Hello everyone and welcome once again to the Temple Institute Parsha class.
My name is Gedalia Meyer and I am podcasting from Maale Adumim in Israel.
One of the true gifts of human life is music.
It has an almost mystical quality in how it lifts us up or brings us down.
It is not easy to explain this almost universal human feeling towards music.
Psychologically it makes little sense.
Why should this pattern of sounds have this effect?
Why should they work one way if they go according to one theme and a completely different way
if they follow another?
Good luck answering these questions.
We simply know that it works this way and leave things at that.
We all know that music elicits this strange reaction.
We have all felt it countless times and crave to experience it in the future.
Life without music would be quite dismal for most of us.
We would survive, but our lives would be incalculably emptier.
We wouldn t have the pick-me-up of a march, the beat of rock, the beauty of classical,
the melody of folk, or the rhythm of blues and jazz.
We wouldn t have had the unique musical culture and methods of virtually every single society
that has lived on the earth since long before we were capable of recording such things.
We wouldn t have any of that, and life would be devoid of that entire element of what makes
us human.
It has likely been with us since our days in the caves.
It is not difficult to imagine a clan living in a cave, protected from the elements and
the animals by their walls, shielded from the dark by the fire in the middle, and leaning
on each other as they stare at that fire.
Perhaps one of them begins a chant of some sort, perhaps with words of their language
or perhaps with mere sounds.
Perhaps the chant is accompanied by some crude instruments - a drum made of animal skin,
a reed flute, or maybe an ancient version of some strings across as gourd.
The chant builds until everybody joins in.
This is their life.
It is the celebration of surviving another day, of commemorating the life of one who
has left them, or a way to reach into the mystery of all that surrounds them.
Perhaps they even evoke some idea of divine powers through this music, imagining it to
be a way to communicate with those powers and maybe contribute in their own way to the
miraculous gift.
Music is one of the very few constants that permeate all cultures and much of human history.
It ranks among those treasures that do not contribute directly to survival but grant
immense value to life.
Thus it may rank below spoken language and tools and fire and advance planning, but it
probably rests right up with written language, numbers, religion, and love on the next tier.
It is rooted in human intelligence, but it reaches back to our animal heritage.
It touches on every aspect of the emotions, from fear to awe to joy to loss.
Love found and love lost have been among the most precious themes of music since people
have been singing.
It rides with the imagination as far as that mysterious power can reach.
There are no limits to where music can take us, other than those we set by our own fears
and dreams.
In a sense it is the will made audible, for it is human potential given a voice through
sound.
Perhaps more accurately, it is human consciousness coming into being in a way that can be projected
out into the world.
It exists in all the old texts, in hymns to some divine power or poems of love and adoration,
or even celebrations of victory in battle or lamenting a defeat.
There is no reason to believe that every single ancient culture had music as a primary means
of expressing their deepest thoughts and emotions.
The Bible, of course, is no exception to this.
With its many poems that were really musical expressions, the Bible is positively filled
with the beauty and sadness of music.
The Psalms are really nothing but music, as are dozens of devotional chants and celebrations
of the joys and gifts of life.
This week s Parsha happens to have one of the truly great examples of Biblical music.
While there are no notes, there is a song.
It is called Shirat Hayam, or Song of the Sea.
It celebrates the miraculous salvation the Israelites met with after fleeing Egypt in
the course of the Exodus and being pursued by their former Egyptian oppressors.
But we are getting ahead of ourselves already.
First we must discuss the buildup to this great moment.
The Parsha is called Beshalach, which means In sending . It is the beginning of a phrase
which states, It was in Pharaoh s sending out of the people, God did not lead them by
the way of the Philistines which was closer, for God said, Lest the people regret when
they see war and return to Egypt . This introductory verse is followed by non-stop action right
up until the long break with the Song of the Sea.
It goes from one dramatic moment to another.
It is the immediate aftermath of the Exodus, the first journeys of the Israelites after
they were freed from Egypt.
They took with them provisions but it was only enough to get them a short distance away.
They would be on their own once they hit the true wilderness.
But they were not on their own.
God was with them every step of the way, like in that poster with the footprints on the
beach.
There was a mysterious cloud which accompanied them by day, and an equally mysterious fire
at night.
They were told to return and camp near some sort of monument not far from the sea.
