HaMadrich - Weekly Guide to Emeth
Shabbat Beshalach
Torah reading:
Shemot (Exodus)
13:17-17:16
11 Shevat 5772
Feb 3-4, 2012
If you were to look into a Torah scroll this Shabbat, you would see the words are written so distinctively that there is no doubt that it is a poem. The poem, ascribed to Moses, is called the Song of the Sea, Shirat Hayam. Because of this poem, this Shabbat has a special name: Shabbat Shirah – Shabbat of Song.
The poem includes some of the most well-known lines in Torah. You will recognize them because they are included in every service: Mi chamocha ba-aileem Adonai? Mi camocha nedar ba-kodesh? (Who is like You among the gods, Adonai? Who is like You, powerful in the holy place? Too awesome for praises, performing wonders!) (Exodus 15:11)
The song is inspired by the events that had just transpired in our Torah reading. Pharaoh finally relents and allows the Israelites to leave Egypt – and then he and his servants change their minds and go after the slaves, intending to return them to Egypt. Instead, the Egyptians, their riders, and their chariots are all drowned in the sea. This is the moment of our deliverance, the moment to celebrate our freedom and the birth of our new experience as a people.
But we don’t only celebrate our freedom, we also remember our past. Symbolically the Israelites had little time to pack up their meager belongings but the Torah tells us that they took two important items. They took Joseph’s bones (Exodus 13:19) and they took tambourines (Exodus 15:20). Before Joseph’s death, he extracted a death bed promise from his brothers that his body would be returned to the land of his ancestors when they left Egypt. Carrying Joseph’s bones is an image of taking the past into the future.
But they also carried tambourines, timbrels. Torah says: Miriam, the prophetess, Aaron's sister, took a timbrel in her hand, and all the women came out after her with timbrels and with dances. This verse is the first time Miriam is referred to as a prophet. Had she and the women not had faith in the future, belief in God’s awesome power and lovingkindness, they would not have brought instruments to celebrate their deliverance.
May you remember the lovingkindness of the Holy One who rescued us and brought us through the generations to this very day, and may you continue to celebrate our deliverance.
Rabbi Debbie Israel
