Dayeinu

 Bukkharian Jews have a custom I view as strange. My father's mother Z"L being Bukkharian, we practiced this custom from as long as I can remember. 

On Seder night, during Dayeinu, a pithy prayer in which we show our abundant gratitude to Hashem for each and every step of the Exodus, and the divine providence that enabled each and successive stage of our liberation to transpire, what we do is hit each other with scallions. 

The scallions perhaps represent the endless whippings and beatings we took on the part of our Egyptian oppressors, like a child saying in modern Hebrew, dai, dai, dai, enough, enough, enough. 

The point of the prayer though, in my humble opinion, is to utter the very opposite, not that we've had enough of the oppression, the beatings, and the like, but rather, like the prayer of Nishmat: "We're entirely overawed by your divine kindness, that the merest thing would have overwhelmed us with gratitude, and now you've done so much more." And so on. Each successive stage bringing us greater and greater joy, liberation and exultation. 

Almost like Joseph could have said: "If you had only freed me from the dungeon, that would have sufficed. And if you had only made me a free man, how ever grateful I would have been. And if you had only restored my rights so I wouldn't be like an indentured servant, I could have never said thank you enough. And if you had only elevated me to a position similar to the one I held before, how that would have infused me with boundless satisfaction. And now, how I've been elevated to the post of minister, I could never have imagined. And then, were I to become a top minister, how incredulous I would have been. And then to become the viceroy, the second in command, elevated over all other ministers, heading the top royal ministry, answerable to no one besides the king himself, that would have been beyond my greatest imagination."

And the very same approach or take can be adopted if we were to look at the story of the Jews' victory under Queen Esther and Mordechai, and then under the Greek Hellenistic oppression, with the miracles of Hanukkah and the primacy and holiness of the Beit Hamikdash being restored.

The simple point I would like to make is that ever so often we look at the beatings we took, and life's travails, but not the boundless joy we can experience by looking at how life, its pleasures, feats, coups and accomplishments, and the wondrous experiences its offered have experienced our wildest imagination, giving us riches, figuratively and literally that would have once seemed inconceivable.