The Song of the Sea, or in Hebrew known as Shirat haYam, is written out in the Torah in a way unlike any other passage. As you can see, this passage that we read this Shabbat isn’t one block of text, it is full of breaks and spaces that lend itself to poetic understanding.
This passage is the song of praise to God in the immediate aftermath of the Israelites’ release from Mitzrayim. They make their way through the sea, walking on dry land, and Moses leads the people in song. On the face of it, this song is one about gratitude. The Israelites had been enslaved for so long, and finally, they have reached liberation.
The Sefat Emet, a Hasidic master, teaches that we can learn something additional, something we don’t hear from the words of the poem, from the form. He asks why the physical structure of the song uses so many spaces, and he powerfully writes that the Israelites needed pauses and breaks to understand redemption. He writes that each space opens up and reveals new learnings about their own path towards liberation, and that they couldn’t understand their own journey without the ability to pause, reflect, and process their experience.
When we pause, when we stop to think through and reflect, that is sometimes where the learning happens. Our society is on our own path towards redemption, one that is complicated and often brutal. We are not yet singing the song of full redemption but we are in the midst of writing that song, believing that we are working towards the walk through a splitting sea. And in that writing, we must build in the pauses. We are in one of those moments now. We are in a big moment, one that calls for deep reflection and processing. Without that pause, we can’t write the next lines of the song.
Perhaps we can think of the words of the song as the events, the things that happen. But the breaks in them are how we respond, how we incorporate, what we do with what has transpired. I pray that this pause gives way to a song of hope, a song of peace. I pray that we process and reflect on this moment to help write the rest of the song, bringing redemption soon.
