Chad Gadya

No, this isn't an essay about some guy named Chad. Chad Gadya (pronounced Had Gadya with a gutteral 'h' and rhymes with "Mod Squad, ha!") is a song sung at Passover at the end of the Seder. In Aramaic (Hebraic dialect). Which I think is pretty cool.

It's an odd song. Kind of like a drinking song, which I guess is appropriate for the end of a meal where everyone is supposed to drink four glasses of wine. The song tells a story that goes like this:

My father bought a kid goat for two zuzim (apparently a monetary unit in ancient Babylon). But the goat was eaten by a cat. Then the cat was bitten by a dog, the dog was beaten by a stick, the stick was burned by a fire, the fire was put out by water, the water was drunk by an ox, the ox was slaughtered by a butcher, and so on...

Aramaic and Hebrew are closely related, so I can understand a fair amount just from my knowledge of Hebrew. For instance, in Hebrew, dog = kelev; in Aramaic, dog = chalba. Both use the same root: KLB. Some words aren't anything alike... In Hebrew, cat = chatul; in Aramaic, cat = shunra. I was disappointed to learn that shunra is interpreted as a pun on the Aramaic phrase soneh rah, which means "one who is evil and hates." Hey, just because the tabby was hungry for a little goat doesn't make her evil!

I don't know if there's any rhyme or reason for this posting. Maybe it's that I just had four glasses of wine, and I'm a lightweight. My apologies to the reader, and in the future, I'll try and blog while sober.