Lord was someone who "has no God," in our language. And naturally they devoured Jacob and laid waste his habitation. I do not pray with this wording, but if I did, I would mean it with all my heart.

And to Yoel

I don’t understand why you care about a Holocaust of billions of gentiles in the world, who did not care—and will not care—about the Holocaust of the Jews. Even today you see that no one in the world cares about Iran’s threats to destroy Israel (except for the evangelicals, with Trump at their head—toward whom Rabbi Michi astonishingly displays ignorance in his ingratitude), and especially the self-righteous leftists around the world don’t care, and maybe deep down they even hope it succeeds. Why should I care about them? So yes, aside from a tiny few righteous gentiles, I too pray for the destruction of all those gentiles who lack fear of God. Truly, the lesson of the Holocaust is not the manipulative pseudo-Jewish sanctimony of not hating strangers—who hate us anyway. What is called the whiny, victimhood-driven, leftist pseudo-Jewish conclusion from the Holocaust. Rather, it is the understanding that we are alone in the world, and if we are not for ourselves, who will be for us—and that never again means never again. That is the right-wing lesson of the Holocaust.

Nobody really cares about anybody. By your terms, Jews too have no fear of God. And anyway, why should I care whether they care about me or not? If I were dealing with the question of whether to make an effort for someone, then apparently if he wouldn’t make an effort for me, I wouldn’t make one for him. But for me to have an interest in his suffering or death? Why? I have no words.

Indeed, first of all, most Jews do not have fear of God either. That is something one has to learn; you are not born with it. But when speaking at the resolution of whole peoples over the course of history, only the Jewish people ever had fear of God at some point in the past, at least several times, and maybe it still exists today in practice—but that does not matter for what I am about to write. The moment a person has fear of God even once, he changes. Something of it remains with him forever. Fear of God is seeing God: recognition of the supernatural reward and punishment attached to good and evil. Karma, if you like—except that this has structure and content and is not just a name. It is like a person blind from birth whose eyes were opened for ten minutes, he saw the world, and then returned to blindness. He no longer sees again, but he is already essentially different from another blind person who has never seen anything in his life. He saw an external and new world. It is the same with us. And individual Jews have the ability to absorb something into themselves from this collective fear of God by choosing to remain connected to the people; that is, every Jew, simply by remaining and choosing to remain a partner in the fate of the Jewish people, absorbs something from this collective fear that constitutes a kind of potential fear relative to his personal fear. And in fact, what actually sustains this collective fear and the form in which it is expressed in practice is that same fear found in individuals. The other peoples never had fear of God, and if they did, it was only perhaps among a few isolated individuals.

And I am not speaking merely about indifference but about actively caring enough to help evil, not only about non-intervention. That is the story with Iran today. The whole discussion of nuclear agreements is ultimately just a means for these nations to calm their self-righteous conscience in their own eyes—not because they recognize truth and justice—but deep in their hearts, probably unconsciously, they would actually be happy if the Jews disappeared from the world, and Iran would be doing them a favor by that. That is exactly what happened in the Holocaust. It is not only that the world was silent. Deep down it would actually have been happy if Hitler had finished the job. It is no accident that the Americans did not bomb the death camps. Not that they owed us anything—they did not. It seems to me that deep in their hearts they would have been happy if the Jewish problem had been solved that way. In any case, if the other nations of the world are helping the Iranians today, even if only out of concern for their own interests, and they simply do not care about us, rather than specifically wanting our harm, I am still allowed to pray for their destruction if in practice they are helping to destroy us. That, by the way, is what Asaph complains about there in Psalms. If we too do not care about them in that way, then for all I care they too can pray for the destruction of the people of Israel.

A note: when I speak about a Jew choosing to be part of the Jewish people and a partner in its fate, I mean to exclude what is called in Jewish law "apostates." These are the converts away from Judaism, many of whom caused a great deal of trouble for the Jewish people over the course of history. And today, in practice, this includes part of the Reform Democratic Jewish public in the U.S., in the name of leftist postmodern universality, as well as the very hard core of the left in Israel—people like Ofer Cassif perhaps. Not long ago some such person died, really a true hater of Israel. They talk about universality and morality, but it is a slave morality. They only want to live well there by the fleshpots, and the fate of all the other "oppressed" people of the world does not really interest them. All the talk about "democracy" and globalism is just manipulation—perhaps subconscious—in order on the one hand not to share in the fate of the American nation, and on the other hand to enjoy the comfortable material life that Americans bought for themselves with blood and sweat over nearly two hundred years before a Jew ever set foot in America. And of course they do not want to take part in sharing the fate of the Jewish people, who are always on the brink of destruction. They simply do not want to be loyal to any people, so as not to suffer, while at the same time wanting to enjoy the power of "equality" and some "birthright" to liberties that Americans attained only after a great deal of American blood was spilled—the War of Independence, World War II, and more. A parasitic mentality like that. In the end, American wrath will rise against them—and not specifically from the antisemites on the right—first from the blacks and Muslims and Hispanics, and afterward from the mainstream as well. It will all blow up in their faces, just as this mentality blew up in the faces of German Jews. And I completely understand the Americans on this issue.