Beshalach
I wrote a d'var Torah on Beshalach last year, one on Yitro in 2002 and, in two weeks, I will speak on Mishpatim. A mini-Shmot cycle.
Here is Beshalach. I hope it's the final version, which might actually be on my computer at home. If not, I shall update later.
Yet, that is exactly what happens after the Israelites safely cross the yam suf in their final deliverance from Egypt. Now, I am not implying the Song at the Sea was a scene suited to Mel Brooks’ never made History of the World Part II, with Moses and the Israelite boys singing the Shirat ha-Yam, the women taking the second chorus, timbrels in hand, in a Fosse dance number – although this would eliminate the need for the volumes of traditional and feminist discourse regarding Miriam’s song. Rather, witnessing the Lord’s wondrous power, the people spontaneously and collectively voice their new found fear and faith through the language of expression; words alone are not enough and only music can capture the depth of their awe and wonderment.
At emotional moments we are incapable of containing our thoughts in the everyday rhythms of speech; whether rowdily cheering at sporting events, singing at weddings, brooding over the same two songs after a breakup or singing love songs in the shower at the start of a romance, our hearts sing out. In The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum writes, "When we hear an opera, we are listening not only to the libretto and to the music, but to a story about the body, and the story of a journey; the voyage of ‘voice’, traveling out from hiddenness into the world." The Israelites emerge from captivity in an Egypt that had forgotten Joseph and embark on the physical and spiritual journey that frees them to voice their true destiny. Unable literally to put one’s heart into something without dying, they offer the next closest act: song, a renewable offering of breath.
Martin Buber wrote that, "The children of Israel understood [the splitting of the yam suf] as an act of their God, as a ‘miracle’; which does not mean that they interpreted it as a miracle but that they experienced it as such, that as such perceived it." It is not that, after analysis, they determined the event met the criteria constituting a miracle; as it occurred they knew, with every fiber of their being, that they were in the midst of a divine act. As a musician, I am painfully aware that music can be analyzed and interpreted. Practicing technique and studying theory enhance understanding and respect of music, but does not cause wild applause at the end of a stellar performance. Craft alone does not create the sublime moment.
Tapping into something larger, circumventing the solely rational part of the brain, generates art. Many episodes of Star Trek are dedicated to this dichotomy, with the purely logical Spock or Data attempting to make sense of situations complicated by emotion or art only to realize that this is fundamentally what it means to be human. There is the aphorism that you may not know much about art, but you know what you like. Removing the philistine connotations from that statement – since ignorance is rarely a bragging matter – this is a fundamental principle of art, to affect and transform one’s perception and understanding of the world, spiritually or emotionally moving its audience to new heights or depths.
The medieval commentator Sefat Emet writes that until the moment the sea splits the people "have known but not felt themselves held or entranced by the mystery of God’s presence. For the first time they experience emuna, or faith." As newly engaged participants in the religious experience, the Israelites are spurred to sing a spontaneous outpouring of emotion praising God. The Shirat ha-Yam is in the first person, even though all the people sing it together. Although the Israelites left Egypt and traversed the sea en masse, they are all incorporated into their state of wonder individually. For William James, the religious experience centers on "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Precisely at the moment of national birth the Israelites are not an impersonal throng but a nation of precious individuals. Just as they each suffered distinct and particular horrors of slavery in Mitzrayim they each have a personal reaction to the miracles of redemption. While a nation is a collective, it is each individual's experience that endows a nation or community with uniqueness and strength.
Last week David Lerner spoke eloquently about Anim Z’mirot, a medieval sage’s attempt to illustrate God’s greatness by collecting similes about God throughout the Torah and prophetic writings and incorporating them in a poem. Together with this week’s parsha, I was reminded of two different Hindu parables. The first tells of six blind men who attempt to describe an elephant: one, touching its trunk, declares an elephant is like a snake; another touches a tusk and says it is like a spear; and so on. Reconciling their view points, they end up with something that is nothing like an elephant. This parable was intended to illustrate the shortcomings of perception and descriptive language; although the collective metaphors in Anim Z’mirot – or those in Shir’at ha-yam, such as the blast of God’s nostrils – attempt to increase our awe by phrasing God in terms to which we can relate, we are left knowing only that the anthropomorphizing impulse is insufficient and it is impossible to describe the indescribable.
