Dayenu means “it would have been enough” in Hebrew, and it is the title, and refrain, of a song that is sung every year at the Passover Seder. It’s an upbeat tune that lists all of the things we are grateful to God for in the Exodus story. Dayenu is over a thousand years old, and appears in the first medieval Hagaddah (the book used to guide the Passover Seder), so it has staying power.
There are fifteen stanzas, all in the same format, for example: If God had only brought us out from Egypt, and had not carried out judgements against our oppressors – it would have been enough; If God had split the sea for us, and had not taken us through it on to dry land – it would have been enough; If God had given us the Torah, and had not brought us to the land of Israel – it would have been enough.
The mystery of the song, for me, has always been: how can any of these things have been enough when all of them were necessary for the survival of the Jewish people? What is “enough” supposed to mean? Do we really mean it would have been enough if God had split the sea and then not allowed us to reach dry land?
I’ve been listening to the podcast For Heaven’s Sake, from the Shalom Hartman Institute, ever since October 7th, not because it gives me answers on how to view what’s going on in Israel and Gaza, but because it helps me to formulate my questions; and recently, Rabbi Doctor DonnielHartman referred to himself as a “Dayenu person” in the course of a conversation with Yossi Klein Halevy, who pronounced himself definitely not a Dayenu person, which started me thinking about what they meant by a Dayenu person, and what the tradition means by Dayenu overall.
I think what they mean by a Dayenu person is someone who is able to accept the limits of what’s possible, and to celebrate what’s achievable in the moment, even in the face of wanting, or even needing, more. If I’m using Rabbi Hartman as the model, then being a Dayenu person wouldn’t have to mean that you’ve stopped hoping for, or recognizing the need for more, because he always talks about wanting more from himself and for the Jewish people. But I think that in order to be a Dayenu person, you’d have to have faith that more good things will come, so that pausing to be grateful for your incomplete gifts wouldn’t leave you worrying that that’s all there’s ever going to be. And that sort of leaves me out.
I used to call myself an optimistic realist, because while I could see the suffering and pain in the world, I totally believed that my problems and the problems around me could eventually be solved. And I still act as if I am optimistic, but internally my expectations for my life and for the world around me have been lowered significantly; and not in the I-accept-you-as-you-are sort of way, but in the I’m-screwed sort of way.
But, the idea of being a Dayenu person resonates for me. I really do crave the feeling of having enough, and the faith that everything will be okay. I just don’t know how to get there from where I am. It feels impossible to pause in the middle of a raging sea and be grateful that I have a boat: a very small, very rickety boat. And I’ve always heard the words of Dayenu as a command to act grateful and act satisfied even when I’m not, in order to please someone else; in this case, God. But what if there’s another way to read the words of the song? What if the song is, inadvertently or intentionally, telling us that we can be grateful for each step of the journey only because we already know that all of the steps took place and we reached the Promised Land? As we sing through all fifteen verses the song can teach us how to toggle between the two mindsets: gratitude for what we have, and willingness to keep working for what needs to come next.
One of the primary purposes of the Seder every year is to help us feel as if we personally experienced the Exodus from Egypt, and I’ve always thought that meant reminding us to be content with what we have, and not be so jealous of what someone else has been given; but I wonder if it’s also about reminding us that there is a path forward. So that if we feel like we are in the middle of a raging sea, with only a dinky little boat to cling to, singing Dayenu can remind us that this crisis moment is not the end of the journey, or even the beginning, it’s the middle; we’ve already come a long way, and, the song tells us, there are still many gifts ahead to help us on the journey.
Maccabeats Dayenu – https://youtu.be/CZgDNPGZ9Sg?si=BOmJAcAW91Y29L4K
If you haven’t had a chance yet, please check out my Young Adult novel, Yeshiva Girl, on Amazon. And if you feel called to write a review of the book, on Amazon, or anywhere else, I’d be honored.
Yeshiva Girl is about a Jewish teenager on Long Island, named Isabel, though her father calls her Jezebel. Her father has been accused of inappropriate sexual behavior with one of his students, which he denies, but Izzy implicitly believes it’s true. As a result of his problems, her father sends her to a co-ed Orthodox yeshiva for tenth grade, out of the blue, and Izzy and her mother can’t figure out how to prevent it. At Yeshiva, though, Izzy finds that religious people are much more complicated than she had expected. Some, like her father, may use religion as a place to hide, but others search for and find comfort, and community, and even enlightenment. The question is, what will Izzy find?