There once was a goat that was bought for two zuzei,
and eaten soon after by one hungry kitty.
A dog came along, and the cat was consumed,
and down to its whiskers as dog meat was doomed.
A stick came along and the dog that it spurned
was struck, and the stick in hot fire was burned.
Then water poured down from the riverside docks,
and put out the fire, till drunk by an ox.
A slaughterer came and he shekhted the beast,
serving ox to the Jews for their Passover feast,
a choice Deuteronomy gives us, though not
the sheep Shemot tells us to put in the pot,
an alternative based on a statement by Moses,
(Deuteronomy’s author no good Jew opposes).
They ate it with matzoh and maror, of course,
every Jew just as hungry that night as a horse.
The angel of death then decided to slaughter
the shokhet whose blood wasn’t thicker than water.
Along came the Holy One, blessed be He,
and slaughtered death’s angel, but though we feel free
on Passover night, this angel, we know,
rose faster than bread when there’s yeast in the dough.
Though the goat that was bought for two zuzei is dead,
death’s angel’s so smart, he is one step ahead
of God, though the prophet Elijah, it’s said,
has some tricks up his sleeve. Now let’s all go to bed.
No need to count sheep, though we must all start countin’
for fifty days, till we stay one night awake,
in a tiqqun like one that we made on the mountain
where Moses changed matzoh (that’s us!) to cheesecake.
Gershon Hepner
3/31/21
The had gadya entered the haggadah in the sixteenth century, being absent in the first edition of the Prague haggadah (1526) and present in the second (1590). Chaim Semeruk claims that the original version was in Yiddish, and in it, a mouse ate the kid, and was then eaten by the cat which never ate the kid.
Gershon Hepner is a poet who has written over 25,000 poems on subjects ranging from music to literature, politics to Torah. He grew up in England and moved to Los Angeles in 1976. Using his varied interests and experiences, he has authored dozens of papers in medical and academic journals, and authored “Legal Friction: Law, Narrative, and Identity Politics in Biblical Israel.” He can be reached at gershonhepner@gmail.com.
