As the Seder night draws to a close, after the Four Questions have been asked and answered, the festive meal has been enjoyed, and the evening's mitzvot have been observed, we raise our voices in a curious and delightful song at the end of the Haggadah: Chad Gadya.
Chad Gadya or Had Gadya (Aramaic: חַד גַדְיָא chad gadya, "one little goat", or "one kid"; Hebrew: "גדי אחד gedi echad") is a playful cumulative song in Aramaic and Hebrew. It is sung at the end of the Passover Seder, the Jewish ritual feast that marks the beginning of the Jewish holiday of Passover.
El Lissitzky's illustration of Chad Gadya
On the surface, Chad Gadya appears to be nothing more than a simple folk tune, perhaps even a nursery rhyme suitable for the “youngest amongst us”. Certainly, it keeps the children awake so that the end of the Seder night is as filled with delight as its beginning. But more than that, the song is part of a sublime and meaningful religious-halachic experience.
By the end of the Seder, after the Afikomen has been found and its reward exacted, after the story has been told and the festive meal consumed, the children grow sleepy and want nothing more than to curl up and slumber. It is not yet time to slumber and so we continue the many and seemingly strange things at the Seder to keep the children awake.
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And even if the song’s purpose is to keep the children awake, the song’s theme and images are depressing and cruel. No character escapes unscathed in Chad Gadya. The kid is innocent and harmless, but the cat consumes him. The dog takes revenge on the cat, but the dog then gets a beating.
Then came the Holy One, blessed be He, and smote the angel of death, that slew the slaughterer, that slaughtered the ox, that drank the water, that quenched the fire, that burned the stick, that beat the dog, that bit the cat, that ate the kid, that father bought for two zuzim. His involvement in the song’s turn of events certainly means that Chad Gadya cannot be understood only as a simple, whimsical rhyme.
And so it turns out that this deceptively simple song is filled with insightful lessons. In fact, Chad Gadya incorporates one of the most fundamental elements of emunah.
Interpretations of Chad Gadya
As with any work of verse, Chad Gadya is open to interpretation. Over the centuries, differing interpretations have been offered to explain the song.
Many see in its dark imagery the history of Israel, the lone, innocent kid. The father Avinu Shebashamayim, selected the lone kid, when giving two zuzim, two tablets of the covenant. The animals, objects and people who subsequently destroy and beat one another are the various nations that persecuted, subjugated and oppressed the “one lamb among the seventy wolves” throughout history.
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Another explanation takes the form of a debate between a Jew and an Egyptian. Framing this interpretation is the understanding that the kid is an animal both deified and worshipped by the Egyptians. Seeing in this deification the essence of idolatry, the Jew wonders how the Egyptian can worship a kid that can be devoured by a cat. When the Egyptian responds that he will then worship the cat, and the Jew retorts that a dog can overpower the cat, the Egyptian quickly transfers his allegiance to the dog.
Another understanding views the goat as man’s soul which descends (“sold by the father”) to this earthly existence and suffers through the trials and tribulations of life as it moves (zuz-zazin) about in this world. Each stanza of the song symbolizes another phase and stage of life as we know it. As life progresses and years pass by, man is called to task, “ Chad Gadya, Chad Gadya - Unique soul! Unique soul! - What have you accomplished on this world? What are you doing here?” But at each step and every stage, man procrastinates, thinking that there will always be time to tend to the spirit and soul. “Later” however, never comes.
The Chatam Sofer brings Chad Gadya closer to Pesach, and finds therefore a parallel between this very last song and the very first Haggadah paragraph, “This is the Bread of Affliction”. Both are in Aramaic. Both were authored subsequent to the galut and renewed exile from Eretz Yisrael. Both are forms of elegies (kinah) bemoaning the renewed galut, recalling when matzah was eaten not as the bread of affliction but as the bread of freedom and when the Pesach was attended by the pageantry of a Temple sacrifice in Jerusalem. Now we eat matzah, but again as the bread of affliction. Likewise, we recall the entire service of Pesach, which encompassed the offering of both a Pesach sacrifice and a Chagigah Korban (chad gadya, chad gadya) which were bought for shtei kesef (two zuzim). And now, chad gadya, chad gadya-woe unto us how we have lost two beautiful gediyim!
