Is Dayeinu Really Enough?
- Hinda Eisen Labovitz
- 14 hours ago
- 5 min read
I wrote this piece during the Pesach immediately following Ronen's death, which was also right after COVID locked down the world. I thought I had shared it before, but looks like it's just been sitting on my hard drive for the past six years. But every year the message and the tune of "dayeinu" being so unabashedly perky -- and the number of times I need to sing it as part of preparatory Pesach teaching -- continues to activate/trigger me just like it did the first time. My shock absorbers have a few more helpful callouses now, but it still hurts. Not overwhelmingly every day, but sometimes a wave rushes over and it's like I'm back there.
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Day 198 since Ronen’s death. It’s also the thirty-second day of our isolation period for social distancing, the sixth day of Pesach, and the fifth day of counting the Omer. A life in numbers.
Seders were complicated this year; as we are in isolation with the rest of humanity with the COVID-19 pandemic, we were not able to share our Seder with others in person. We left a Zoom line open for the first day and were joined by my family and Bob’s parents, which was, perhaps, a blessing among the stress. We haven’t had Seder with our families in many years, since I am always at the pulpit on Pesach and so we need to be here in Maryland, and it isn’t always possible for others to travel to celebrate with us.
The part of the Seder which extols God’s deeds one by one, Dayeinu, is a much-anticipated moment. We learn the peppy refrain from the time we are young children—Judah, now 4, ran around the house singing it for several days in advance of Pesach—and it’s a rare moment that seems, no matter the origin of those sitting around the table, unifies American Jews on Seder night. It’s a celebration of God’s acts, one by one, leading from the redemption from Egypt, until it comes to the punchline:
If God had given us the Torah and had not brought us into the land of Israel;
[it would have been] enough for us.
If God had brought us into the land of Israel and had not built us the ‘Chosen House’ [the Temple;
it would have been] enough for us.
We sing the peppy tune through the end, but the poet who wrote this text comes to a noisy, screeching halt. We have to say that each of these things are enough. If we don’t, and the fulfillment of redemption is the Temple standing in Jerusalem, but the payyetan (liturgical poet) lived in a time where there was no homeland in Israel, and the Temple was no longer standing, how are we to imagine that it really was “enough for us”?
In her Haggadah Seder Talk, which encourages Seder participants to discuss real-life applications for texts in the Seder, Dr. Erica Brown invites people to share:
After Dayeinu, pause and have every member of the Seder express thanks for three positive aspects of his or her life in the structure of the song, “Had I only… it would have been enough.” Alternatively, every person at the Seder can thank the person to his or her right within this format. If you want to be truly consistent with form and content, you can identify difficult challenges for which you are now grateful because you wouldn’t be who you are without those trials. As the writer Melodie Beattie says, “Gratitude unlocks the fullness of life. It turns what we have into enough, and more.[1]
It's tradition in our family that we all use different Haggadot and if there's a comment we share it. As we sang the perky tune, I thought about reading this prompt out loud. Dayeinu, it would have been enough for us. And then, my heart leapt into my throat. What would have been my three?
If I had just been friends with [my now-husband of almost 12 years] Bob, but we had not (finally) gotten married, it would have been enough.
If I had just married Bob, but we did not have our twins, it would have been enough.
If I had just had our twins, but we had not had Ronen, it would have been enough…
If we had not had Ronen, but … what?
I didn’t share. My heart just sank.
Is it that the last two steps of Dayeinu are mentioned ironically? Angrily? In rationalizing a terrible reality in which total achievement is yet to come? Is it optimism, fear, or ire? What is the message screaming at us at the end of this piyyut, when we are rendered tone-deaf by our upbeat tune?
In another article, Erica Brown also calls Dayeinu a “Jewish Template for Gratitude,”[2] and totally misses -- or ignores -- this ending. The payyetan is aching for the last two steps -- the return to Israel and the building of a new Temple for centralized worship -- lost to history. Perhaps it is worthy to be grateful for what we have in step-wise fashion, to be attuned to each step we have taken to achieve success and sh’leimut (wholeness).
Just after we sing Dayeinu, the Haggadah contains a second piyyut, almost identical, but without the qualifications at each step. We declare, “How many and manifold are the Omnipresent’s kindnesses to us,” with the same list. God took us out of Egypt, brought judgment upon our oppressors, etc. … and God brought us to the land of Egypt, and built for us the Temple of Promise,” and we finish, with the punchline, “So we could atone for all of our sins.”
Yes, “So we could atone for all of our sins.” Six months and counting to Yom Kippur, just past the half-way point of a year since Ronen died, let’s remember: We don’t atone for our sins through animal sacrifice at a Temple in Jerusalem. We do the best we can to atone through reflection, apology, and prayer, tzedakah, and contrition. We have made our own meaning from the missing steps reflected in this poem. Perhaps we can be grateful for the self-determination and autonomy we’ve exercised, even where we are no longer able to access God’s gift.
What’s the punchline to my Dayeinu? Is there an adjustment I can make so it feels minimally palatable, if not relatable?
I met Bob, and (eventually) we started dating and got married.
Two years later we had our twins.
Three years and almost five months later we had Ronen, so we could…
So we could ...what? Become bereaved parents? Support other bereaved families? Know what it’s like to suffer from PTSD and depression? Find my own resilience? Learn the length of Bible that I’ve studied, and bring Torah into the world in his memory? Is there any gratitude punchline we could articulate here that would even begin to rationalize our loss? So we could form the identities we have today?
It isn’t clear when Dayeinu was composed, but since it appears first in the Seder Rav Amram Ga’on, published around the ninth century of the common era, it’s likely to have been composed within two centuries of that publication.
Perhaps with a minimum of six centuries of hindsight, we’ll also figure out how to put our loss into context. Just six years later, I'm not sure I can yet. But then again, I'm certain that we all have unattained futures, roads we did not take or were blocked for us, and maybe that's the point.
[1] Erica Brown, Seder Talk: The Conversational Haggadah (New York: Maggid Books & OU Press, 2015), p. 77.
[2] Erica Brown, “Dayeinu: A Jewish Template for Gratitude,” https://www.myjewishlearning.com/article/dayenu-a-jewish-template-for-gratitude/. Accessed 14 April 2020.
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