Shalom Brothers: What Anger is For (Ha’azinu)

Rabbi Noam Raucher, MA.Ed – Executive Director, FJMC International

Anger has a bad reputation in both religious and secular life. Religion often warns that anger can lead us toward sin. Contemporary culture frequently treats it as something to manage, suppress, or “let go.” We praise people for staying calm and worry about those who lose their temper. There are good reasons for this. Anger can frighten people. It can destroy trust. It can make cruelty feel righteous. But anger is not itself the problem.

Sometimes anger is the appropriate response to betrayal, injustice, humiliation, or harm. The moral question is not whether we become angry. It is what we do once anger arrives.

Parashat Ha’azinu, Deuteronomy 32:1–52, is filled with anger. Moses’s final song describes a relationship between God and Israel damaged by betrayal. God cared for Israel “as an eagle who rouses its nestlings,” protecting and sustaining the people (Deuteronomy 32:10–14). Then prosperity produces estrangement. “Jeshurun grew fat and kicked.” Israel “forsook the God who made him” (32:15–18).

The language is relational. Someone gave love, loyalty, and protection and received betrayal in return. For years, I wrestled badly with anger. I could feel it welling up inside me until it became visible on my face. People could tell. Sometimes I would deliberately try to look as though I was not angry, which, unsurprisingly, did not make me less angry.

I tried exercising it away. I would take it to the gym, carry it through the workout, and bring it into the sauna, where I am fairly certain my anger was hotter than the stones. Worse, I sometimes released it on the people closest to me. Anger frightened people I loved and created distance precisely when what I probably needed was connection.

It took years of therapy, honest conversations, work with other men, and plenty of steps forward and backward before I began to understand what was happening. I learned to notice anger instead of immediately obeying it. I learned where it appeared in my body, what specifically had triggered it, and, most importantly, how much sadness, fear, disappointment, or hurt was often hiding beneath it.

Ha’azinu understands that anger can have a legitimate cause. God sees Israel’s betrayal and becomes enraged: “The Lord saw and was vexed and spurned His sons and His daughters” (Deuteronomy 32:19). What follows is frightening language of famine, violence, and destruction (32:20–25).

Then something significant happens. The retaliation stops short. God imagines wiping Israel away—“I might have reduced them to nothing, made their memory cease among men”—but does not do it (32:26–27). Even in a poem of divine fury, anger encounters a boundary. That distinction matters, particularly for men.

Anger is often one of the few difficult emotions men are socially permitted to display. Hurt, fear, shame, and grief often arrive disguised as anger. Anger can feel preferable because it feels active. It gives us energy when sadness makes us feel exposed. The danger begins when justified anger becomes justification for whatever we choose to do next.

Someone hurt me, therefore I may humiliate him. Someone betrayed me, therefore I may punish her. Someone behaved unfairly, therefore retaliation becomes justice. But being wronged does not give us unlimited moral authority. Later in the song, God declares, “Vengeance is Mine, and recompense” (Deuteronomy 32:35). Whatever the theological meaning, there is an important human boundary here: vengeance cannot simply belong to the person who feels wounded.

Pain does not make every response permissible. You can be genuinely betrayed and still behave badly in response. You can be the injured party and later become the person causing unnecessary injury. The fact that someone else started the conflict does not decide who you become inside it.

Eventually Ha’azinu moves from judgment toward restoration. God will “vindicate His people” (32:36), and the same voice that speaks of punishment says, “I wound and I heal” (32:39). That may be what healthy anger is ultimately for. Anger tells us that something matters. A boundary was crossed. An injustice occurred. Something precious was threatened. But its purpose cannot simply be to make another person hurt as much as we hurt.

The better question is: What is my anger trying to protect, and what response protects it without causing unnecessary destruction? That is the question I now want my sons to learn much earlier than I did. Anger is a tool many boys are handed without instructions. We should not teach them never to become angry. We should teach them to recognize it, understand what lies beneath it, and decide what to do with its energy.

The goal is not to raise men without anger. It is to raise men whose anger can defend what matters without destroying what they love.