It's a father-eats-what? world

[elettaria]

rymenhild, puzzled by the traditional Passover song Chad Gadya, has challenged her readers to interpret it. It really got me thinking, so here's my answer. Go first to this post, in which she gives the translation and also an intriguing recording of the song. (There's another version available here, the Israeli version; sung by kindergarten children, I'm afraid, but this is the version I've always heard sung.) For those who are less familiar with Passover, it is a Jewish festival which celebrates the Exodus, the escape from slavery in Egypt and journey to the Promised Land, under the leadership of Moses, and there is a preoccupation with lists and hierarchies in the songs and in the spoken text. Here's a basic guide to Passover rituals.

I started off by listening to the recording she found, and that gave me food for thought. In some ways it's clearly recognisable as Chad Gadya, but it's very different in others. The main thing you notice is that it's eerie and sometimes dramatic. The eerie effect is partly the timbre of the singer's voice, which ranges from ghostly to passionate, even sexy at times (the drums reinforce the latter effect in a fairly traditional way), which is itself an odd juxtaposition, especially in a song largely about eating. It also comes from effects such as the cantillation with chords moving upwards (frequently dissonantly), over a pedal note which is constant throughout the piece. Movement and stasis in an uneasy relationship, sound and silence (there are striking unaccompanied moments). And had I a proper musical training, I'd be able to give you a far better analysis than that. What makes it even more unsettling is that the seder version I know is cheery, with everyone racing more and more as the list gets longer and longer. This is not a cheery song.

Which brings me to the analysis of the text. In some ways it appeals to the children's-story aspect of the seder. There's an enormous focus on telling the story to children in the Haggadah, both the idea of passing our history down through the generations and the idea of making it accessible by presenting it in child-sized terms. This is exactly what Chad Gadya is about. It begins with telling a story and something being passed down from father to child, and the story is largely about animals, typical of a children's fable.

But it's not a very nice story. It starts off in the domestic mode, father buying a kid. The father is probably going to have it killed and served up for a family meal, but that's not made explicit, and at this stage you have an image of Daddy and a sweet baby animal. Then it gets surreal.



At first the chain seems extraordinarily simple, reinforced by the structure which equates all the links by the way they're added together and repeated. They're not equal. Most of the links are of the same sort, i.e. aggressive: attacking, consuming, killing or otherwise destroying. But factors are left out and others don't quite work. The cat presumably kills the goat before eating it, but does it? (Now there's a nasty thought, being eaten alive. Did the dog actually eat part of the cat it bit?) And anyway, since when do cats eat goats? Sticks don't have agency, they don't hit things on their own, but the presumed human wielding the stick is left out, and after that abstracts come into the chain, fire and water. The water that quenches the fire (again, it can't be through its own agency) is probably not literally the same water that the ox drinks, but rather from the same body of water, e.g. a man took a bucket and drew water from a stream, and later the ox drank from the stream. Everything is confused in this chain of destruction and consumption, much is between the lines.

Now look at the participants. Again, it's not a normal food chain. It starts off with humans, goes to animals, then non-sentient things, then an animal, then a human, then heavenly forces; all uneasily related together. The hierarchy, which should be as follows (Fire and Water are left floating, though presumably they are the servants of man, but for the others it's fairly clear), is all mixed up, even reversed.



Where does the father fit in? He is "above" the child (going back to the original diagram), but he is also above the kid, and the chain of the kid is not the same chain the father or the child are caught in, but rather parallel to it. The father has presumably told the story to the child, thus gaining patriarchal narrative authority, and the child is passing on this story (and the instinctive reading is that the child is a boy who has grown up to be a father himself, identified with the father or father-figure leading the seder). You can equate the father with God in that sense, and you sure as hell could if you were Christian, but "In the beginning was the Word, and the Word was with God, and the Word was God" isn't the most appropriate thing to be quoting here.

Anyway, look what father-figures do. One begins the process, one ends it. God is the top of what is basically a food chain. The chain has two ends, both interwoven in the part of the narrative they appear in: the kid who is the ultimate victim, and the child/father pair who are passing on the story. I don't know what the Aramaic is literally, but I presume it's a specific word for a young goat, as opposed to just a goat. In English there is a pun on "kid" meaning human child. A father who buys a kid, for a purpose which is unspecified but which, if you draw the obvious parallels with the rest of the chain, is killing and eating, could do that to his own children, his own "kids". So could God. Pretty damn disturbing.

For a people who have probably never been more than a couple of generations away from persecution, from confused categorisation where they may be untermenschen, less than human, perhaps treated like food animals (and one of the main differences that has set Jews apart and has been resented by anti-Semites is our dietary practices, think of the blood libel) by being cremated in giant ovens after being killed like cattle, and who never know when what seems harmless, friendly or even subservient could suddenly turn round and attack, this song expresses a deep-seated fear. Anything in this song - being hit, burned, drowned, ritually slaughtered, eaten - could happen to us.

Not to mention the economic mode invoked at the beginning, tethering it to reality and forming the refrain which frames each verse. For centuries, many diaspora Jews were only permitted to be money-lenders. Look at the Christian-authored narrative about Shylock. He starts off by lending money as is his job, then we get into the pound of flesh, implications of cannibalism, the consuming hatred that had been seething barely beneath the surface bubbling up and nearly leading to the terrible death of being carved up alive. Instead the positions of power shift suddenly and Shylock is now the underdog again, forced to be assimilated into Christian society by conversion, in a way consumed by it.

Thankfully, this song is sung after the Passover meal.

And now I challenge you all to interpret my interpretation.