Rabbi Freedman’s Shabbat Message

​The need to communicate is a fundamental longing of human beings, deeply rooted in a combination of biological, psychological, and other genetic factors. Amongst the reasons humans seek to communicate are historical, social and emotional. Here are but a few examples:

•  Survival and Cooperation: Early humans relied heavily on communication to coordinate hunting, gather resources and warn each other of dangers. This cooperation was essential for survival and the continuation of the species.
• Social Bonding: Communication is said to be the primary means by which humans form relationships, build communities, and maintain social structures. It facilitates shared experiences, emotional support, and a sense of belonging, all of which are crucial for mental well-being.
• Cognitive Development: Language and communication skills are intrinsically linked to cognitive development. The process of communicating helps individuals organize thoughts, reason, and express complex ideas.
• Information Transfer: The ability to share information and knowledge across generations – from practical skills to complex cultural narratives – has allowed human societies to progress and adapt far more effectively than other species.
• Emotional Expression: Humans have a profound need to express emotions, share feelings, and achieve mutual understanding. Communication allows for empathy, emotional regulation, and the navigation of complex interpersonal dynamics.
  While communication most often takes the form of the written and spoken word, one of the most effective ways in which humans are able to communicate their innermost thoughts, concerns, ideas and emotions is through the medium of song. Within this genre, songwriters have also been able to inform or inspire others regarding historical events that in the eyes of the composer were of great significance and should be remembered and perhaps celebrated or commemorated long into the future.

In my own Spotify list of songs a number of examples spring to mind. The Wreck of the Edmund Fitzgerald written by Gordon Lightfoot in 1976 is a folk ballad that tells the story of the SS Edmund Fitzgerald freighter, which sank in a storm on Lake Superior in November 1975, with all 29 crew members lost. I Don’t Like Mondays by The Boomtown Rats was written by Bob Geldof following the 1979 Cleveland Elementary School shooting, where the perpetrator explained that she committed this atrocity simply because she “didn’t like Mondays”. A third example is American Pie by singer-songwriter Don McLean, who described the emotions felt on hearing the news of Buddy Holly’s death in an air crash in 1959.

A song of this nature is found within this week’s Torah portion. שִׁירַת הַיָּם – The Song of the Sea (Exodus 15:1-18) was sung by Moses and the Children of Israel after safely crossing through the Red Sea. It is a triumphant anthem celebrating God’s miraculous deliverance of the Israelites from the pursuing Egyptian army. It explicitly recalls the historical event:

ס֥וּס וְרֹֽכְב֖וֹ רָמָ֥ה בַיָּֽם
The horse and its rider He has hurled into the sea”.

In this way, the Shirah has become embedded in our collective memory. Although over 3000 years old, it remains of contemporary relevance to the Jewish people – it is recited daily in our prayers and it has a special place on the 7th Day of Pesach when it forms the Torah reading for the day. Whenever it is recited, whether from the Sefer Torah or out of the siddur (the daily prayer book), we honour it by standing while it’s chanted – a distinction reserved for just one other Torah reading, that of the Decalogue (The Ten Commandments). We adorn it with a special melody and most tellingly, it’s the only song in the Bible that has a Shabbat named for it – Shabbat Shirah.

In an article on the subject, Sharon Citrin Goldstein described the song as ‘a biblical great, unequalled as a literary and linguistic work of art, unsurpassed in its grandeur and majesty, unmatched in its power of inspiration, and unmistakable in its influence on the Jewish experience.’

She adds that the song’s ultimate purpose was to teach an enduring religious ideology.

מִֽי־כָמֹ֤כָה בָּֽאֵלִם֙ ה’ מִ֥י כָּמֹ֖כָה נֶאְדָּ֣ר בַּקֹּ֑דֶשׁ
Who is like You, O Lord, among the powerful: who is like You, majestic in holiness?

By singing these words, Israel taught that there is but one invincible ruler before whom the nations of the world should tremble. The Song of Moses describes how God chose to defend His people, fight for them and guide them to a place where they would be able to settle amidst the Lord’s holy presence.

This is a song therefore, of celebration and inspiration, a defining moment in the history of our people. The closing words ה’ יִמְלֹ֖ךְ לְעֹלָ֥ם וָעֶֽד The Lord will reign for ever and ever has become an iconic phrase with variations of it appearing throughout our liturgy, each being a direct reference back to this moment: the inauguration of Jewish nationhood and the thankfulness of a people to their God.