So too, the Gaon of Vilna traces the theme of Am Yisrael’s trials and tribulations throughout its long sojourn in galut. The two gediyim bought by father are the ones purchased by father Yaakov and brought to Yitzchak on the night of Pesach. These were to become the dual korbanot offered on Pesach, which merited Yaakov the blessing of Yitzchak as well as the bechorah. The cat is the jealousy, the dog is Pharaoh, the stick is Moshe’s staff, the ox is the Kingdom of Edom, the slaughterer is Moshiach ben Yosef who will be killed by the angel of death.
A few years ago, a group of American scholars, journalists, and writers published the New American Haggadah. Jeffrey Goldberg has a running commentary in the New American Haggadah that addresses the relationship between the texts and themes of the Haggadah and the modern American Jewish experience.
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According to some modern Jewish commentators, what appears to be a light-hearted song may be symbolic. One interpretation is that Chad Gadya is about the different nations that have conquered the Land of Israel: The kid symbolizes the Jewish people; the cat, Assyria; the dog, Babylon; the stick, Persia; the fire, Macedonia; the water, Roman Empire; the ox, the Saracens; the slaughterer, the Crusaders; the angel of death, the Ottomans. At the end, God returns to send the Jews back to Israel. The recurring refrain of 'two zuzim' is a reference to the two stone tablets given to Moses on Mount Sinai (or refer to Moses and Aaron).
Though commonly interpreted as an historical allegory of the Jewish people, the song may also represent the journey to self-development. The price of two zuzim, mentioned in every stanza, is (according to the Targum Jonathan to First Samuel 9:8) equal to the half-shekel tax upon every adult Israelite male (in Exodus 30:13); making the price of two zuzim the price of a Jewish soul.
In an article first published in the Journal of Jewish Music & Liturgy in 1994, Rabbi Kenneth Brander, summarized the interpretations of three rabbis:
- Rabbi Jacob Emden in 1795, as a list of the pitfalls and perils facing the soul during one's life.
- Rabbi Jonathan Eybeschuetz (1690-1764) as a very abbreviated history of Israel from the Covenant of the Two Pieces recorded in Genesis 15 (the two zuzim), to slavery in Egypt (the cat), the staff of Moses (the stick) and ending with the Roman conqueror Titus (the Angel of Death).
Regardless of accent, both the words and melody of Chad Gadya were simply too difficult for us to tackle, so we always skipped those pages in whichever Haggadah we were using. Several commentaries, the Vilna Gaon among them, assert that Chad Gadya is a representation of the various disasters that have befallen the Jewish people throughout history.
In the story of the Exodus, Moses confronts Pharaoh, demanding he let the Israelite people go. Each time, Pharaoh agrees, only to renege, which brings a plague. The story of Chad Gadya mirrors this pattern of recall, back and forth, and mimics the crescendo of violence. Each stanza builds on the tension of the previous and adds another layer of destruction, only to end when God slays the Angel of Death.
Another similarity I see is the mixture of animals and natural elements. Four of the plagues are animal based: Frogs, bugs, wild animals, and locusts. In Chad Gadya, in addition to the titular goat, other named animals are dog, cat, and ox. In addition, natural elements that wreak havoc in Chad Gadya are fire and water, and with a bit of a stretch, the stick. The natural elements that are wielded as plagues are blood, pestilence, boils, hail, and darkness.
One commentary also suggests that the two zuzim used to purchase the goat represent Moses and Aaron.
Throughout the history of the Jewish people, persecution required that Jews find ways to cloak their practices. Chad Gadya can enter that panoply of practices. The song can be sung as a whimsical tale to end the festive meal of Pesach. But now we can also understand and appreciate it as a clever way for the author of the song (unknown) to tell a story without telling it directly, to remember and celebrate in hidden ways.
At Passover, we sing Chad Gadya, a silly but spooky song that children at the seder love. It starts with a verse about a father buying a goat for two zuzim. Then the dog bites the cat, a stick hits the dog, a fire burns the stick, water quenches the fire, and on and on. Each verse repeats all the previous verses, which forces the lead singer to carry the rest of the singers through ever longer renditions of the verses.
