AND THE ISRAELITES WENT INTO THE SEA ON DRY GROUND, THE WATERS FORMING A

WALL FOR THEM ON THEIR RIGHT AND ON THEIR LEFT.

(Shemot 14:22)

BUT THE ISRAELITES HAD MARCHED THROUGH THE SEA ON DRY GROUND, THE WATERS

FORMING A WALL FOR THEM ON THEIR RIGHT AND ON THEIR LEFT.

(Shemot 14:29)

Is Faith for Everyone, or Does it

Require Courage?

And rebelled at

the sea, at the Red Sea (Psalms

106:7)

– Why twice? Because they rebelled at the sea when they did

not want to descend [into the water]. If it had not been for the tribe

of Judah, which jumped in first and sanctified the Name of the Holly One

blessed be He, for it is said: When Israel left Egypt… Judah was His holy

one

(Psalms

114:1-2)

at the Red Sea? When they descended into the sea it

was full of mud, which had been kept moist until then by the water, and formed

a kind of mud, as it is said: You made your horses tread the sea, homer

the mighty waters (Habakkuk 3:15). Then Reuben would say to Shimon: "In

Egypt there was mud,

and in the sea there is mud. In Egypt – in the

bricks and mortar, in the sea homer [stirring, or alternatively, clay] the mighty waters" – and

so we see that they rebelled at the sea, at the Red Sea. [God said]: "After

all those miracles you do me wrong! Would you do this to the Lord, foolish

and unwise people…?" Another view: Would you do this to the Lord

– He told them: "After He performed so many miracles for you, you rebel

against Him?" as it is written: and rebelled at the sea, at the Red Sea;

at the sea – on the sea shore; at the Red Sea – as literally

understood. At that very hour the Prince of the Sea became full of anger at

them and wanted to wash them away, but the Holy One blessed be He rebuked him

and dried him up, as it is said: He rebuked the sea and dried it up (Nahum

1:4),

and it says: He rebuked the Red Sea and it became dry (Psalms

106:9).

When Moses saw that, he caused them to take leave of the sin of the sea, thus

it is said, Moses caused Israel to set out

from the Red Sea (Shemot

15:22).

(Shemot Raba 24, 1)

In honor of my mentor and teacher, Prof. Avigdor

Shinan,

May he raise-up many additional students

And flourish in fruitful work

For many good long years

of joy and

satisfaction.

(Translators note: the Hebrew word shira refers to both song and poetry, and both words

are used in this translation according to context)

Life Will Sing a Song

Dalia Marx

This song is

great, for it contains the present and it contains the past and it contains the

future and it contains this world and it contains the world-to-come.(Sifrei Devarim 433)

A child enters

the world through the birth canal and begins to cry.

The newborn's

crying is the ultimate human expression; there is none

simpler nor purer than it.

The baby cries

itself. It is not crying aimed at gaining someone else's attention, nor to receive

hugs (such crying will come later). It is pure crying, perfect; the unmediated

reaction to the powerful and awesome experience which the child went through in

birth.

The Israelites

pass through the birth canal, crossing the Red Sea.

They cannot remain

on the one bank, but [maybe – yet?] the other is frightening and threatening.

The passage

itself is a terrible experience.

The walls of

water could fall at any moment, burying the bewildered Israelites under them.

When the Israelites emerge from the other

end of the great national birth canal – the people feared the Lord and

believed in the Lord and in his servant Moses (Shemot 14:31).

And then they

sing this song to the Lord.

The Song of the

Sea sung by the rebellious, insubordinate, and stiff-necked Israelites, a

nation of slaves and the starved – is the cry of the newborn child.

True,

immediately after this stirring event the Israelites backslide to their old

ways and complain at Mei Marah

saying, "What shall we drink?'. Soon, they

are already asking to return to Egypt and its

fleshpots. However, this instant, this singular and wonderful blink of an eye,

is the moment of a baby's cry, a moment of true speech, forthright and unmanipulative. The Israelites are speaking themselves,

without reserve or prettification.

And who sang

the Song of the Sea?

Rabbi Yosi HaGalili teaches us that

they all sang:

An infant lying across its mother's

knee and a babe sucking at its mother's breast,

saw the Divine

Presence –

the infant raised

up its neck and the babe pulled the nipple from its mouth

and both said: This

is my Lord, and I will glorify Him…

R. Meir used

to say: How do we know that even the unborn sang from within their mother's

wombs?

But they did not see anything!?

R. Tanhum

said: The [mother's] abdomen became like clear glass for them, and they saw. (Sotah 30b)

The infants,

the babies, and even the unborn sang the Song of the Sea. After the entire

people was enraptured by that wonderful singing led by Moses, Miriam came with

a drum in her hand

And all the women came after her with

drums and dancing (15:20).

The women also

sang.

They sang with

the entire nation, and now they sing their song by themselves.

No one silences

them.

They sing, and

dance, and play instruments…

The women's

singing is different from that of the men.

It is less

verbal.

The women sing

with their voices, with their bodies, and their musical instruments.

Perhaps they

repeat the same utterance over and over again:

Sing to the Lord, for He has triumphed

gloriously, horse and driver he has hurled into the sea (15:21).

The Song of the

Sea marks this foundational moment,

The

singular moment in which the Jewish People peeked behind the divine screen.

Did not a

maidservant by the sea view things more exalted than

did the great prophets?

The moment

passed, and is no more.

Even so, it

continues to be replayed in our hearts throughout the generations as part of

the praises uttered in the morning service, and as part of the Torah reading.

But what is

song?

Can one always

sing?

Is song always

available or does it require a special state of mind?

