Shabbat Shalom.
And welcome to this special Shabbat called Shabbat Shirah. That means the Shabbat of Song; and some communities use it as an opportunity to lean into beautiful music, kind of like what we do every week.
But Shabbat Shirah is not a Shabbat about music generically. It is a reference to tomorrow’s torah portion, B’shallach, which is one of our biggest and most memorable. It includes our people’s flight from Egypt and the Crossing of the Red Sea. A moment so significant and so part of our collective consciousness that we reference it in our prayers every day. Midrash tells us that the Sea’s parting and our crossing it on dry land was so great a miracle that even the humblest young person there saw what the great prophets – Isaiah, Ezekiel, Jeremiah – never saw in their whole lives.
When we reached the other side, the waters poured back and drowned Pharaoh’s army that was pursuing us. After what must have been a stunned silence, Moshe begins a song of praise, which we call Shirat Hayam, the Song of the Sea. Then Miriam takes up the song with the women, playing timbrels and dancing.
The Song of the Sea holds such a place in our lore that it is written differently in Torah so that the page looks like waves of water more than a block of text. And the melody is different as well. In the Song, with its special and ancient melody, we sing:
אָשִׁ֤ירָה לַֽיהֹוָה֙ כִּֽי־גָאֹ֣ה גָּאָ֔ה ס֥וּס וְרֹכְב֖וֹ רָמָ֥ה בַיָּֽם׃
“I sing to Adonai who has done great things; the horses and their riders are thrown into the Sea.” Then the Song continues. with some words that are familiar to us:
עָזִּ֤י וְזִמְרָת֙ יָ֔הּ וַיְהִי־לִ֖י לִישׁוּעָ֑ה זֶ֤ה אֵלִי֙ וְאַנְוֵ֔הוּ אֱלֹהֵ֥י אָבִ֖י וַאֲרֹמְמֶנְהו
“Adonai is my strength and my song and my salvation.”
And later in the Song we get to even more familiar words:
מִי־כָמֹ֤כָה בָּאֵלִם֙ יְהֹוָ֔ה מִ֥י כָּמֹ֖כָה נֶאְדָּ֣ר בַּקֹּ֑דֶשׁ
נוֹרָ֥א תְהִלֹּ֖ת עֹ֥שֵׂה פֶלֶא
“Who is like you, Adonai, mighty in holiness, wondrous in praise, making miracles?”
And the Children of Israel sing and dance and play their drums and clap their hands and pound their feet. Midrash says that the angels who were watching began to join in to sing and dance as well but God quieted them, scolded them, saying, “My people are drowning in the Sea, and you rejoice?” Indicating that the God of the Exodus is also the God of all who inhabit the Earth, both the persecutors and the persecuted, and the decision to drown the Egyptian army to allow the Israelites to escape was not one made lightly.
But while the angels were scolded for singing and dancing, we were not. Because deliverance from immediate peril and from years of persecution is cause for relief and joy. One cannot not celebrate being saved from certain death.
This is also National Refugee Shabbat, a custom begun by HIAS, the Hebrew Immigrant Aid Society. It is no accident that this is the week HIAS chose. It is because of this Torah portion. Because of our unlikely escape from Egypt and our miraculous traverse of the Sea. This week was chosen to remind us that we too were refugees. We fled an oppressor who would have seen us die before seeing us free. There was a time in our collective memory when it was we, our people, pouring forth in untold numbers into the unknown because the unknown was, in that moment, the better choice – a better choice than the oppression we had experienced under Pharaoh.
We were refugees; Torah tells us so. We were the ones who ended up wandering from place to place in search of home. We were the ones living in vast tent cities on other peoples’ outskirts. “Not in my backyard,” said the king of Moab to the Israelite tent city, and he sent a sorceror to curse our people. But that sorceror, upon opening his mouth instead poured forth blessing, saying Mah tovu ohaleykha Ya’akov, mishk’noteykha Yisrael. “How beautiful is your tent city, O Jacob. Your sacred resilience, O Israel!”
Since that mythic time, we have been refugees many times. From the Land of Israel. From Spain. From England. From every principality of Germany. From Europe as a whole. Refugees again and again. Almost like it’s in our blood.
So we name this not only Shabbat Shirah, but Refugee Shabbat, to help us renew our compassion and empathy for the refugees who are right now lodging in tent cities and crossing great waters and wandering from place to place in search of home. We were refugees too. They are our story rewritten in the present tense.
We ask that our service be in itself a prayer that the refugees of this moment, fleeing war and famine and persecution, that they might all be delivered into safety. That the nations of the world receive them. That the bodies politic of this planet change because of the new languages and cultures, and that those changes make them more loving and more understanding than they were before.
We pray tonight that all who are homeless and stateless safely reach the other side of the Red Sea that they are still crossing. So that they too may soon sing, Mi khamokha ba’eylim Adonai, “Who is like You, Adonai, who has plucked me out of danger, out of the narrow place, out of Pharaoh’s vice-like grip, and who has delivered me to safety, to an unexpected place I can now call home.”