Somewhere around that point, the Torah states, Pharaoh and his henchmen decided that they
had made a grand mistake in allowing the Israelites to leave and strategized to trap them in the
desert.
God intervened with Pharaohs mind to reinforce this attitude, thus spurring things on for
the great showdown at the sea.
With Pharaoh s chariots in pursuit, the Isrealites would be sandwiched between the Egyptians
and the sea.
It was a classic massacre in the works, as the more numerous Israelites would be no match
for the trained charioteers of the Egyptians.
They were pursued right to the edge of the water.
They saw no avenue of escape so they turned their voices towards God.
The first of a long series of complaints about their fate as a result of the Exodus took
place right at that moment, as they asked if there were no graves in Egypt that they
had to come out to the desert to die.
Moshe s response to this was to stand and wait for divine help, promising them that
it would arrive.
The divine response to all this was, surprisingly, to stop praying or complaining or whatever
they were doing.
Moshe was to raise his staff and the sea would split so that the Israelites could walk through
it on dry land.
The Egyptians would follow and, owing to the perfect divine timing, be caught in the returning
waters and drowned in the sea.
There are angels involved and some sort of wind from the east to do the heavy lifting.
It takes all night but the Israelites cross the sea.
The Egyptians follow, as if compelled, find that their chariot wheels get caught in the
mud on the seabed.
It all works like a machine, with walls of water on the sides of the Isrealites and the
Egyptians dead in the water.
When the Israelites were finally able to look back and see what had happened, they saw the
work of the great power of God and they believed in God and in Moshe, His servant . At that
point, they broke out in song.
This poem is quite long, even by Biblical standards.
It is not easy to translate, as it is written in a poetic style with quite ancient expressions.
The first line is particularly interesting, as it tells us how this spontaneous moment
of song came about.
Then Moshe and the Israelites would sing this very song to Hashem, and they would say, I
shall sing to Hashem who has been exceedingly mighty in throwing the horse and rider into
the sea . God is my strength and my song, and is a salvation to me, this is my God and
I will praise, the God of my father and I will exalt.
It goes on in this theme, mainly celebrating the defeat of enemies, but also great fate
that awaits the Israelites in the future.
It is the classic Biblical song to God, the prototype for the many that would follow.
But there is something quite unusual about the opening line.
It is generally not apparent in translation so it is a bit difficult to appreciate.
The exact translation of the opening Hebrew words is Then Moshe and the Isrealites will
sing this song to Hashem But what does that mean?
Why would it say that they will sing when it is simply the narrative voice saying that
they did sing?
This is an obvious question to those familiar with the Hebrew.
It begs for an answer.
It happens that there is no shortage of answers to this question.
They range from simply retranslating the words to fit the tense, to some sort of hint to
the resurrection of the dead in the Torah.
While these answers may strike some as desperate attempts to make sense of a simple problem
in verb tenses, they are suggested nevertheless because this is such an important moment in
the Bible and in Jewish history.
There was never quite a moment like this, either before or after.
Even the Exodus, which is somewhat drawn out, or the giving of the Ten Commandments, which
was more nuanced and vague in its drama, don t quite compare to this.
So how are we to read those crucial introductory words?
It turns out that what may be a more accurate reading is along the lines of Then Moshe and
the Israelites would sing this song to Hashem.
It still has a future tense element, but it is the future adjusting the past.
In other words, this is what they did, because this is what anybody would do under these
circumstances.
They would sing.
Moshe and the Israelites sang because this was the exalted human reaction to the events
they just experienced.
They were, in a sense, compelled to sing.
Their hearts and their minds directed them to this very human reaction because this is
what we do.
We sing.
This is what we do.
At those singular moments in life when we briefly reach the pinnacle of human experience
and of elevated emotional state, we need music.
Whether we make the music or we produce it from some other source, it is the music that
lifts us out of the humdrum of normal human feelings and into the stratosphere of touching
the stars.
It could be when we are sad, and need to voice or make that sadness feel palpable.
It could be in moments of joy, when nothing else will do but to music.
It could be a celebration of a victory or a descent into confusion or a tune to stir
us out of the boredom of the sameness of life.
The important thing is that, like the Israelites, we are spontaneously inspired to sing, to
make music, to experience this moment in a manner that is so human that it seems almost
superhuman.
This is the gift of music.
Shabbat Shalom!