As we learned, the Sages of the Great Assembly originally wrote the Amidah with great precision. Therefore, it was a critical matter to choose the right person to compose this additional blessing. After serious deliberation, the rabbis chose Shmuel HaKatan, “Little Shmuel.” Why couldn’t any one of the great rabbis then alive write this request? Is it really that difficult to express the desire to wipe out our enemies? Yes, it should indeed be difficult to express such thoughts. The Talmud records that Shmuel HaKatan was famous for teaching the verse from Proverbs, “When your enemy falls, do not take joy.” Someone who finds any joy in destroying another person could not have written this blessing with the necessary precision. Shmuel HaKatan had the right intention—love for God, not hate for people. Through the teachings of Shmuel HaKatan, we learn that as Jews we should want our enemies to do teshuvah and ascend higher in their service to God. We now can see the tremendous love for God this blessing required. Anybody can write a blessing that expresses the desire for our enemies to fall. The words “kill them,” “destroy them,” “wipe them from the face of the earth,” come to mind. Only someone with the purest of intentions—solely out of love for God and without any hate for evil-doers whatsoever—could have the necessary attitude required to formulate this prayer. A close reading of this request reveals its accuracy. It does not say, “Slice them into little pieces” or “torture them.” Rather, it describes a corrective process. We first ask God to cause the slanderers to give up all hope that their diabolical scheming will have any impact. Then we ask that evil disappear instantly from the earth. Note that it does not ask for evil-doers to disappear but evil itself. In his book Midot Haraaya, Rav Avraham Yitzchak Kook explains that whenever we Jews pray for God to deal with our enemies, we never pray for the destruction of the enemy himself, only the evil that drives him. We do not want to see people die unless there is no other way to stop them from doing harm. The continuation of the prayer is provocative: “And may all Your enemies be quickly cut off.” Cut off from where? Why doesn’t it say, “Kill them”? There are many ways to define the phrase “cut off.” It can mean disrupt their supply lines, discontinue their support or cause them to lose their footing (and perhaps even their funding), among other things. A careful reading of the Amidah reveals that we do not want our enemies to be killed, just defeated. In the end, we ask God only to “subdue them,” because what we really seek is their teshuvah. But teshuvah is a long process. First, our enemies must be uprooted so they have no grounding. Then, they must be broken down and humbled. We could pray, “May You be abundantly manifest as one who kills and destroys our enemies.” But that’s not how the blessing ends. Instead, we ask to experience God’s abundant presence as one who breaks enemies and humbles deliberate sinners. Clearly, this blessing was written with tremendous love and sensitivity, in the hope that evil—not evil-doers—will be removed from the earth. Indeed, Judaism teaches that we must not ask for sinners to be cast from the land, but rather that their sins be cast from the land. We learn this lesson from the Talmud’s story of Bruria. The wife of the great sage Rebbe Meir, Bruria was well known as a woman possessing vast Torah knowledge. Once a man told her that there was someone in his community who was harassing him, and he was praying for God to destroy him. “You fool!” she admonished him. “The verse in Psalms says, ‘May the sins be cast off from the land, not the sinners.’” In other words, we pray not that sinners die but that sinners do teshuvah. It is important to note the reference to “Your enemies.” Any enemy of the Jewish people is, more importantly, an enemy of God. This is Judaism’s most fundamental belief. Judaism centers on God’s directives—as set down in the Torah—to which we bear testimony. This is why the Torah is called a testament. The Jewish people are God’s witnesses and anyone who tries to destroy us is essentially trying to eliminate our testimony of God’s sovereignty. We must pray for protection from our enemies for our sake and for God’s sake.