El Lissitzky, the great Soviet avant-garde artist, did a series of takes on Chad Gadya, only in images. His portraits used the song to celebrate the emancipation of the Jews through the Bolshevik Revolution. You can buy a book of the images, which are stunning.
The song is silly but spooky, as I said, because, for all the fun and forward motion, it’s really about the violence of the universe. What saves the song, for children, from the scariness is that the violence ultimately stops with God, Blessed Be He (as the song goes), who, in one final act of violence, ends all the violence that has come before God.
In 1989, Chava Alberstein, an Israeli singer and songwriter, rewrote and recast the song as a much more terrible parable of violence, pointing it directly at the Israeli state. Setting the song to a haunting melody, Alberstein ends Chad Gadya not with God, who is not present in her song at all, but in an endless cycle of violence.
It’s hard not to think that the song is about how victims, like the Jews, become killers, like the IDF, and ultimately lose themselves in the violence.
Pesach is a story about redemptive violence, and that, in a way, is the meaning of the traditional song Chad Gadya, the one last act of violence that ends the cycle of violence. In Alberstein’s retelling, Chad Gadya becomes about the renewal of violence. Rather than freeing us, as the Pesach story tells us, violence controls us.
The conclusion of the Passover seder features a folkloric song called Chad Gadya, in which a father purchases a baby goat for two zuzim (small coins) only to see it eaten by a cat. In the next stanza the cat is bitten by a dog, and in the next the dog is hit by a stick, which is then burned by a fire, that is then extinguished by water, which is then drunk by an ox, which is then killed by a slaughterer, who is then felled by the Angel of Death.
Authorship of Chad Gadya is unknown. The song is believed to have entered the Passover liturgy some time in the 16th century, long after most of the Haggadah was already fixed. A famous Haggadah published in Prague in 1526 does not contain the song, while a 1590 edition of it does. There is a tradition that it was known to, and perhaps authored by, Rabbi Eleazar of Worms, a German kabbalist born in the 12th century.
It has also been suggested that the song is inspired by a midrash in which Abraham debates the biblical king Nimrod, who tries to persuade him to worship fire. Abraham counters that water extinguishes fire, so Nimrod suggests worshipping water. Abraham then counters that the clouds contain water, so Nimrod suggests worshipping the clouds.
If its origins are cloudy, its symbolism is even more so. It’s often said that each character in the song symbolizes a nation that persecuted the Jewish people. In this telling, the Israelites are represented by the kid, acquired for two zuzim (representing the two tablets of the covenant), and was then oppressed by a succession of ever more powerful empires until its ultimate redemption by God.
Among the most famous of these was offered by the Vilna Gaon, the 17th-century Lithuanian scholar, who posited that the kid refers to the birthright that Jacob bought from Esau for bread and lentils (two zuzim), and thus symbolizes the special relationship between Israel and God. That blessing then passed to Joseph, who was the object of envy from his brothers, represented by the cat. The dog represents Pharaoh, who enslaved Jacob’s descendants, and the stick represents Moses, who redeemed them (and, famously, carried a rod).
Others have suggested that the song represents the journey of a soul through the world, with each of the characters representing an obstacle on the soul’s path to refinement. Or that it’s an indictment of cycles of violence and revenge that escalate until only God is left to restore order and keep the peace.
Common to all these understandings is a sense of the turbulence, violence and disorder that is endemic to human existence. At the conclusion of a long evening spent retelling the story of the Exodus and celebrating freedom, Chad Yadya seems to present an image of the world in which the strong devour the weak and danger lurks around every corner.
“The song itself, disarming in its simplicity, teaches the great truth of Jewish hope: that though many nations (symbolized by the cat, the dog, and so on) attacked Israel (the “goat”), each in turn has vanished into oblivion,” writes Rabbi Jonathan Sacks.
p. 146. “This is a highly amusing song with awesome meaning. If you accept the political interpretation of Chad Gadya, that the kid represents the Jewish people, and that the cat plays the part of Assyria, and Rome, the ox, and so on, then the message of Chad Gadya is nothing less than the message of the seder itself; it may seem that persecution will last forever, but it will not-and it will be the righteous God who brings it to an end.