In the other Hindu parable, one is asked to describe fire to someone who has never experienced it. Its colors range over the spectrum but are constantly changing, it can spread rapidly or be easily contained, its heat can both give life and destroy it. The attributes of fire fall short of the real thing, yet as a metaphor it comes closer to painting a likeness of God’s immensity, power and range. Throughout history, illustrated by the story of Prometheus, fire has been a tangible symbol of man’s awe. Moses first encounters God as unconsumed fire and later, at Sinai, is altered by the radiance emanating from God.
In Beshalach, the Israelites are accompanied by a pillar of fire by night, but by the antithesis of fire by day: a pillar of cloud. The sages debate whether these pillars are merely beacons to guide their way, signs from God, a mask for Divine Presence, or the Shechinah itself; regardless, they are present as a symbol that God is with them. Cloud, although not in the wonder twin form of a pillar, also covered the mishkan and a dense cloud accompanied at the revelation at Sinai. Cloud is the meeting of air and water, the intersection of God’s name, which evokes blowing wind, and water, the imagery of which is replete throughout this parsha. Water, like fire, bestows both life and death and in the splitting of the yam suf it does both in rapid succession. Whoever controls water controls the desert and in this parsha God clearly does. Whether driving back the sea and returning it to its normal state, sweetening bitter waters or providing water where there is none, God proves mastery of this most vital element and, fittingly, manifests as a column of visible, mobile cloud.
Prior to the splitting of the sea, "The angel of God, who had been going ahead of the Israelite army, now moved and followed behind them; and the pillar of cloud shifted from in front of them and took up a place behind them." Nahum Sarna suggests that the luminous pillar of cloud set up a protective screen between the two camps, a beneficent fog of war reassuring the Israelites. In this interpretation, cloud functions as it often does in literature, as a substance obscuring sight, blanketing the Israelites from full knowledge of the proximity of their enemy.
The Torah explains that, "The cloud with the darkness cast a spell upon the night," implying something more poetic and magical in the movement of this cloud. As anyone who’s ever spent time in San Francisco knows, clouds descended to the earth have a very tactile presence. The Israelites had seen signs and wonders in Egypt, but no one more than our ancestors in the wilderness disproves the adage that seeing is believing. Before the pillar shifted they had not personally encountered any aspect of God’s self. Prior to plunging into the sea, the pillar of cloud travels from the front of the troops to the rear, thus passing through the camp in a descending mist. All the Israelites have a palpable encounter with heavenly forces. The repositioning of the guiding angel and the pillar of cloud was an essential prelude for the Israelites’ acceptance of the miracle. The cries and snide remarks heard just a few verses prior are silenced, and the Israelites are spiritually fortified to walk the stretch of dry land between two walls of water, before the bridge between their enslavement and their future promise is washed out by the sea.
The universal language of music is often described as a bridge: between both cultures and individuals, like in high school when all you needed to initiate a friendship was a favorite band in common. If God and man are in search of each other, we fittingly have replaced sacrifice with songful prayer in our attempt to close the gap between us and God. Koestenbaum also writes, "Opera places words and music together and apart, always both at once. Opera’s task is to recombine words and music, the severed halves of a body are single and whole." God had saved people before – Noah from the flood, Isaac from the knife, Jacob from numerous tight spots – but they never offered thanks by singing God’s praises. A Midrash relates, "As soon as Israel was saved they uttered their song. And God responded, ‘I have been waiting for them.’"
This week I looked over the d’var Torah list and was amused to discover that, within the past year, I had given d’vrei Torah on Lech lecha and Shlach lecha, in addition to Beshalach, today. I would dismiss this as mere coincidence, but I am the d’var Torah coordinator and I get my pick, even if my reasoning is subconscious. If I were to emulate the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and select a trilogy of three crucial episodes that formed the psyche of the people Israel, I would choose these moments of going: Abraham going forth from his birthplace; Pharaoh letting the people go; and the scouts going into the land, their false intelligence resulting in the forty year postponement of entering the land promised in the two previous episodes. Perhaps my choice of parshiot expresses a desire for movement, but not necessarily to a warmer and more scenic land. These stories are re-read during Passover. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook explains that "the true duty of a Jew on Pesach is to ‘expand and deepen’ the tale." Even if we, like the Israelites, take a roundabout or zigzag route getting there, it is our duty to unite the words and the music, combine the knowledge with the expression, and connect us with God.
Here is Beshalach. I hope it's the final version, which might actually be on my computer at home. If not, I shall update later.
