As our family Seder comes to a close, no one is really in the mood for deep discussion. At this late hour, and after four cups of good wine, we and our guests just want to sing the classic songs and enjoy ourselves. As a result, Chad Gadya, the enigmatic little ditty about a father and his unfortunate goat, gets little serious attention, although we do relish doing the actions and the animal sounds.

Chad Gadya, however, does have some profound undercurrents, especially when an often-made mistake is corrected. It is well-known that the “Pesach” was the paschal sacrifice offered by each Israelite family when the Temple stood in Jerusalem on the eve of Passover. However, many make the mistake of thinking this was always a lamb offering. In fact, the Torah calls the animal to be offered a seh. 

This is a Hebrew collective term for a lamb and a kid, as it says, “An unblemished seh, a year-old male you shall have, from the sheep or from the goats you may take it” (Exodus 12:5). So the Pesach offering could be a paschal lamb or a paschal goat. This places the Chad Gadya story at the centre in the Seder. For that goat can represent the Jewish people surviving oppression, as they did way back in ancient Egypt when the paschal goat was first eaten.

With this knowledge, each stanza of Chad Gadya can represent a subsequent oppressor of our people. First is the cat “that came and ate the goat”. The cat represents ancient Egypt who considered the animal sacred (the goddess Bastet), and often mummified them. A cat eating a goat is anatomically dubious but the author of the song is forced to employ a feline as he wants to reference a popular symbol of Egypt.

From here the song proceeds chronologically. The dog that bites the cat represents the empires that confronted Egypt and destroyed the northern (722 BCE) and southern (586 BCE) kingdoms of Israel respectively. These are Assyria and Babylon, which both employed dogs for hunting and military campaigns, as is evidenced from numerous reliefs in the British Museum. 

The stick that beat the dog is the Persian empire that overcame the Babylonians and had subjugated the entire Middle East by the end of the sixth century BCE. The Persian king, Ahasuerus, from the Purim story, famously brandished a golden sceptre to control those who sought a formal audience with him. 

The fire that burnt the stick is the Greek empire that conquered the Persians, led by Alexander the Great in the fourth century BCE. Prometheus stole fire from the gods of Olympus, a large flame burnt all through the annual Olympic games, and on Chanukah we recall Greek battles with the Maccabees by lighting candles.

The water that extinguished the fire is the Roman empire that defeated the Greeks and destroyed our Second Temple in the year 70. The Romans famously constructed many aqueducts to supply cities with running water. “What have the Romans ever done for us?” asked the disgruntled Jews in the film Life of Brian. The Talmud asks the same question, and answers: they built bathhouses (Shabbat 33a).

The ox that drank the water may represent the caliphate that from by the end of the seventh century stretched from China to Europe. The second and longest surah (chapter in the Qur’an is called “The Cow”).

The slaughterer that killed the ox would then be the Christian Crusaders of the early Middle Ages who attempted to “save” the holy land from the Muslims, decimating Jewish communities as they swept through Europe.

Chad Gadya first appears in the 1590 Prague Haggadah, so it must have been penned prior to then. The author would probably have lived during the Ottoman Empire, which grew to control most of “Eastern Europe and the Middle East. That empire might have seemed like the”‘Angel of Death that slew the slaughterer” in Chad Gadya. 

Little did the author know what was to come: the First World War German-Ottoman alliance, followed by World War Two and the Holocaust. The Angel of Death indeed. But the conclusion of the Chad Gadya is upbeat. The author is sure that at in the end God will arrive and slaughter the Angel of Death. Sure enough, the state of Israel was regained in 1948.

That little kid then is us, the Jewish people, surviving every aggressor, throughout time. Maybe the father in the song is also God, who “bought” us at Mount Sinai with “two zuzim”, two coins. These are the leaders Moses and Aaron, or even the two-fold expression of commitment our ancestors proclaimed in response to God’s revelation: “Na’aseh v’nishmah”, “All that God has said, we will do and we will heed” (Exodus 24:8).   

Chad Gadya turns out to be an imaginative, historical elaboration of a key text that appears much earlier in the Haggadah: Vehi Sh’amda: “For not just one alone has risen against us to destroy us, but in every generation after generation, they have risen against us to destroy us, and the Holy One, blessed be God, saves us from their hand.” 

That would be the ideal place to discuss all this. Better than at the end of the Seder when after a night of celebrating, discussing, singing and chatting, we are relieved and relaxed — at one with our ancestors, with each other and with our God.

Rabbi Zarum is dean of the London School of Jewish Studies