Enough
How much is enough? The Dayenu portion of the Passover Seder meal challenges us to recognize that “enough” is an attitude, not a set of circumstances
Image Credit: Dayenu Hebrw Art - Search Images
Solo Dios Basta. [God alone suffices]
-Santa Teresa de Jesús
For a word that most three-year-olds can use accurately, “enough” is a slippery term.
At first blush, “enough” sounds like an objective or even scientifically quantifiable measure.
To be certain, in some circumstances, it is.
A price tag tells you how much money is enough to buy a specific item. Science can tell you how much heat is enough to raise a liter of water from freezing to boiling at sea level (approximately 418.4 Joules, by the way). The law can tell you how old is old enough to vote or buy alcohol, or big enough to ride in a car without a booster seat.
However, when it comes to personal life and value statements rather than objective or scientific measurements, “enough,” like beauty, is in the eye of the beholder.
I was thinking of what “enough” really means as I watched The Chosen’s most recent season, which looks at the week leading up to the crucifixion through the lens of the Last Supper. (Some Christians might be surprised to learn was a traditional Seder meal. At least, I was). Although it came out a year ago, in the spirit of Easter and Passover, we re-watched an episode of the last season of The Chosen which centers on the Dayeinu (דַּיֵּנוּ)—the declaration of God’s sufficiency.
The tone of the Dayeinu feels in some ways a bit distinct from much of the rest of the Seder. After all, the Seder itself is first and foremost an act of corporate remembrance: a memorialization and recapitulation of God’s deliverance of His covenant people, and an opportunity to transmit that corporate memory to the next generation as the children ask, “Why is this night not like other nights?” Each item or phrase or action is designed to call to mind some aspect of the Exodus story: the bitter herbs or horseradish provide a gustatory reminder of the bitterness of bondage; the salt water, the tears of countless generations; the unleavened bread, the rootlessness of having to eat in haste because our deliverance works on God’s timetable, not ours. If the food memorializes suffering brought about by man, the wine memorializes hope brought about by God: four cups symbolizing Sanctification, Deliverance, Redemption, and Praise.
However, in the midst of a celebration devoted to looking backward at past deliverance and forward to future hope (“Next year in Jerusalem!” sang generations of Jews in diaspora, most never dreaming that such a dream would be realized in their lives or those of their descendants), Dayeinu is something different: a look inward to respond to what God has done by recognizing that God Himself, beyond any gifts He gives or acts He performs, is enough.
Had He brought us out of Egypt but not brought judgment upon our oppressors,
That would have been enough
Had He brought judgment upon them but not upon their gods,
That would have been enough
Had He brought judgment upon them without killing their firstborn sons,
That would have been enough
Had He killed their firstborn sons without giving us their wealth,
That would have been enough
Had he given us their wealth without splitting the sea,
That would have been enough
Had He split the sea for us but not brought us through it dry,
that would have been enough
Had He brought us through the sea dry without drowning our enemies in it,
That would have been enough
Had He drowned our enemies in it without providing our needs for forty years in the desert,
That would have been enough
Had he provided for our needs for forty years in the desert without feeding us with manna,
That would have been enough
Had He fed us with manna without giving us Shabbat,
That would have been enough
Had He given us Shabbat without drawing us close around Mount Sinai,
That would have been enough
Had He drawn us close around Mount Sinai without giving us the Torah,
That would have been enough
Had He given us the Torah without bringing us to the land of Israel,
That would have been enough
Had He brought us to the land of Israel without building for us the House He chose,
That would have been enough
Fifteen praises—fifteen opportunities to marvel at God’s deliverance—become fifteen occasions to ask, “Is God enough?,” and answer, “Yes, He is.” The number fifteen is no coincidence. As Sir Jonathan Sacks—the late chief rabbi of Great Britain—noted, the number fifteen “has a deep association with thanksgiving, reminding us of the fifteen Psalms that bear the title Shir HaMa’alot, ‘A Song of Degrees’ [Psalms 120-134] and the fifteen steps in the Temple on which the Levites stood as they sang to God.”
In Hebrew, however, the resonance is stronger and more personal than in translation. Biblical Hebrew strikes you with the beauty of humble, personal ambiguity. All languages have their quirks—their beauty and their headaches, their different shades of meaning that cast light on reality like a unique stained glass window. It seems to me no coincidence that God would choose to reveal Himself first in a language that drips personality and mystery. Languages like Greek or Latin prize objectivity and precision: tenses like the present, the perfect, the imperfect, the pluperfect, even the future perfect make it possible to determine who did what and in what order with scientific precision. Biblical Hebrew, however, is inherently personal: the verb tenses are few and ambiguous, and even verbs have gender, because what something or someone is, is inherently connected to what something or someone does. Precisely when something is done is less important than who did it, and why, and the intensity or force behind the action. Consequently, if Greek and Latin are languages well-suited to science or abstract philosophy, Biblical Hebrew is particularly well-suited to storytelling and to poetry. Science tries to separate and categorize things; poetry tries to unite and connect disparate things. Science strives for objectivity, precision, and impersonality; poetry and stories embrace the personal, with all the messiness it entails.
