This week’s Torah portion, Beshallach, is the ultimate example of Jewish Joy. A joy that comes right on the heels of suffering, pain, fear, loss, grief. We read the conclusion of the Exodus story – the Israelites are finally, finally freed from Egypt, God miraculously parts the sea to allow them to pass safely, and then closes it on Pharaoh’s army. The Israelites sing exuberantly in relief, giving this Shabbat its special name: Shabbat Shira, a Shabbat of Song.
Midrash, our interpretive tradition, offers two different stories that allow us to dig deeper into the Israelites’ experience of this moment. Some Israelites couldn’t focus on the miracle – they were too stuck in their own experience of the moment to appreciate what was happening around them. Instead, they kvetched, complained, about how muddy the seafloor was! (Of course it was muddy! It had been covered by an entire sea moments before!) Sometimes ,we are too stuck in our own narrow experiences to notice the miracles around us. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel offers the approach of “radical amazement,” a practice by which we notice that which is truly amazing in the world around us, in nature.
At the end of the dramatic episode at the sea, we find one of my favourite verses of Torah, Exodus 15:20: “Then Miriam the prophet, Aaron’s sister, picked up a hand-drum, and all the women went out after her in dance with hand-drums.” The midrash asks the obvious question: “How on earth did these women manage to have musical instruments with them?!” Torah tells us how quickly the Israelites had to pack – there wasn’t even time for the bread, an elemental human need for survival, to rise, but somehow Miriam and the women managed to pack musical instruments. Midrash answers that this indicates their complete faith in God – they knew there would be a miracle, and they would be ready to celebrate it. I think there’s more going on here though. The women had the capacity to imagine a different future, to hope that there might be joy in their future, despite the hardship of the Israelites’ time in Egypt. And, they knew that hope, that being prepared to celebrate, to dance and to sing – is just as important for human existence as bread.