Chad Gadya teaches the importance of small acts. Follow the song all the way through. One little goat is ultimately responsible for the smiting of the Angel of Death by God. That’s some goat. Most great movements for change start with small acts by anonymous people, think of Shifra and Puah, the Hebrew Midwives who cleverly resist the commands of Pharaoh. ... The power of a single human being is awesome, in part because so few individual acts occur in a vacuum. We all look to others for leadership, for positive examples. Which means that we have within us the power to be that example. We all have within us the power to spark revolutions through the lives we choose to lead. And it is our choice!
A review of these various understandings, however, always returns us to the central theme of Chad Gadya, the same theme that makes clear that the song is no child’s ditty. That theme is, quite simply, that God is the Master of the world. No true story begins or ends without God. Whether we like it or not, whether we want it or not, whether we deign to recognize it or not, God must enter into every story of our individual and collective life. God is the Master of all. He conducts the affairs of the world in His fashion, and His fashion does not always conform to our own wants or selfish understandings. As a result, the world often appears chaotic, unfair, inexplicable, and in disarray. We too often forget or ignore that actions have consequences, and that there is no deed which, in the end, does not lead up to God. Each and every action, even one as “simple” and “ordinary” as buying a goat (car! home!) in the market place, is part of a chain. Only God can bring together conflicting, seemingly destructive forces, into harmony. It is that harmony that is reality. God is.
Reb Avraham Mordecai of Gur taught that a person may look at the saga of our people’s history and conclude that our experience has been a series of random, often cruel, events. However, ultimately Moshiach will come. History has meaning.
| Character | Symbolism |
|---|---|
| Kid | Jewish People |
| Cat | Assyria/Envy |
| Dog | Babylon/Pharaoh |
| Stick | Persia/Moses' Staff |
| Fire | Macedonia |
| Water | Roman Empire |
| Ox | Saracens/Kingdom of Edom |
| Slaughterer | Crusaders/Moshiach ben Yosef |
| Angel of Death | Ottomans/Titus |
| God | Ultimate Redemption |
Descriptions of Chad Gadya being "entirely in Aramaic" are in error; the song is a mix of Aramaic and Hebrew and indicates that the composer's grasp of Aramaic was limited. For example, the song begins with ḥad gadya, which is Aramaic, instead of the Hebrew form gədi ʾeḥad, and for the cat the Aramaic shunra instead of the Hebrew ḥatul and for the dog the Aramaic kalba instead of the Hebrew kelev, etc., but, towards the end of the song, we find the slaughterer is the Hebrew ha-shoḥet instead of the Aramaic nakhosa and the Angel of Death is the Hebrew malʾakh ha-mavet instead of the Aramaic malʾach mota and, finally, "the Holy One, blessed be He" is the Hebrew ha-qadosh barukh hu whereas the Aramaic would be qudsha bərikh hu.
Moreover, the Aramaic grammar is sloppy, for example. The words "dizabin abah" (דְּזַבִּין אַבָּא) in the second line of the song literally mean "which father sold", rather than "which father bought".
Solving the Mystery of Chad Gadya
In 1917 and 1919 Russian avant-garde artist El Lissitzky created two variants of the book Had Gadya. Lissitzky's used Yiddish for the book verses, but introduced each verse in a traditional Aramaic, written in Hebrew alphabet. These two versions differs in style: art historians Dukhan and Perloff called the 1917 version "an expressionist decorativism of color and narrative" and "a set of brightly colored, folklike watercolors", respectively, and 1919 "marked by a stylistic shift ... Two versions also differ in narrative: "if in the variant of 1917 the Angel of Death is depicted as cast down but still alive, that of 1919 shows him as definitely dead, and his victims (an old man and a kid) as resurrected." Dukhan treats these differences as Lissitzky's sympathies towards the October Revolution, after which Jews of the Russian Empire were liberated from discrimination. Perloff also thinks that Lissitzky "viewed the song both as a message of Jewish liberation based on the Exodus story and as an allegorical expression of freedom for the Russian people." She also noted that "the hand of God is strikingly similar to an image of a hand that appeared on one of the first series of stamps printed after the revolution of 1917. On the stamp, the hand is clearly a symbol of the Soviet people.
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