Plagues

I went to a seder the other night. (I’m a non-believer among friends.) A passage from the Haggadah, listing contemporary plagues, “the plagues that threaten everyone everywhere they are found, beginning in our own hearts,” resonated strongly with me, so strongly that I took out my phone to take a picture so that I could share the words here:

The making of war,
the teaching of hate and violence,
despoliation of the earth,
perversion of justice and of government,
fomenting of vice and crime,
neglect of human needs,
oppression of nations and peoples,
corruption of culture,
subjugation of science, learning, and human
    discourse,
the erosion of freedoms.

From A Passover Haggadah, ed. Herbert Bronstein (New York: Central Conference of American Rabbis, 1982).

And now it’s thirty-five years later.