by Rabbi Sari Laufer
This week is known as Shabbat Shira, the Shabbat of Song, referring to the song the Israelites sing upon crossing the sea. This year, I will once again have the honor of chanting these words—with its special melody; this time, I’ll get to do it at Camp Ramah, with our families on Family Camp. The words, the song, is known as Shirat HaYam—the Song of the Sea.
Shirat HaYam is a song of miracle, wrought by a God of military might. It is a song of victory, sung by a people saved and redeemed by an all-powerful God. It is a song of redemption, the model for our individual and communal futures. But I am not sure that it is the song most of us would choose to sing, or the theology we choose to model. And so, while the melody of the Shir moves me deeply, it is the breath I take with the words preceding it that shape the meaning for me.
When Israel saw the wondrous power which the Eternal had wielded against the Egyptians…they had faith in the Eternal and in God’s servant Moses.
A colleague of mine wrote on this parasha, this song, this experience as a lesson in failure…and in growth. She teaches about God as a mentor, who needs to step back and allow Moses to step forward. He will step into success, he will step into failure….and he will step forward with faith.
For me, it’s not just about failure—about learning to fail better, but also (maybe even more) about faith. There is a Hasidic teaching that suggests that the miracle about which we sing, the miracle that brings us to our feet, is not the splitting of the sea. Rather, we learn, the miracle is that the splitting of the sea brought the Israelites from a place of fear to a place of faith.
Even if we are not standing at the shores of the sea, I hope that we too, in our own lives, can move from fear to faith, and perhaps even to song.
A portion of this Dvar Torah appeared on ReformJudaism.org.
Exodus 14:31
Mi-Ginzeinu Ha-Atik, as quoted in Aharon Yaakov Greenberg (ed), Torah Gems: Volume 2. (Israel, Yavneh Publishing House, 1998), p. 113.