Dayenu! Is It Ever Really Enough?

Sometimes, it’s the simplest things that carry the deepest truths.

Dayenu is perhaps the most well-known song of the Seder night. Its rhythm is familiar, its melody uplifting, and its presence is so timeless that it almost feels like it was sung at the splitting of the sea. We sing it with joy, nostalgia, and generational memory. Do we ever stop to ask: What is this song trying to teach us?

The word Dayenu (דֵּינוּ), means “it would have been enough for us,”, with the root being דַּי, enough. At first glance, the term seems to express a simple idea: gratitude, contentment, appreciation. Yet when we look more closely, something much deeper begins to unfold.

The word דַּי is also the root of one of the names of Hashem: שַׁ-דַּי. In Parashas Va’eira, Hashem says to Moshe, "I appeared to Avraham, Yitzchak, and Yaakov as Kel Shaddai, but by My name Y-H-V-H I was not known to them." The name Shaddai is tied to limitation and boundary, a statement from Hashem of containment. Chazal tell us that…