I was walking to the Farmer’s Market on a summer Sunday morning, just after services, my yarmulke still on my head. At a crosswalk, a large SUV had nosed into the intersection, turning left. The driver was looking left and never saw me on his right. I waved so he’d know I was there. He got the message, and I crossed safely. As I passed his window, he saw the yarmulke and called out an oddly angry “Baruch Hashem,” the words any traditional Jew gives to “how are you.” He knew exactly who I was. Then he finished his turn and stuck his hand out the window to show me his middle finger.
Not an apology for blocking a crosswalk. An FU to someone he’d just recognized as Jewish.
What was he so angry about? My wife, Jodi, would ask whether he was having a bad day, or something awful was happening in his life. I’d rather just say: an act of hostility is not acceptable. It is an example of the anger that pervades our society, more dangerous than a middle finger, and harder to dismiss than the obnoxious driver.
Good people feel an anger that seems not just permissible but necessary. We see despotism, cronyism, and greed operate in plain sight. Anger feels like the only honest response. Maybe the only fuel strong enough to move us to act.
Anger is part of being human. Some anger is the correct response to real evil. What diminishes us isn’t the feeling itself. It’s what happens when a feeling hardens. When it turns into a character trait, a settled way of facing the world, that erases someone else’s dignity. Erases our own empathy. Or our sense of responsibility. The angry spark is not the problem. The hardening is.
Why our tradition is so suspicious of anger
Maimonides lays out a general theory of character in the Mishneh Torah: for almost every trait, the right path is the middle, the balance point between two extremes. But when he reaches anger, he abandons that model entirely. Don’t seek the middle here, he says. Anger, in his words, is an exceptionally bad quality. Train yourself not to react, even to things that would justify reacting.
The Talmud is just as severe: whoever gives way to anger loses access to wisdom, and a prophet loses access to prophecy.
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum has argued that anger pollutes democratic politics, that its costs outweigh its usefulness.
We might think anger is the energy we need against injustice right now. But I don’t think that’s what the tradition is warning against. It’s warning against something more specific, and two Torah stories make the case better than any abstract rule could. Read them not as verdicts on the people in them. Read them as diagnostic tools, a way to recognize what’s happening in your own chest when anger takes the wheel.
Two stories, one pattern
Simeon and Levi, in Genesis. Their sister Dinah has been assaulted, and their grievance is completely legitimate. But their response doesn’t stay proportional to the wrong. It moves from the man responsible, Shechem, to killing every male in the city. Jacob speaks to Simeon and Levi on his deathbed in Genesis 49. He doesn’t defend his sons. He curses the anger. Fierce, he calls it. Cruel. By then, it had stopped being about their sister. It had become about their inability to hit the brakes on the rage.
Anger that hardens becomes contempt: it treats another person as beneath consideration. Then someone else’s suffering starts to feel deserved. It becomes vengefulness: it stops wanting correction and starts wanting pain.
Moses at the rock, in Numbers 20. The people are complaining again; the water source is gone. Moses’ frustration is understandable. Yet, instead of speaking to the rock as God commanded, Moses strikes it. One act. It costs him the one thing he’d worked his whole life toward: entry into the land.
The text doesn’t say his anger was unreasonable. It says it cost him his capacity to see clearly in the moment that mattered most. It teaches that an angry leader should not be our leader.
What this feeling turns into
What about the fire in your own chest? For that, look to Joseph. His brothers sold him into slavery. Years later, he holds their lives in his hands, with every reason and every opportunity for revenge. Instead, he weeps. He forgives them outright, tells them not to be angry with themselves for what they did (Genesis 45).
Joseph teaches us how to cool our anger. It may take time. It takes self-discipline, but it is the righteous response.
What do we do with righteous anger?
Maimonides offers more help than his severe language suggests. In the same section where he tells a person to avoid anger almost entirely, he makes one exception. A leader, he says, may present an angry front to correct his household or his community and move them back toward the right path. But inwardly, he stays calm. The anger is performed as an instrument. It is not permitted to become who he is.
Lincoln did something close to this. When he was furious at a general or a cabinet member, he’d write the letter in full, every angry word of it, and then set it in a drawer instead of sending it. The anger got its say. It just never got to do the damage. And he was the most effective leader.
That’s the answer to the question this moment puts to us. The tradition isn’t asking us to feel nothing in the face of despotism, cronyism, or greed. It’s asking us to keep the feeling in service of the wrong being addressed, rather than let it become a permanent disposition toward the people involved.
We can be stern without being contemptuous.
We can refuse to look away without becoming callous.
