Parashat Beshalach

Parashat Beshalach ~ Song of the Sea

Shevat 15, 5773 ~ January 26, 2013

by Stephen H. Leist, Librarian to the Stars   

The Jewish bard, Mel Brooks, is asked for a sampling of his written work in the 2000 Year Old Man by his confederate Carl Reiner.  He responds that he was a poet, albeit a long, long time ago.  He continues to recite in the Sand language, which was popular prior to Hebrew and Aramaic: “nag nag makellin be bob, deluch matuch maluch metog.”  Brooks warns that all ‘beauty, gorgeousness, and wonder’ is lost in translation and then proceeds, “beans, beans the musical fruit, the more you eat the more you toot.”  The point he makes regarding the poem’s magic getting lost in translation is elegantly made.  Sadly, the same is true for so many of the Torah’s most enchanting passages and most mystical prayers.

My experience with Song of the Sea speaks to the difficulty of translating biblical Hebrew, particularly passages intended as psalm, and read as music, into another tongue.  Seven years ago on the 30^th anniversary of my Bar Mitzvah, I was called to the scrolls to read this portion.  My encounter with the material was only as song and sound.  Now, as I return to the material, I cannot help but feel that the verse is married to its original language and trope.  Song of the Sea, comfortably situated in what is often called the Cecil B. DeMille, parashas of Beshalach is unique in every way.  Not only does it have its own trope, but it is inked in a special layout, as if to illustrate the two walls of water and the Israelites in the middle.  So central is its sound to the Jewish ear that it is placed in the daily Schacharit prayer service.   Even the ancient PJs (prayer jockeys who preceded DJs) had trouble editing its air time and placed it two times in our calendar, in its current mid-winter home in the correct chronological place, and on the seventh day of Passover.

As music, Song of the Sea is unequaled in the Old Testament but its meaning can be difficult and challenging for the peace-loving.  Rashi refers to the song as championing Hashem’s destructive power and you can see why from the early going: “Master of war”, “glorious with strength…your right hand smashes the enemy.”   Some commentators refer to these as the strength and power stanzas, and it gets a little gory as we hear of horses, chariots and drivers brought under the sea to demise.  It is no wonder that after witnessing the destruction of his army that in the movie version that Yul Brenner (Pharaoh) turns to Anne Baxter (Nefretiri) and states: “his God is God.” According to a rabbinic legend, Hashem confronts a group of angels who are singing this song and in anger he says “my creatures are drowning and you’re singing songs!”   It is only later in the hymn that we encounter the elegant lines: “with your kindness you guided this people that you redeemed: you led with your might to your holy abode.”   

What a moment in time this was for humanity!  Hashem was manifest.  Not only had his plagues rained down on Egypt but in this encounter between a fast-moving, well-armed military force, and the power of the heavens, the lord’s supremacy is clear for all Israel to beholden.   The events of the Sea of Reeds are part of transforming a slave people to a free one.  From the moment Moses sets out from Egypt he is besieged by doubters and those who wished they had just stay home.  The parting of the sea makes it clear that they are in Hashem’s hand and no other.  They are entering a wilderness where they will be sustained entirely by God’s grace: freedom from hunger, freedom thirst and freedom from oppressors.

But what’s up with the rowdy singing?  This was the first communal exultation. Led by Moses and Miriam, they are supported by a chorus of “women of valor” and a cast of thousands who for the first time know with certainty that their age of enslavement is well and truly behind them.  This is the exultation that free people are granted.  They are free to proclaim with joy that an oppression lasting 400 years is broken. They are exuberant and permitted not just to sing quietly in their dwellings, as they may have in Egypt, but to bellow to the heavens.  After all, freedom changes a man and in a few months we will once again be called upon to perform our tableside reenactments so that every one of us can sit as a free man and tell the story as if it were we, ourselves who crossed the Sea of Reeds. 

It is the sages of the Mishraic and Talmudic period who have likened the Song of the Sea to the Ketuba of the Jewish people—our marriage contract with Hashem.  They say that the marriage can be as difficult as the splitting of the Red Sea.  To many, the difficulties of a marriage seem at first to be insurmountable, a miracle if overcome.  In marriage, as at the sea, one must place their trust and faith in Hashem and in this union, and then embark on the brave journey into a new land.