Recently, a child in the religious school came up to me after tefillah and asked, “Why do we sing the prayers?” Good question. Sometimes it takes the curiosity of a child who asks questions about things we take for granted to push us to think more deeply about those things we take for granted.
Actually, at this moment, our community is beginning to think in greater depth about prayer and singing in prayer, in particular. In two weeks, we’re having our annual scholar-in-residence weekend, and this year, Rabbi Elie Holzer will be here from Jerusalem to help our community grow in our experience of prayer through song. In preparation for his visit, many of us have been reading articles by Abraham Joshua Heschel about the spirit of prayer and about what we are actually trying to do here when we sit for 3 hours and sing out these words. This is what I want to explore with you today.
This Shabbat is Shabbat Shira, the Shabbat of Song, for on this Shabbat, the Jewish people all over the world are singing. We’re singing THE song of the Torah, THE song of the people of Israel, THE song that shows up in our prayers each and every day: Shirat HaYam, the Song at the Sea. As we read, when we left Egypt, Pharaoh and his army pursued us, but Moses holds his arm out over the Sea of Reeds, and God splits the sea, allowing us to walk through on dry ground and then closes it in on the Egyptians, drowning them and redeeming us from slavery. Our response to this ultimate redemptive act is what? To sing. First Moses leads the people in song and then Miriam leads the women with timbrels in song and dance.
This song becomes our protypical song. It’s the first song in the Torah so it must teach us something basic about singing and why we sing in prayer or in connection to God. So, as we think about our own experience of singing in shul, what can we learn about prayerful singing from our Song at the Sea? This is an important practical question for us: we’re all sitting here together for hours and hours, some of us sing, some of us don’t, some of us aren’t sure what to do, many of us feel uncomfortable for one reason or another: we don’t know Hebrew; we think we don’t know enough to participate fully – only the serious Jews are qualified to sing out; we feel self-conscious, etc. But our prayer service is largely made up of song – what are we trying to do here? How would you answer my young friend’s question “why do we sing prayers?” What is the Torah suggesting to us about singing – why do sing when we cross the sea?
Let’s try to answer this by doing an experiment. Read 15:2. Try reading it, saying it, even saying it with feeling. Now try this. Repeat after me, and if you don’t know Hebrew, just sing lalala. What’s the difference?
Prayer should move us, awaken us, allow us to feel our emotions and raise them up to God. Communal singing in prayer should lift up the congregation and allow us to feel our hearts bursting open. Prayer should not be, as Heschel put it, like reading last week’s newspaper. It’s Martin Luther King weekend – imagine if people went around during the civil right movement saying, “we shall overcome. We shall overcome, deep in my heart, I do believe, we shall overcome someday” instead of singing it out? It seems absurd, but if you think about it, so is saying the words of the siddur without any music, without any feeling.
People often think that the key to having a more meaningful prayer experience lies in gaining a better understanding of what the words mean and how the prayers are organized. They think: maybe if I had a better translation I could connect more to prayer. In my opinion, this is not the solution. Yes, learning Hebrew and understanding the service helps a lot, but prayer is not an intellectual exercise. Praying is not reading. Forget the words and just hum along, but do it with feeling. Think about it: if you go to yoga class and chant “om,” you don’t need to know what it means, you don’t take it in intellectually; you experience the vibration of sound, your whole body resonates. As Heschel says, “first we sing, then we understand. . . to sing is to call forth the . . . presence of the divine.” That’s what prayer is, and we don’t need to understand the words to do it.
We do a lot of singing here at Kol Shofar, but we can do it better. The Baal Shem Tov taught that singing can bring us to joy and devekut (oneness) with the Infinite One. He quotes the Zohar which says that there are heavenly palaces whose gates can only be opened by song, but you have to sing before God and let the Shechina (the presence of God) sing through you. Imagine what our mornings here in prayer could be like if we sang like that, if our melodies opened the gates of heaven. We have moments of that – we’ve felt our singing open the heavens on Yom Kippur, but usually we’re so civilized; it’s too embarrassing to show emotion in prayer.
But that, I believe, is the key. The Hasidim were not afraid to show emotion in prayer: they dance and cry and yell out and turn cartwheels, if the spirit so moves them. What if we gave ourselves permission to let loose and not be so dignified? To sway, to shuckle, to cry, to sing out? Listen to the instructions of the Piasetzna rebbe, Rabbi Kalonymus Kalman Shapiro: “Take a niggun you know, close your eyes, and think that you are standing before God and with your heart broken you have come to pour your soul out to God, with song and melody which come from the innermost part of your heart. Slowly, you will feel that your soul has begun to sing of its own.”
That’s why we sing when we pray - through song we can pour our hearts out; our soul comes out through song. Sometimes we are pouring joy out of our hearts, as we did at the Sea of Reeds, but sometimes the broken heart is what pours out. The Piasetzna was the rebbe of the Warsaw Ghetto. Imagine the soul the poured out in his song.
Singing in prayer is very healing. As Rebbe Nachman of Bratslav taught, even when we are deeply sad, we should find the points of goodness within ourselves, and the collection of all of those points becomes the notes in our song. By singing that song, we connect those dots of light that are in even the darkest place, and we raise them up and are able to find a kind of joy.
Prayer can be powerful and it should be transformative, otherwise we’re wasting our time here. That’s probably why the Song at the Sea appears so often in our liturgy: we’re meant to re-experience that redemptive moment of crossing the sea again and again and again. I want to encourage you all to come to the Scholar-in-Residence to continue this exploration of prayer, but today, on the Shabbat Shirah, I want to encourage us to explore our own prayer through song, to lift up our voices and pour out our souls, so that together as a community we can sing our way across that Sea of Reeds.
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