My dear friend and teacher, Rabbi Josh Kulp, lead author of the Schechter Haggadah has published something very special this year – it’s a collection of hopeful and profound extracts from early and pre-state Israeli Haggadot. He wrote, in introducing them that he Pesach to be a time of optimism and hope, and Mah Nishtanah – a different night, not talking about hostages and Gaza and Iran again.
I understand that,
But, Misken Ani – so I’m going to do the
other thing. And if you came to Shul today hoping for the Rabbi to talk about
something other than hostages and Gaza and Iran. I’m sorry. If it helps, I don’t
think I’m going to mention the words again. Or maybe I will once.
I want to talk about Chad Gadya
In part because it’s my favourite Pesach
song,
In part because it’s the song that most reminds
me of – you know all the stuff that’s going on out there.
In part because I don’t get to share more
thoughtful stuff around the time we are singing Chad Gaya at Seder Night.
Everyone just wants to sing a good song and go home.
Chad Gadya is old, not quite as old as the
rest of the Seder – most of the rest of the Seder is at least 1800 years old,
but it dates back at least 500 years, which has to count for something.
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 it’s part of a folk song tradition which
includes “There was an old lady who swallowed a fly,” in which progressively
bigger and more dangerous creatures and things gang up on smaller creatures and
things until, well the world feels – in Hobbe’s phrase “nasty brutish and
short.” The moral of the song seems to be that the way to survive in the world
is be bigger, badder and the person that no-one fancies their chances in taking
on.
Makes for odd reading in this time.
In my own thinking about this song, this year,
I’ve been moved by something written by the veteran pro-peace Israeli activist,
Mickael Mannekin[1]
“Once, I decided to read [Chad
Gadya] backward; perhaps I would find a hidden lesson. We know God is good, and
the angel of death is terrible. If we read the story backward, I thought, we
could learn something about justice and retribution for the unjust. The unjust
attack the just, so God retributes. I got stuck quickly. I understood that the
Jewish butcher was good. But what did the cow do wrong? Drink water? Does that
make water just for putting out fires? All the fire did was burn a stick. And
if the stick is justice, that makes the dog injustice. If the dog is unjust,
that makes the cat just. And if the cat is just, he’s right to bite the goat.
But didn’t the goat come first? So much for restoring justice!
I then read the story forward, and
things got worse. If the goat did no wrong, in this thesis and antithesis story
of justice, the angel of death is well within the line of rational thinking on
justice. Then what does that make God?
While preparing for Pesach this
year, [said Mannekin] I started seeing Chad Gadya in a new light. Since October,
many have been focused on trying to understand the root causes of violence.
Unsurprisingly, each “side” in this conflict sees themselves as the victim.
Violence is therefore either justifed or inevitable. To restore justice, one
needs to go back to the origin. There lies pure good, they suggest.
There are many problems with this
notion. One that particularly bothers me is how it erases or minimizes the pain
of the other. Our side’s pain is never-ending. Their side is “contextualized.” In
our hyper-ideological modern world, this outlook is present on all sides of the
political map. Chad Gadya points to the futility of this exercise. Sure, God is
good, and the Angel of Death is evil. But sometimes, a stick is just a stick,
and a cat is just a cat. They are all part of a tug-of-war that, more often
than not, has no coherent explanation and doesn’t make sense. Sometimes, there
is no original sin, and no grand narrative — just violence.”
Ahhhh
The other piece that is providing me with
insight in this awful year, was translated by Dr Saul Maggid[2]
from the book Herut – freedom, by the early C20th Rabbi, Aaron Shmuel Tamares.
Tamares published this in Bialistock just three years after the Kishinev pogrom
of 1903.
All
of this [the story of the Exodus] can be used to explain the final plague in
Egypt, in which God executes death [to the first born of Egypt]. This judgment
was deployed by Godself, as the Haggadah explains: “I passed over the night, I,
and not an emissary.” This seems odd as God could have enabled the Israelites
to wreak vengeance on the Egyptians. However, God did not want to even show the
Israelites how to use the power of the fist, even in a moment of defending
themselves against the evil ones. This is because, at that moment, while they
would indeed be defending themselves against the aggressors,
in the end they would have become aggressors.
Therefore,
God took great pains to prevent the Israelites from enacting any vengeance
against the evil ones; so much so that he prohibited them from even witnessing
it. Thus, the [violent] act was deployed “in the middle of the night” in the
darkest hour of the night. God also warned the Israelites not to leave their
houses, all to separate them from this destructive act, even to witness it
passively.
