Rabbi Avi Shafran: Reconstructing Dayeinu

Much of our Seder-night message to our children, mediated by the Haggadah, is forthright and clear. Some of it, though, is subtle and stealthy.

Dayeinu, for example.

On the surface, it is a simple song – a recitation of events of chasdei Hashem over the course of Jewish history, from Yetzias Mitzrayim until the entry into Eretz Yisroel – with the refrain “Dayeinu”: “It would have been enough for us.” It is a puzzling chorus, and everyone who has ever thought about Dayeinu has asked the obvious question.

Would it really have “been enough for us” had Hashem not, say, split the Yam Suf, trapping our ancestors between the water and the Egyptian army? Some take the approach that another neis could have taken place, but that certainly would weaken the import of the refrain. And then there are the other lines: “Had [Hashem] not sustained us in the desert” – enough for us? “Had He not given us the Torah.” Enough? What are we saying?

Contending that we don’t really mean “Dayeinu” when we say it, that we only intend to declare how undeserving of all Hashem’s kindnesses we are, is the sort of answer children view with immediate suspicion, and make faces at.

One path toward understanding Dayeinu, though, might lie in remembering that a proven method of engaging the attention of a child – or even an ex-child – is to hide one’s message, leaving hints for its discovery. Could Dayeinu be hiding something significant in plain sight?

Think of those images of objects or words — or letters, like the “beis” hidden in the “peh” of the ksav of a sefer Torah – that the mind needs time to comprehend, simply because the gestalt is not immediately absorbed; one aspect alone is perceived at first, although another element may be the key to the image’s meaning.

Dayeinu may be precisely such a puzzle. And its solution might lie in the realization that one of the song’s lines is in fact not followed by the refrain at all. Few people can immediately locate it, but one of the events listed is pointedly not followed by the word “dayeinu.”

Can you find it? Or have the years of singing Dayeinu after a cup of wine obscured the obvious? You might want to ask a child, more able for the lack of experience. I’ll wait…

…Welcome back. You found it, of course: the very first phrase in the poem. Dayeinu begins: “Had He taken us out of Mitzrayim…” That phrase – and it alone – is never qualified with a “dayeinu.” For only it refers, so to speak, to a “non-negotiable.” Yetzias Mitzrayim was the singular, crucial, transformative point in Jewish history, when an extended family became Klal Yisroel, with all the special interrelationship that peoplehood brings. Had Jewish history ended, chalila, with starvation in the desert, or even at battle at an unrippled Red Sea, it would have been, without doubt, a terrible tragedy, the cutting down of a people just born – but still, the cutting down of a people. Klal Yisroel, the very purpose of creation (“For the sake of Yisroel,” as the Midrash comments on the first word of the Torah, Hashem created the universe), would still have existed, albeit briefly.

And our nationhood, after all, is precisely what we celebrate on Pesach. When the Torah recounts the rasha’s question (Shmos, 12:26) it records that our ancestors responded by bowing down in thanksgiving. What were they thankful for? The Sheim MiShmuel explains that the very fact that the Torah considers the rasha to be part of Klal Yisroel, someone who needs and merits a response, was the reason for the Jews’ happiness. When we were just a family of individuals, each member stood or fell on his own merits. Yishmoel was Avrohom’s son, and Eisav was Yitzchok’s. But neither they nor their descendents merited to become parts of Klal Yisroel.

That now, after Yetzias Mitzrayim, even a “wicked son” would be considered a full member of the Jewish People indicated to our ancestors that something had radically changed since pre-Egyptian days. The people had become a nation.

And so the subtle message of Dayeinu may be just that, the sheer indispensability of Yetzias Mitzrayim – its contrast with the rest of Jewish history, its importance beyond even the magnitude of all the nissim that came to follow.

If so, then for thousands of years, that sublime thought might have subtly accompanied the strains of spirited “Da-Da-yeinu’s,” ever so delicately yet ever so ably suffusing Jewish minds and hearts, without their owners necessarily even realizing it.

In any event, it’s an idea worth pondering.

For now, dayeinu.

[Rabbi Shafran is director of public affairs for Agudath Israel of America.]