Of course this is not the only song in the Tanakh. Jeffrey Kranz writing on the many songs found in the Tanakh, calculated that there are at least 178 songs found within the books of the Bible. As he put it, “battles, coronations, funerals, cities being sacked, and seas splitting up—you can find songs for all kinds of occasions.” One hundred and fifty of these songs, he wrote, are in the Book of Psalms, and at least six more come from the other two ‘songbooks’ of the Bible, namely Shir Hashirim, The Song of Songs written by King Solomon, and the Book of Eichah or Lamentations written by the prophet Jeremiah. Kranz suggested however, that there are at least a further 22 songs, chants, dirges, and hymns scattered throughout the Tanakh in Exodus, Numbers, Deuteronomy, Samuel, Isaiah, Ezekiel, Amos, Habakkuk and Chronicles.

Many of these, like Shirat Hayam, are joyous in nature, as they celebrate wonderfully happy or miraculous events. For example there is the Song of Deborah (Judges 5), recounting the victory of the Israelites over the Canaanites during the time of Deborah, the prophetess. Then there is Hannah’s Prayer, which is truly a song of thanksgiving offered by Hannah after the birth of a long-awaited son (Samuel). Nonetheless there are songs of lament as well; the most poignant being David’s requiem following the untimely death of King Saul and his son, Jonathan, who fell in battle against the Philistines (2 Samuel 1:17-27). David celebrates their bravery and expresses deep sorrow, especially for Jonathan, with whom he shared a particularly close relationship. Known as The Song of the Bow, this is a historical lament that captures the grief of the nation.

In more modern times, Jews have continued to compose songs to reflect special moments. Perhaps the most famous in our lifetime was Naomi Shemer’s Yerushalyim Shel Zahav (Jerusalem of Gold), which became the unofficial anthem of Israel and the Jewish people following the Six Day War. The original song expressed the deep longing of Jews to return to Jerusalem’s Old City. The Old City, including the Kotel – the Western Wall had become inaccessible to Jews following the 1949 Armistice Agreements when the city was divided and East Jerusalem came under Jordanian control. Although Yerushalyim Shel Zahav was written by Shemer for the Israeli Song Festival, held in May 1967, it took on added historical and cultural significance following Israel’s overwhelming victory in the Six-Day War, one month later. Shemer then added a final verse to commemorate the reunification of Jerusalem and the return of Judaism’s holiest sites to Israeli control.

So it was that Yerushalyim Shel Zahav inspired a nation and was chosen as the Israel’s Song of the Year in 1967, and as Israel’s Song of the Jubilee in 1998.

One other such example has a fascinating history – the song Hava Nagila.

The following is taken from an article in Tablet magazine entitled The Secret History of ‘Hava Nagila’ by Edwin Seroussi and James Loeffler:

The story begins with the musician Abraham Zvi Idelsohn. Born in 1882 in Feliksburg, in the northwest of the Russian Empire (present-day Latvia), he trained as a cantor in Libau before moving to Germany in the 1890s to study at Berlin’s Stern Conservatory and the Leipzig Academy of Music. Idelsohn then worked as a cantor in Germany – in Leipzig and Regensburg, and finally in Johannesburg, SA. In 1907, he settled in Jerusalem with his family.

Living next door to Eliezer Ben-Yehuda, the father of Modern Hebrew, Idelsohn set as his own goal the creation of Modern Hebrew music to accompany the national rebirth of Jewish life in their ancient homeland. In the spirit of the Zionist philosopher Ahad Ha’am, Idelsohn began to collect all the riches of Jewish musical traditions that he found in Ottoman Palestine and throughout the diaspora. Using the emerging recording technology, he began to transcribe folk songs and make field recordings in order to forge an old-new musical sound that would be (in his view) authentically Jewish. That meant uncovering what he imagined to be the oldest layer of pre-exilic melody common to all Jewish traditions and liberating it from the foreign accretions resulting from the exile.

Idelsohn’s project was an unabashedly political one. He denounced the cultural and spiritual “assimilation” that he experienced among German Jews. He lambasted his fellow Jewish musicians for flocking into European classical music rather than taking an interest in their own heritage. Like other architects of this new Hebrew culture, Idelsohn sought out Jewish religious culture in order to refashion it into new secular national traditions.