Whenever my husband and I discuss moving from Chicago to a more hospitable climate and varied topography I feel apprehensive. Not for the practical concern of finding gainful employment out west, nor for the sentimental concern of leaving my friends and community; alas, I am overwhelmed by the thought of loosing my Lyric Opera seats. I doubt there is much sympathy in this room for my plight; I certainly get none from my husband. Despite a checklist of dating prerequisites, I entered a mixed marriage. Once described as a flaming opera queen, I married a musician who, with the exception of West Side Story, does not get a kick out of theatre that is musical. The major reason he cites for shunning this entire genre is one I hear frequently from people outside my tribe: it is difficult to sustain disbelief when someone suddenly breaks into song.
Yet, that is exactly what happens after the Israelites safely cross the yam suf in their final deliverance from Egypt. Now, I am not implying the Song at the Sea was a scene suited to Mel Brooks’ never made History of the World Part II, with Moses and the Israelite boys singing the Shirat ha-Yam, the women taking the second chorus, timbrels in hand, in a Fosse dance number – although this would eliminate the need for the volumes of traditional and feminist discourse regarding Miriam’s song. Rather, witnessing the Lord’s wondrous power, the people spontaneously and collectively voice their new found fear and faith through the language of expression; words alone are not enough and only music can capture the depth of their awe and wonderment.
At emotional moments we are incapable of containing our thoughts in the everyday rhythms of speech; whether rowdily cheering at sporting events, singing at weddings, brooding over the same two songs after a breakup or singing love songs in the shower at the start of a romance, our hearts sing out. In The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality and the Mystery of Desire, Wayne Koestenbaum writes, "When we hear an opera, we are listening not only to the libretto and to the music, but to a story about the body, and the story of a journey; the voyage of ‘voice’, traveling out from hiddenness into the world." The Israelites emerge from captivity in an Egypt that had forgotten Joseph and embark on the physical and spiritual journey that frees them to voice their true destiny. Unable literally to put one’s heart into something without dying, they offer the next closest act: song, a renewable offering of breath.
Martin Buber wrote that, "The children of Israel understood [the splitting of the yam suf] as an act of their God, as a ‘miracle’; which does not mean that they interpreted it as a miracle but that they experienced it as such, that as such perceived it." It is not that, after analysis, they determined the event met the criteria constituting a miracle; as it occurred they knew, with every fiber of their being, that they were in the midst of a divine act. As a musician, I am painfully aware that music can be analyzed and interpreted. Practicing technique and studying theory enhance understanding and respect of music, but does not cause wild applause at the end of a stellar performance. Craft alone does not create the sublime moment.
Tapping into something larger, circumventing the solely rational part of the brain, generates art. Many episodes of Star Trek are dedicated to this dichotomy, with the purely logical Spock or Data attempting to make sense of situations complicated by emotion or art only to realize that this is fundamentally what it means to be human. There is the aphorism that you may not know much about art, but you know what you like. Removing the philistine connotations from that statement – since ignorance is rarely a bragging matter – this is a fundamental principle of art, to affect and transform one’s perception and understanding of the world, spiritually or emotionally moving its audience to new heights or depths.
The medieval commentator Sefat Emet writes that until the moment the sea splits the people "have known but not felt themselves held or entranced by the mystery of God’s presence. For the first time they experience emuna, or faith." As newly engaged participants in the religious experience, the Israelites are spurred to sing a spontaneous outpouring of emotion praising God. The Shirat ha-Yam is in the first person, even though all the people sing it together. Although the Israelites left Egypt and traversed the sea en masse, they are all incorporated into their state of wonder individually. For William James, the religious experience centers on "the feelings, acts, and experiences of individual men, so far as they apprehend themselves to stand in relation to whatever they may consider the divine." Precisely at the moment of national birth the Israelites are not an impersonal throng but a nation of precious individuals. Just as they each suffered distinct and particular horrors of slavery in Mitzrayim they each have a personal reaction to the miracles of redemption. While a nation is a collective, it is each individual's experience that endows a nation or community with uniqueness and strength.
Last week David Lerner spoke eloquently about Anim Z’mirot, a medieval sage’s attempt to illustrate God’s greatness by collecting similes about God throughout the Torah and prophetic writings and incorporating them in a poem. Together with this week’s parsha, I was reminded of two different Hindu parables. The first tells of six blind men who attempt to describe an elephant: one, touching its trunk, declares an elephant is like a snake; another touches a tusk and says it is like a spear; and so on. Reconciling their view points, they end up with something that is nothing like an elephant. This parable was intended to illustrate the shortcomings of perception and descriptive language; although the collective metaphors in Anim Z’mirot – or those in Shir’at ha-yam, such as the blast of God’s nostrils – attempt to increase our awe by phrasing God in terms to which we can relate, we are left knowing only that the anthropomorphizing impulse is insufficient and it is impossible to describe the indescribable.