R. Simon said: Not everyone who wants

to utter a song may do so,

Rather, whenever a miracle occurs for

someone and they utter a song, it is known that their sins will be forgiven,

And they become like a new creation.

When a miracle occurred for them, Israel uttered a

song, as it is said: Then sang Moses and the Israelites. (Midrash Tehillim 18:6)

Utterance of

the song is not only the production of a new work or of a new creation.

Utterance of a

song transforms he who creates it into a new creation.

***

The Song of the

Sea is not the only song that stirs us this week.

The haftarah of Parashat BeShalah relates the story of Devorah

the Prophetess, one of the seven prophetesses who, according to tradition, rose

up from the Jewish People. Deborah's wonderful story is told twice in the Book

of Judges, first in prose and later in poetry. How great is the difference

between the prose account of Yael's

deed:

She opened the milk-skin and gave him

drink and covered him (Judges 4:19)

and the poetic

description:

Most blessed be Yael

among women,

the wife of Hever the Kennite

shall be most

blessed among the women of the tent.

He asked for water but she gave him

milk

In a princely bowl she brought him

curds. (5:24-25)

Song is the other voice,

the forgotten one,

the voice that

must be raised up from the depths of oblivion,

the voice that

does not give itself over easily to those who call out in it, nor to those it

summons.

Song gives

voice to elements that are not always remembered to be spoken in the busy

language of the everyday.

Song gives

voice to tones and strains that are not always comfortable for the heart of

flesh to remember.

Song gives

voice to those who are usually silenced.

***

The sons and

daughters of humanity are not alone in offering song before the Blessed One.

All of nature

utters song.

This Shabbat is

called Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song. This

is so, because it contains great songs – the Song of the Sea in the parasha, and the Song of Deborah in the haftorah.

On this

Shabbat, the Shabbat during which we commemorate Israel's singing, it

is customary to feed the birds, it is a folk custom to

scatter bits of food for those fowl whose vocation is song.

Next week we

celebrate Tu BiShvat.

On that day we

are called upon to be especially attentive to nature's song.

We do not

always have in ourselves the resources necessary to hear that song in the

hustle and bustle of our lives.

On Tu BiShvat we are called upon to

stand outside the usual flow of life,

to observe and

experience,

to recall that

every single blade of grass has its own special Niggun,

its special song,

and that each and

every animal – even the least among them – has its own special shirah, its special song.

And from all

their singing is formed the song of the shepherd, the song of the world and of

its Creator:

They said of King David that upon

completing the Book of Psalms he was self-satisfied and said to Him: "Lord

of the Universe, is there anything in the world that can sing as I do?"

A frog came up to him and said to him:

Do not be so self-satisfied, for I utter more song than you! (Yalkut Shimoni Tehillim, 889)

As we celebrate

it today, Tu BiShvat itself

is a new song, a renewed custom.

Fine old wine

poured into new bottles,

Fresh juicy

nectar served in ancient vessels.

Sometimes song

is served in vessels that cannot easily accommodate it.

Sometimes we

can recognize a spark of song, the poetic dimension, even in surprising places.

Sometimes the

race of life and the rush of prose allow us a peek of the poetic.

As the NeTziV wrote in the introduction to his commentary on the

Torah:

"Write

this song for you (Devarim 31) – which is the

entire Torah."

Here is how the

NeTziV explains his assertion:

How is one to understand that all of

the Torah is called song, when it is not written in the language of song?

Rather, it enjoys the nature and virtues of song, which is poetic speech…

And for him [the enlightened person]

the light of subtlety is exceedingly sweet…

For poetry has

the special virtue of adorning it with allusions that are not related to the

song's immediate subject…

And that is true of all of the Torah in

its entirety.

***

Where does the

song dwell? Only within the palaces of knowledge and the

towers of understanding?

We learned from

the frog which admonished King David that it is also found in the bog!

Its substance –

is the substance of life, but the swamp foliage does not always leave it room

to grow.

Aharon David Gordon,

the pioneer and man of faith, who is counted among the leaders of the Second Aliyah, said:

What use is poetry to me?

What use is belles-lettres to me?

What use is literature to me?

Life is what I yearn for, life,

Let life utter a song!

Indeed, Gordon's

life was a song. Are only the chosen few capable of living life as a song?

Perhaps it is a

matter of rare and special moments.

In his essay, "Revelation

and Concealment in Language," Bialik tells us

that language conceals more than it reveals. He calls upon us to consider those

rare revelatory moments found "between one concealment

and the next," moments which contain "the flickering of the abyss."

Bialik asks, "To

what may they be compared?" He answers:

When one crosses a melting river,

walking upon the bobbing blocks of ice,

He must not rest his foot on any block

for more than an instant,

For more than the time it takes to hop

from one to the next, and on and on,

Between the cracks flickers the abyss,

the foot fails, danger is near…

Song is prayer,

Distilled

prayer is song

One of the ten

expressions that refer to prayer is rina,

which means "song" (Devarim Rabbah 2:1).

But how elusive

song is,

how quickly it can

become a sad caricature of itself

when disconnected

from the sources of its vitality.

In our world,

we are immersed in endless verbiage,

every idea is ground

finer and finer,

tables are drawn up,

definitions formulated,

computations computed,

calculations compared…

Will we know

how to hear – if only occasionally

the song in Your

world, which You have created?

to sing the song

of our lives,

the song in our

lives?

Hold our hand

when we ask to experience those rare

and apportioned

moments,

for we are

apprehensive.

Be with us when

we try to feel the passing seconds

In which

flickers the abyss,

To tarry, if

only for the blink of an eye,

in the revelation

of Your divine presence…

Dr. Dalia Marx teaches at

the Hebrew Union College and at the Hebrew University in Jerusalem.

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