We can want wrongs corrected without wanting the wrongdoer to suffer for its own sake.
The test, in every story, is the one Jacob applies to his sons, and the one Joseph applies to himself. Is the anger commensurate with the size of the wrong that caused it? Or has it grown past that wrong, until it swallows the humanity of everyone in its path, including our own?
That is the line our tradition asks us to hold. Not the absence of feeling. Feelings need discipline. Not a cold heart but one that stays answerable to correction, and the way Joseph’s anger answered, for years, to his own quiet decision not to let it take the wheel.
Bringing this home
This isn’t abstract for us. Commentators are calling the run-up to the 2026 midterms the “Midterms of Rage.”[1] It’s not a new story. It’s the latest chapter in one we’ve seen before, from the Tea Party to Occupy Wall Street, both born from the same well of frustration. And it isn’t a partisan story either. One of the sharpest voices on this, a longtime New York Times columnist, Frank Bruni, wrote that grievance now drives politics on the right and the left alike.[2]
Anger does something other hard feelings don’t. It hands us certainty that our action is justified. It makes us quick to locate someone to blame. That is the exact signature of Simeon and Levi. It is the downfall of Moses at the rock.
Not a case for wanting less change
I want to be careful here; this is not an argument to abide the grave issues we face: the concentration of wealth and power, corruption in our government, and the hatred fueling political movements. Our tradition teaches us how to harness our emotions.
The prophet Amos doesn’t counsel patience toward those who trample the poor for the price of a pair of sandals. He demands that justice roll down like water, an unrelenting flood.
Isaiah tells the nation’s leadership that their hands are full of blood, and their prayers mean nothing while they oppress the vulnerable.
That is fury aimed at concentrated power. And our tradition doesn’t call it a failure of self-control. It calls it prophecy.
We can hold two things at once. Anger at unjust power is a religious obligation. And that same wrath curdles the moment it stops being aimed at the wrong and starts being aimed at the humanity of the people doing it.
It is not how loud the anger is. It’s where it’s aimed. And whether repair still feels possible. Isaiah’s harshest rebuke is followed, in the very next breath, by the promise that sins like scarlet can still become white as snow. He never stops believing the people he just accused of bloodshed could still become something else. That’s the line. Contempt forecloses that possibility before it starts. Prophetic anger, however severe, is still trying to improve the world.
Anger is one tool, not the only one
Even the prophets don’t leave us with anger alone. Micah gives us the tradition’s own summary of what’s required, and anger doesn’t make the list. What is demanded of you, he says, is to do justice, to love mercy, and to walk humbly. Justice, compassion, and humility, not fury, are the substance of the work.
Anger is a poor engine for the long haul. It burns hot. It burns out fast. It gives you certainty and blame in an instant. It was never built for the patient work of repairing a broken system.
Compassion keeps us attached to the people on the other side of an injustice, including, eventually, the very people we’re angry at.
Justice gives the anger a direction. An endpoint. A structure to aim for, rather than a target to destroy.
None of that asks us to feel less. It asks us to make sure anger isn’t the only tool in our hands. Because a movement that runs on anger alone tends to end up looking like the thing it opposed.
Where this leaves us
We all have to strive to be like Joseph, willing to master the anger in his own chest when he finally holds the power to act on it. That is not weakness. That is not neutrality between right and wrong.
When the world hands you despotism, answer with justice.
When the world hands you cronyism, answer with integrity.
When the world hands you greed, answer with generosity.
When the world hands you contempt, answer with dignity, theirs and yours both.
Not because the wrong doesn’t matter. Because it matters too much to let anger have the last word.
We are not asked to feel nothing. We are asked to be more than what we feel.
So which will you be this year? The guy whose anger diminishes humanity, the finger out the window, the road rage that pervades our politics? Or can you be the moderating force for justice, compassion and humility?
Let the anger come. Let it wake you up. Let it move your feet. Let the anger put you in the room where decisions are being made. And then let something steadier take the wheel: justice, which gives your anger a destination. Compassion, which keeps you tethered to the humanity of the people you are fighting. Humility, which remembers that you, too, could become the man in the crosswalk with his hand out the window, on a different day, in a different mood.
May we have the strength to master our anger, the wisdom to answer gently, and the courage not merely to desire peace, but to pursue it.
[1]The Hill, “Can Republicans survive the midterms of Rage?” (opinion, May 2026); the phrase was picked up by NPR-affiliate coverage tracing it back to voter anger after the 2008 financial crisis (August 2026).
[2]Frank Bruni, longtime New York Times columnist, The Age of Grievance (2024).
Rabbi Evan J. Krame
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