In the other Hindu parable, one is asked to describe fire to someone who has never experienced it. Its colors range over the spectrum but are constantly changing, it can spread rapidly or be easily contained, its heat can both give life and destroy it. The attributes of fire fall short of the real thing, yet as a metaphor it comes closer to painting a likeness of God’s immensity, power and range. Throughout history, illustrated by the story of Prometheus, fire has been a tangible symbol of man’s awe. Moses first encounters God as unconsumed fire and later, at Sinai, is altered by the radiance emanating from God.
In Beshalach, the Israelites are accompanied by a pillar of fire by night, but by the antithesis of fire by day: a pillar of cloud. The sages debate whether these pillars are merely beacons to guide their way, signs from God, a mask for Divine Presence, or the Shechinah itself; regardless, they are present as a symbol that God is with them. Cloud, although not in the wonder twin form of a pillar, also covered the mishkan and a dense cloud accompanied at the revelation at Sinai. Cloud is the meeting of air and water, the intersection of God’s name, which evokes blowing wind, and water, the imagery of which is replete throughout this parsha. Water, like fire, bestows both life and death and in the splitting of the yam suf it does both in rapid succession. Whoever controls water controls the desert and in this parsha God clearly does. Whether driving back the sea and returning it to its normal state, sweetening bitter waters or providing water where there is none, God proves mastery of this most vital element and, fittingly, manifests as a column of visible, mobile cloud.
Prior to the splitting of the sea, "The angel of God, who had been going ahead of the Israelite army, now moved and followed behind them; and the pillar of cloud shifted from in front of them and took up a place behind them." Nahum Sarna suggests that the luminous pillar of cloud set up a protective screen between the two camps, a beneficent fog of war reassuring the Israelites. In this interpretation, cloud functions as it often does in literature, as a substance obscuring sight, blanketing the Israelites from full knowledge of the proximity of their enemy.
The Torah explains that, "The cloud with the darkness cast a spell upon the night," implying something more poetic and magical in the movement of this cloud. As anyone who’s ever spent time in San Francisco knows, clouds descended to the earth have a very tactile presence. The Israelites had seen signs and wonders in Egypt, but no one more than our ancestors in the wilderness disproves the adage that seeing is believing. Before the pillar shifted they had not personally encountered any aspect of God’s self. Prior to plunging into the sea, the pillar of cloud travels from the front of the troops to the rear, thus passing through the camp in a descending mist. All the Israelites have a palpable encounter with heavenly forces. The repositioning of the guiding angel and the pillar of cloud was an essential prelude for the Israelites’ acceptance of the miracle. The cries and snide remarks heard just a few verses prior are silenced, and the Israelites are spiritually fortified to walk the stretch of dry land between two walls of water, before the bridge between their enslavement and their future promise is washed out by the sea.
The universal language of music is often described as a bridge: between both cultures and individuals, like in high school when all you needed to initiate a friendship was a favorite band in common. If God and man are in search of each other, we fittingly have replaced sacrifice with songful prayer in our attempt to close the gap between us and God. Koestenbaum also writes, "Opera places words and music together and apart, always both at once. Opera’s task is to recombine words and music, the severed halves of a body are single and whole." God had saved people before – Noah from the flood, Isaac from the knife, Jacob from numerous tight spots – but they never offered thanks by singing God’s praises. A Midrash relates, "As soon as Israel was saved they uttered their song. And God responded, ‘I have been waiting for them.’"
This week I looked over the d’var Torah list and was amused to discover that, within the past year, I had given d’vrei Torah on Lech lecha and Shlach lecha, in addition to Beshalach, today. I would dismiss this as mere coincidence, but I am the d’var Torah coordinator and I get my pick, even if my reasoning is subconscious. If I were to emulate the Polish director Krzysztof Kieslowski and select a trilogy of three crucial episodes that formed the psyche of the people Israel, I would choose these moments of going: Abraham going forth from his birthplace; Pharaoh letting the people go; and the scouts going into the land, their false intelligence resulting in the forty year postponement of entering the land promised in the two previous episodes. Perhaps my choice of parshiot expresses a desire for movement, but not necessarily to a warmer and more scenic land. These stories are re-read during Passover. Rabbi Abraham Isaac Kook explains that "the true duty of a Jew on Pesach is to ‘expand and deepen’ the tale." Even if we, like the Israelites, take a roundabout or zigzag route getting there, it is our duty to unite the words and the music, combine the knowledge with the expression, and connect us with God.
posted by Mi at 3:55 PM
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