(Delivered April 19, 2025)

Shabbat Shalom & Chag Sameach!

Sometimes it seems like Pesach is one big game of “I Spy.” Or for the younger set, “Where’s Waldo?” The opportunity to step off the usual path to notice what’s different is inherent in Pesach—after all, much of what we do at seder is expressly so that children will take note of the strangeness and ask questions. Opening our eyes to our surroundings leads to a deep, rich experience, and allows us to reflect on the familiar with fresh perspective. 

Our holiday Torah readings likewise take us out of the flow of time, inviting us to re-examine familiar passages that we’ve already seen in the course of our regular weekly parsha study. Somehow, they seem to catch the light differently in a different season. 

For example, the words of שירת הים—the Song of the Sea, which daily daveners say every morning and which we chant here every Shabbat, are at risk of becoming so familiar that we don’t even notice them anymore. Hearing them chanted in the context of the story they come from invites us to consider them anew. And hearing them chanted in the context of that story and in the context of the holiday that celebrates that story adds another layer of richness.

Something that struck me this year is that שיר, the Hebrew root word for song, appears for the first time in the entire Torah at this passage. The creation of the world—and all of the miraculous, beautiful, sorrowful, connective things that follow—go unsung. There is plenty of beautiful text, but it’s only after the Israelites cross the sea that they, and the text, burst into song. Imagine it! The creation of the world merits no song. Noah’s emergence from the Ark merits no song. Avram becoming Avraham, Yitzhak escaping the knife, Yaakov meeting his love, Josef forgiving his brothers. All these are described in gorgeous poetry but the voice never lifts into song. 

As Rabbi Lewis taught us a few months ago, the first word of the Torah בראשית can be anagrammed to say שיר תאב, thus reinterpreting the Torah’s first pasuk from the familiar, In the beginning, God created the heavens and the earth, 

to 

With an appetite for song, God created the heavens and the earth. If indeed God desired song from the beginning, it’s all the more telling that it isn’t until the moment of crossing the sea that something breaks open and song pours forth.

The sound of liberation is musical.

And yet this glorious riot of song poses a theological and moral question. The basis of the freedom that we sing about so robustly is found a little further back, in Parshat Vaera. In chapter 9 verse 1, God tells Moses to say to Pharaoh:

שַׁלַּח אֶת־עַמִּי וְיַעַבְדֻנִי
Let My people go, that they may worship Me

Though we may be tempted to think that the text is saying the Israelites are Moses’s people, the completion of the sentence makes it clear that in fact we are God’s people, and that the gist of the liberation Moses and we seek is not necessarily a life of ease, but rather a life of theological purpose. Thus Shirat Hayam, the song of the sea, is the expression of a new kind of relationship with the divine.

Why, then, do we use this new-found gift of song to rejoice at the death of our enemies? Dayeinu that we would have escaped with our lives, but then we go on at length with detailed descriptions of Pharaoh and his men, just recently bereaved of their first born sons, now drowning in the very waters that parted for us. We gloat at the sight of Pharaoh’s highest officers meeting their watery doom. We refer to God as אִישׁ מִלְחָמָה—a warrior. Why does triumph so often curdle into an appetite for vengeance? And why, even as I feel mildly embarrassed at this war cry, do I also feel a kinship with it?

If it’s uncomfortable to witness this in our ancestors, it’s probably because we recognize all too well the human impulse that drives it. I, too, have moments of wishing the worst on people whose actions have caused pain to the Jewish community; I imagine the same is true of everyone in this room. I grew up holding the contradiction that I should try to see the best in everyone… except Hitler. Today, that small carve-out category includes the Hamas leadership as well. There are people—people who are fully devoted to destruction—who seem to be beyond the pale of sympathy; and yet if we delight in the downfall of those who would destroy us, what does that say about us? What does it say about God? Where are the boundaries of צֶלֶם אֶלֹהִים?

Obviously these questions resonate with a lot of what I’ve been feeling lately as I look out from my happy little bubble at the bigger world. As the soul-wracking war in Israel and Gaza grinds on; as summary deportation becomes normalized here at home purportedly in the name of protecting the Jewish community; as antisemitism continues to surge—it’s all too easy to see the work of dehumanization. And it isn’t just “major social issues” where we see it. Even in our everyday lives, it’s the mechanics of dehumanization that make us decide we can no longer talk to, say, a high school friend whose political orientation we disagree with, or a family member whose sympathies in the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are not aligned with our own. These divisions are painful and growing ever wider. And when the Israelites burst into full-throated song to celebrate the deaths of the Egyptians, despite their justifiable rage at their oppressors, there’s more than a whiff of dehumanization in the song.

There is a teaching from the Talmud that speaks to this question. On Brachot 10a, we find Beruria, a great Rabbinic scholar of the first and second centuries, in conversation with her husband, Rabbi Meir. He is troubled by a gang of criminals in their neighborhood and, out of exasperation, prays for their death. Beruria chides him, using an ingenious reading of a verse from Psalm 104, to teach that he should pray not for the death of the sinner, but for the death of the sin. Convinced, Rabbi Meir instead prays on behalf of the hoodlums, and they repent. Beruria’s wisdom in this instance lay in her capacity to separate the action from the person.

Elsewhere in Tractate Brachot, the rabbis discuss the proper time to say the morning Shema. Their purpose is to describe just how much light is needed in order to say it’s light enough to be morning. They offer a few possibilities: when you can see the difference between blue and green; or the difference between sky blue and white; or the difference between a dog and a wolf. Finally they land on a distinction that speaks straight to my soul:

 מִשֶּׁיִּרְאֶה אֶת חֲבֵרוֹ רָחוֹק אַרְבַּע אַמּוֹת, וְיַכִּירֶנּוּ
When you can see a friend from a short distance away,
and recognize them. 

Our capacity and willingness to see one another and recognize one another’s humanity is our best hope for singing a song that seeks only the death of sin, and that ultimately liberates us all.