Dayeinu is translated into English as “It would have been enough.” The one-word Hebrew refrain means simply, “Enough to us” or “[It is/would have been/will be] sufficient for us.” Several important shades of meaning emerge from this difference. The conditional English tense sounds clinical and objective; the Hebrew reminds us that “enough” is always personal. The conditional English seems to imply an individual’s determination of sufficiency; the Hebrew reminds us that “enough” takes place in the context of a story that involves an “us” far bigger than just you or I, far bigger than those who happen to share this precise moment in history. The English sentence is an abstract calculation; the Hebrew word is a personal declaration, an act of will.
Looking at the specific fifteen acts of God that Dayeinu memorializes, the need for this personal and corporate decision becomes all the more clear. Each of the acts of God is a miracle and, for the chosen people, a revelation of grace, but it is also a reminder that grace is no easy thing. It is hard. It is terrifying. It does not leave the recipient unchanged. And so the Hebrews went kicking and screaming from grace to grace: they cursed Moses when he tried to lead them out of Egypt (Exodus 5:21); they declared at the edge of the sea that they never wanted to leave Egypt in the first place (Exodus 14:12); they complained, first that God had brought them out into the desert to starve (Exodus 16:3), and then that the manna that God provided didn’t taste good (Numbers 11:4); when they came to the land, they refused to enter because they were afraid (Numbers 13:33); etc. These are moments that would be experienced in retrospect as divine outpourings of grace, but at the time they occurred, they were experienced as crises.
This brush with dayeinu reminded me of my own crisis of grace. Sixteen years ago, in a Teen Challenge (“Reto a la Juventud”) rehab center in one of the seedier parts of Mexico City, I sat down with my journal reflecting on my Mexican (mis)adventure. I had gone to Mexico with some hope of glory, and every hope that I had had was frustrated. Yet, as I reflected on this brokenness, I realized that it was only by realizing my own insufficiency that I could see and appreciate the sufficiency of God.
I have nothing to give. I am broken. But in this brokenness, you bring peace. I realize that, like Simon the Magician, I wanted to buy your gift—I wanted to buy your love. But the more I tried, the more empty I became. Now, I have nothing left—I am empty. I am dry. I have only broken hopes and dreams to offer. Yet this broken man is the one that you saw when you came to die. You saw that I had nothing to offer—and you loved me anyway. Why? I hunger for your love—I need your love more than anything. But I resist it at the same time—my pride says that if you cannot love me for my virtues, don’t love me at all. I cannot hold on to this bitterness any longer. I have no hope beyond the hope of your presence with me. But my beautiful savior, you are enough. If I lose everything and wind up on the street—you are enough. If I never marry—you are enough. If I die right now—you are enough. Sweet savior—I love you, because your love is enough. Give me strength to live for you and a willingness to die for you. Give me strength to fight the good fight, to finish the race, to keep the faith, until that day.
I wish that I could say that the years since then have been an unbroken hallelujah. They have not. It is easy—particularly on days when the kids are crazy, I feel mentally foggy, the future is scary, and the present is murky—to escape into an alternate past and present of “what if.” It is easy to wonder why it is that some have been crowned with success, riches, honor, and glory, while I have hit my head against one closed door after another. It is tempting—and “temptation” is indeed an appropriate word—to lapse into the Jonah-esque combination of anger and despair at feeling that God has abandoned me because my story has not turned out as I thought it would.
Yet, though my questions have no answers—though I am still prone to the idolatry of counterfactual speculation—though I can still easily lapse into the angry despair of seeing my story trailing off in what appears to be a dead end, and certainly not the narrative arc that I would have chosen were I its principal author—yet these past few years have reminded me that, if it is true that “no man is a failure who has friends” (as Clarence told George Bailey in It’s a Wonderful Life), then I am no failure.
Further, I have come to peace with the fact that my greatest legacy and most important work is the imprint I leave on my children. A few months ago, my six-year-old daughter announced confidently and unprompted in the car, “You know, Dad, I would die for you, or Mommy, or Elsie, or Jack Jack. But most of all, I would die for God.” I told her I hoped that it wouldn’t come to that, but I was proud of her. And I was—more than I could say—and grateful to her at the same time. She had reminded me that my life is not in vain: I have kids who know that some things are more important than life itself.
And so, as I watched the disciples recite the Dayeinu at the Last Supper, I found myself tearing up and nodding along. Though it is not with the clarity or conviction that I felt in that I felt in that Reto a la Juventud sixteen years ago—though it is most assuredly a “cold and broken hallelujah”—I believe I can honestly say now, “Adonai, dayay—Lord, you are sufficient to me.”