There was once a goat, a kid goat, that my father bought for two silver coins, just one goat, just one goat. Or in the Aramaic - chad gadya, chad gadya.
And then a cat came and ate the goat
And the dog came and bit the cat.
So the stick came and hit the dog
And the fire came and burnt the stick
And the water came and put out the fire,
And the ox came and drunk the water
And the slaughterer came and slew the ox
And the angel of Death came and slew the slaughterer
Until finally the Holy Blessed One and slew the Angel of Death.
Just one goat, just one goat.
And thus ends the Passover Seder.
All the storytelling and celebrating and food, it all ends up in this a version of There Was an Old Woman Who Swallowed a Fly.
I’ve been thinking about this goat for the past couple of weeks. A friend and colleague - the Rabbi of St Albans Masorti Synagogue, has just bought out a Haggadah, and a very lovely thing it is too. It’s clear, has an excellent contemporary translation, it looks beautiful, it even has a full transliteration ... but no goat.
You get to the end of the formal part of the seder and there’s a note that some people sing songs at this point, but he’s not going to include them all. And he doesn’t include the goat.
Now I used to be the Rabbi of St Albans Masorti Synagogue myself, and one of the things you have to get used to, when you used to be the Rabbi somewhere and then someone else comes along, is that they are going to do things differently from the way you did things. In general, I’m OK with that. But not the goat!
My memories of Seder are intimately tied up in memories of my grandfather of blessed memory - of course, right?, that’s entirely how memories of Seder should be tied up for all of us. And I remember my grandfather taking on the ever-lengthening verses determined to deliver even the very longest in a single breath, despite the bronchitis and the pleurisy and the pneumonia and everything that eventually caught up with him. And I remember the juddering intake of breath as he finally arrived at the ‘Dzabin Aba Bitrei Zuzei’ and I remember feeling that all was going to be alright in the world. And at that moment I would feel as if I had truly completed the Seder in all its prescriptions and proscriptions, and in that moment I would feel as if I had personally gone forth from Egypt.
Ah, dear Rabbi Adam, I wrote to him, I love the Haggadah, but what happened to the goat?
“You like the goat?” he responded as if I had taken leave of my senses. “Hardly educational, if fun. Perhaps it will make the next edition.”
Hmmm - you mess with the goat, you mess with my treasured memories of Pesach. He’s getting a copy of this sermon tomorrow.
It turns out we can date the arrival of the goat in the Haggadah with some specificity. These are a couple of pages from the famous Prague Haggadah of 1527. I went for the page where you start drinking the wine and dipping the Marror and breaking the Matzah - it’s always the dirtiest page in my Haggadot - and I’m delighted to see nothing has changed in some 500 years.[1] So the Haggadah finishes - and then there’s an extra page. And there, in a different script are the lyrics of the Chad Gadya, both in Hebrew-Aramaic and Yiddish.
By 1590 it’s appearing in the properly printed pages of Haggadot in Prague and elsewhere.[2] So it’s definitely older than that. Rabbi Yedidya Weil wrote in 1790 that he had “heard that they found this song… safeguarded and written on a parchment at the Beit Midrash Rokeah in Worms [dated to 1406] and it was decided that it will be sung on the eve of Passover for all generations to come.”
And there’s a C15 version of the song, in the back of a Jewish prayerbook belonging to a Jew from Provence. In that siddur, there is a rope used to tie up a cow - and the mouse eats the rope, and a cat eats the mouse and so on.
Some think that an even earlier inspiration is a famous Rabbinic text[3] which imagines Abraham being dragged before the local potentate, Nimrod, and commanded to bow down to Nimrod’s god - fire. But rain puts out the fire, teases Abraham, fine, says Nimrod, so bow down to rain, but the wind blows the rain away says Abraham, fine, says Nimrod, so bow down to the wind. And on that story goes. And that story goes right back to the Book of Jubilees[4] which is some 2,200 years old.
So we’ve been chasing down the Chad Gadya machine for really quite some time. Maybe it’s not just a kids’ ditty.
The Vilna Gaon, the greatest Rabbi of the C18, taught that the song was the story of the people of Israel. The goat is the promise of a special relationship with God, the birthright of the Children of Israel bought by Jacob from his twin brother Esau with bread - one silver coin, and soup - two silver coins. The cat is the envy of Jacob’s sons towards Joseph, the dog is Egypt, the stick - the staff of Moses used to bring the Israelites out of Egypt, the fire - the lust for idolatry, the water its extinguishing and so on until the Messiah comes.
I grew up with the interpretation that we - the people of Israel - are the goat, the two silver coins are the two tablets of the Torah, and each of the characters was an oppressing nation - the cat - Assyria, the dog - Babylon, the stick Persia and so on.
Yacov Emden, another of the greats of two hundred years ago, taught the song as the story of the soul, placed in our bodies and buffeted by the challenges of existence until ...
Until And then came the Holy Blessed One.
That’s the key line.
At the end of the chain of earthly destruction, God arrives.
That’s the difference between the song of the goat and the Old Lady Who Swallowed a Fly. Life, we know, is nasty brutish and short, and it doesn’t matter if you have faith or if you don’t; if you are a cat the dog is coming for you and if you are a dog the stick is coming for you and the chance of a happily ever after is vanishingly small.
And it’s easy to get beaten down by the relentlessness of the Chad Gadya machine. It’s easy to feel that nothing is worth fighting for, it’s easy to feel that the powers of entropy, decay and violence will conquer our best attempts at life and joy and hope. And the message of the There Was an Old Lady is indeed that that is the case.
But the message of this glorious song about the goat is that goodness is not defeated by, even, all the brutality of the world. The message of the song about the goat is that in the end even the Angel of Death is defeated by a God rachum v’hanun - merciful and graceful. God is stronger than Death. The force of goodness in the universe is more powerful than the force of destruction.
For me - now - long since my child memories stopped sustaining my adult engagement with my faith, the real lesson of Chad Gadya is neither that everything tends to ruin, nor that everything will turn out just fine. I know neither is true. The message of the Chad Gadya is that there is a possibility for a different way that is not about relentless violence, death and murder. The message of the Chad Gadya is that hope for mercy and grace is possible in this world.
I think that’s the same understanding of the great Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai
An Arab shepherd is searching for his goat on Mount Zion
And on the opposite mountain, I am searching
For my little boy.
And Arab shepherd and a Jewish father
Both in their temporary failure.
Our voices meet above the Sultans Pool
In the valley between us. Neither of us wants
the child or the goat to get caught in the wheels
of the terrible Had Gaya machine.
Afterwards we found them among the bushes
And our voices came back inside us, laughing and crying.
Searching for a goat or a son
Has always been the beginning
Of a new religion in these mountains.
The song Chad Gadya is about the possibility of escaping the Chad Gadya machine.
It’s about the possibility of there being meaning in this world beyond the experiences of biting cats, whacking sticks and the rest of it.
And I need that reminder. I need that as a reminder in a week when I will retell the suffering and the enslavement of my own people.
I need that reminder in a week where, God help us, there will be more pointless, gun-related killing in the United States, more needless deaths of refugees trying to escape their contemporary experiences of slavery and the rest of it.
I need the reminder of the Chag Gadya, Chad Gadya - I think we all do.
And I really hope it makes it into the second edition of my colleague’s Haggadah, and that this glorious millennia-old idea gets its moment to shine just before we all keel over with exhaustion at the end of a Seder, gloriously enjoyed by us all.
Chag Sameach, a wonderful Pesach
And Shabbat Shalom
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