It was in this context that Idelsohn premiered a new song, Hava Nagila, at a concert in Jerusalem sometime in 1918. It is said to have marked one of three recent significant events:

1) The Balfour Declaration (November 2, 1917),
2) General Allenby’s triumphant entry into Jerusalem (December 11, 1917), or
3) The laying of the cornerstone of the Hebrew University (July 24, 1918).

Whichever one of these three events inspired Idelsohn, the context is clearly a celebration of the Zionist dream. The opening lines of Idelsohn’s Hebrew text make plain the sense of a momentous occasion:
הָבָה נָגִילָה
הָבָה נָגִילָה
הָבָה נָגִילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָה
Come, let us rejoice, come let us rejoice, come let us rejoice and be happy.

These lines closely echo the verse from Psalms 118:24:

זֶה־הַ֭יּוֹם עָשָׂ֣ה ה’ נָגִ֖ילָה וְנִשְׂמְחָ֣ה בֽוֹ
This is the day that God has made. We will rejoice and be glad in it.

This verse, liturgically speaking, forms part of Hallel, the special collection of psalms recited on Jewish festivals and other joyous occasions throughout the year; for a Zionist romantic like Idelsohn this verse was the perfect choice upon which to base a song celebrating a significant milestone on the journey towards the creation of a Jewish national homeland.

Regarding the melody, Idelsohn wrote that he originally transcribed the melody from a Sadegurer Hasid whom he had met in Jerusalem in 1915. The Sadegurer Hasidic community traced their roots to the town of Sadigura in the Bukovina region of the Austrian Habsburg Empire (nowadays part of Romania and Ukraine). Rabbi Avrohom Yaakov Friedman, grandson of the first Sadigura rebbe, obtained a visa to Palestine shortly after the Anschluss of 1938 and re-established his court in Tel Aviv. Thousands of Sadigura Hasidim were murdered in the Holocaust, leaving the Rebbe with only a few dozen followers. Nonetheless, he continued to lead his Hasidim with princely bearing, conducting his court in Tel Aviv for 22 years until his death in 1961.

Although Hava Nagila has gone on to become a perennial favourite at weddings and other Jewish celebrations, and in spite of the fact that it has been recorded hundreds of times by musicians, Jewish and non-Jewish, some in the Chasidic world took a different position. Cognisant of the fact that the melody was originally a Chasidic niggun, they took umbrage at the fact that it had become a Zionist anthem, and they banned its use altogether. Apparently, only recently, some sections of the Chasidic fraternity, have allowed this niggun to be reinstated at their gatherings.

So one can see, songs and theology continues to play an important role in Jewish life. From the Shira to Hava Nagila, Jews have always found a way of expressing their deepest emotions through this genre. It was Rabbi Sacks who was able to explain this phenomenon in his own unique style.

There is something profoundly spiritual about music. When language aspires to the transcendent, and the soul longs to break free of the gravitational pull of the earth, it modulates into song. Jewish history is not so much read as sung.

There are different tunes for different texts. There is one kind of cantillation for Torah, another for the haftarah from the prophetic books, and yet another for Ketuvim, the Writings, especially the five Megillot. There is a particular chant for studying the texts of the Mishnah and Gemara. So by music alone we can tell what kind of day it is and what kind of text is being used. Jewish texts and times are not colour-coded but music-coded. The map of holy words is written in melodies and songs.

Faith is more like music than science. Science analyses, music integrates. And as music connects note to note, so faith connects episode to episode, life to life, age to age in a timeless melody that breaks into time. God is the composer and librettist. We are each called on to be voices in the choir, singers of God’s song. Faith is the ability to hear the music beneath the noise.

Throughout the long and often challenging history of our people, many amazing events have taken place, just as great personalities have come and gone. With the passage of time there is always the risk that we will forget – we will forget the moment in time, or the greatness of the individual – books have ‘dust covers’ because they gather dust – but songs remain vital and vibrant – they do not sit on the shelf – but they cry out from the depths of our being. Songs live on, even when other memories fade.

Hans Christian Anderson once wrote, “Where words fail, music speaks”, which is exactly why Shabbat Shira serves to remind us each year of the power of song to inform, uplift and inspire. Little wonder that Albert Einstein once said, I often think in terms of music – it was his way of saying that the brain, however brilliant, should give way to the voice – this, he believed, was the essence of Jewish spirituality – it was Einstein’s way of saying, we no longer have the physical Moses, but do not despair because we still have his song.

Shabbat Shalom
Rabbi David Freedman