…
In
fact, God prohibited Israel from witnessing God’s violence to prevent the
violence that is within Israel to be released. Because once that violence is
released there is no longer the ability to distinguish between the righteous
(the innocent) and the evil (the guilty), and the one who is the defender (the
recipient of violence) will become the aggressor (the perpetrator of
violence).
“And
all of you should not leave your houses until the morning” (Ex 12:22)….that you
should not become the destroyer. This means that by distancing oneself from
participating in the vengeance against Egypt one is prevented from unleashing
the destroyer (violence) that is within you.”
Maggid
adds
One cannot destroy Pharaoh by becoming Pharaoh. Normalcy
cannot come at the price of this lesson. Because if it does, Tamares proclaims
later in this essay, “all of human civilization is in peril.” A world of
Pharaohs is not desirable. Nor sustainable. Violence does not redeem. It only
enslaves.
That’s the problem I have with the utterance I
hear from some, in the context of the whole Gaza, Israel, Iran thing – there,
that’s my one last utterance.
Some say, that in the Middle East it’s a dog
eat cat eat goat kind of a place, and the only thing that ‘works’ is the sort
of I’m tougher-than-you-and-if-you-come-at-me-I’ll-come-at-you-harder school of
life as articulated in the Chad Gadya.
And I have both a Michael Mannekin problem with
that – that if I see violence as either justified or criminally unjustified I’m
going to contextualise my suffering as entirely without justification and
contextualise my violent acts against the other as entirely justified and the
outcome is just more violence.
And I have a Aaron Shmuel Tamares problem with
that – that if I allow myself to partake in the violence, even, I think, if I become
a supporter of that violence, I become the very thing I’m trying to get rid of
in this world.
For me, there are two reasons I love the song –
its politics, its theology – of course I love the animal noises, we all love
the animal noises, I’m wrestling with something deeper, I hope than animal
noises. I love the story as a cautionary tale and ultimately hopeful.
When I say it’s a cautionary tale, I have in
mind the great Israeli poet, Yehuda Amichai who wrote this poem,
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.
תַּהֲלִיךְ
הַמְּכוֹנָה הַנּוֹרָאָה שֶׁל חַד גַּדְיָא
The song, the
articulation of the Chad Gadya machine that we all understand all too well is about
the necessity of dreaming NOT to call into the Chad Gadya machine. It’s an
articulation of a way not to be not to dream.
It’s nursery rhyme
as antihero.
The sort of
story you share with small children to get them to find a different way to
behave. It’s brilliant at doing that. I love that about the song.
And then there
is the last line. Chad Gadya comes with a tiny sliver of hope baked in. In the
end of the song God comes – Vatah HaKadosh Baruch Hu. The ultimate winner in
Chad Gadya isn’t the angel of death. It isn’t ‘brutish, nasty and short,’ it’s
God, source of love and compassion triumphing over a world in which – and I
have some serieous questions for God too - but God triumphs over the angel of
death.
Again, Amichai sees
the song, I think, the same way.
אַחַר כָּךְ מָצָאנוּ אוֹתָם
בֵּין הַשִֹיחִים
וְקוֹלוֹתֵינוּ חָזְרוּ
אֵלֵינוּ וּבָכוּ וְצָחֲקוּ בִּפְנִים.
Afterward we found them among the bushes,
And our voices came back inside us
Laughing and crying.
Chad Gadya is
an antihero song, it’s persuading us to look for another way, less our goats
and our children fall into the machine again.
Its message is
hope.
Unfortunately,
I’m not sure we’ve learnt that correctly, we might need to have another go,
another seder, tonight.
Chag Sameach
[1]
https://drive.google.com/file/d/1kNhiqgFP5NB3CCJaPn9VgArCJ8X5vM_T/view?fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTAAAR2yL59Qvnr4KA-3Y3lmQNfG5_iZhJFsYTDKGL9LNpKDHMmzXNlUEXqb-RA_aem_AfHjvvqiHQ1E9bplrf5AU85JmG6pch5v47dmhnrknHPafu2rno6LG-XceFPdZmqiHYr7GI0R78ZX8YYHIx0Apu2m
[2]
https://juliezuckerman.substack.com/p/pre-passover-special-edition-let?r=qfnu&utm_campaign=post&utm_medium=web&fbclid=IwZXh0bgNhZW0CMTEAAR0mSjsa5BpUzucMDd3qiDf4r5uC2w2embJmJ4M0WQge_sRnmB0ELGVgnro_aem_AZ9DRXM0-YwG6Jyir5ukuqgmxIkFqLbfmH06NOpMuIaRwEgzEgdCrRUdWcaIA4XvyZZMJ0G6gkrV1J1dVRcyRl0H&triedRedirect=true
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