[Avodah] Chad Gadya

Toby Katz t613k at mail.aol.com
Wed Apr 10 22:10:39 PDT 2019


In Avodah Digest, Vol 37, Issue 27 dated 4/10/2019 R'  Aryeh Frimer <Aryeh.Frimer at biu.ac.il> writes:
> In Chad Gadya, we say Shelosha Avot and Arba Imahot becauseAvot is
> male and Imahot is female. Yet the text reads Asara Dibraya andshlosha
> Asar Midaya even though Dibra/Dibrot and Mida/Midot are female.Has any
> one seen a discussion related to this Dikduk Problem? Are therules in
> Aramaic different? <<

This thread migrated to Mesorah, without changing the subject line. In
all the learned back-and-forth I did not see anyone note the simple fact
that the Avos, the Imahos, the Dibraya and the Midaya do not appear in
Chad Gadya at all! The subject line should have been "Echad Mi Yodeia."

Echad Mi Yodeia is written in a mash-up of Hebrew and Aramaic, and
there is an excellent reason for that. It rhymes beautifully and is very
enjoyable to sing! Beginning with the number five, everything rhymes:5
chumshei Torah6 sidrei Mishna7 yemei Shabata8 yemei milah9 yarchei
leidah10 dibraya11 kochvaya12 shivtaya13 midaya

All the numbers (chamisha, shisha, etc) are Hebrew. Almost all the words
in the poem are Hebrew (including sidrei, yemei, yarchei). The only
words in Aramaic are words at the end of a line, where the Hebrew would
not make a rhyme.Hebrew: Torah, Mishna, milah, leidahAramaic: Shabata,
dibraya, kochvaya, shivtaya, midaya

I doubt the poet gave any thought to correct Aramaic dikduk. It's a song,
and it rolls sweetly and smoothly off the tongue.

BTW it is not surprising that this poem/song was confused with Chad
Gadya, which likewise has a multiplicity of smoothly rhyming Aramaic
"--ah" words. Gadya, shunra, chalba,chutra, nura, maya, sora. And let
us not forget Abba!

R' Seth Mandel says Chad Gadya was composed at a time when Aramaic was
no longer a spoken tongue. He may be right, or it may be that people
were still mixing a lot of Aramaic into their daily language, as many
of us continue to use some Yiddish mixed in with our English. Over time
people would have simplified their folk-Aramaic and forgotten some of
the grammar. To give an analogy, most Yiddish speakers today don't pay
attention to which words are masculine and which are feminine, and don't
know when you're supposed to say der, dos, dem or di.

RMS also says that Chad Gadya is taken from an older popular German song,
and he may well be right about that, too. I have a book of Mother Goose
rhymes, some centuries old, and one of them is a rhyme that is very
similar to Chad Gadya. It has a stick hitting a dog, a fire burning the
stick, water putting out the fire, even an ox lapping up the water. But
instead of a father it has an old woman, and somewhere in the sequence
of events is a pig jumping over a stile. Needless to say, HKBH makes no
appearance in the Mother Goose version.

--Toby Katzt613k at aol.com


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