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Chad
Gadya |
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Chad Gadya, ‘One little Goat’, is among the best known songs of the Seder and is sung after the meal towards the end of the evening. It is not known who wrote it or when it was written although its earliest known inclusion is in the Sefer Rokeach - 1160-1238. The song is unusual in that it is written almost entirely in Aramaic (apart from the terms for the slaughterer, the Angel of Death, and for God, which are in Hebrew) even though Aramaic had long ceased to be a Jewish vernacular.
Chad Gadya is a cumulative story about a goat bought for ‘two zuzim’ (a quarter of a silver shekel) which is eaten by a cat, which is bitten by a dog, which is hit by a stick and so on, going on to describe a chain of events that occur to all the characters in the song.
At first the song seems to be a child’s story but has traditionally been interpreted in an allegorical way, each of the verses connecting the song to one of the themes of Pesach and referring to the many persecutions of the Jewish people who, according to the song's optimistic ending, will be redeemed by the one true God ‘slaying the Angel of Death’.
Click here to download the English translation of the song (12Kb PDF)
Click here to download the Hebrew translation of the song (300Kb PDF)
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