Mourning into Dancing
Parshat B'shalach
Shabbat Shirah, January 10, 2014
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Usually when I consider the Torah portion for this week I have considered the exultation the Israelites must have felt crossing the Sea of Reeds into freedom, watching as there slavers were buried beneath the waves, knowing they were truly free. But this year at the URJ biennial just in November, I came to another question. At Biennial there is a tradition of getting up to dance during Mi Chamocha, and using the melody we used tonight set to Miriam's song by Debbie Friedman. It is an uplifting song, and an anthem of sorts for women's participation in worship. This year, we used the same melody, and the dancing did commence, but Rabbi/Cantor Angela Buchdal of Central Synagogue, who was leading the Shabbat morning service, introduced the song at a slow tempo, with a mournful introduction. She spoke about the difficulty of slavery and introduced this normally fully joyful prayer as something else entirely. This got me thinking. As free people we can see so much joy for becoming free. We view this part of the story as the ultimate triumph of God over the enemies of the Israelites. This is a special Shabbat of song and celebration, this is the story we re-live at Pesach, but perhaps it is something else entirely.
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Change is hard. As terrible as slavery was the Israelites are constantly wishing to go back--the food was better, this was better, they didn't yet trust in God or in Moses even after walking through the walls of water which were the sea. Egypt and the slavery that came with it was the only way of life they had known for generations. Torah teaches it was 400 years between Joseph and Moses. They must have developed traditions and stories to explain why they were enslaved; they may have even had some form of religion which comforted them with their place in society. They may have longed for release from the work, they may have longed for a Shabbat, or even for a different relationship with the Pharaoh. But did they long to leave? To leave their home? Everything they had ever known about life? This is scary, this is mournful.
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I cannot begin to imagine the fear an immigrant must feel as they leave all they have ever known to come to America (or anywhere else for that matter) in search of a better life. But they are coming to something hopeful, something they have heard about. Whether the mythology of "the streets are paved with gold," or our modern times with the internet, immigrating is something they may have had a chance to research and make plans for in advance. But still, they leave friends, family and a way of life behind them. Even if they find a community here from their home country, a newspaper or TV in the same language, it is not the same. I'm sure for many this difficult journey is worth it, for the personal opportunity or for their children. For the safety it brings from a homeland filled with war, or for a life better than they could have ever dreamed. But there must be days, maybe many, maybe few and far between, when the vastness of the change is overwhelming. When all that can be remembered is the good that was left behind, when the question of whether it the best choice is asked. There may be times when a loved one far away is ill or dies and an immigrant cannot return to care for them or mourn for them at home; I cannot imagine the devastation this change and distance must cause.
All the more so for the Israelite community. They had no idea where they were going, just promises from a stranger and a God they hadn't heard from in 400 years. Everything they knew about how to live, how to survive, what to teach their children had been ripped away from them. Their salvation came with scary plagues and frightening journeys. God, described as freeing the Israelites with a "mighty hand and an outstretched arm," and to us now, this sounds amazing; to the Israelites I'm sure it was AWESOME, both awe inspiring and terrifying. I can imagine thinking; this is our God, what happens when we are at his mercy or wrath instead of pharaoh? Is this what we truly want?
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So perhaps standing on the shores of the sea was a mixed bag. Like all our life cycle events, we celebrate and we mourn simultaneously. We celebrate an achievement, a bar mitzvah... a simcha, but we remember those no longer with us. At a funeral we mourn the death of a loved one, but we also find ourselves laughing as we remember how they touched our lives, how they made us laugh, even how much our children remind us of them... mourning and celebration are mixed and I believe this was also true for the Israelites. They celebrated their freedom, but mourned the loss of the only lives they knew. They thanked God, but prayed too that God would fulfill the dreams promised. They asked God to turn their mourning into dancing. They wanted to thank God, they wanted to celebrate freedom, but maybe they also needed help.
As we go through life we must remember these mixed blessings. Simchas, mixed with sorrow, tragedy sometimes finding a silver lining. We cannot always know what those linings are or find a way to celebrate them, certainly not right away. But we can pray, 'God please turn my mourning into dancing that I may praise Your name.' During those times we are far from God, and angry with God, we can pray, we can reach out and hope it is temporary, hope we can find the courage of the immigrant, and the strength of the Israelite. And so too, when we have blessings in our life, we should dance and sing our praise to God, remember the partnership with God that brought us these blessings. Our hard work, our dedication, may have brought much upon us, but just as illness doesn't discriminate good from bad, blessings should not be discounted as only self made. We are in this together.
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Last year for Shabbat Shira, I shared with you about my aunt, and compared her to Nachshon. She did not wish to be a taking a leap of faith and jumping into the waters of cancer, but that was the hand that was dealt to her. But she is a survivor and has turned what for most would be a dark cloud following her life, into a blessing. She has metastatic breast cancer and will likely spend the rest of her life on chemotherapy, which she has been living on for the last 18 months, but this year she will see her daughter graduate high school, a blessing we never thought she would achieve when she was diagnosed as the mother of a 4 year old. And just two weeks ago, when we were all together as a family for vacation, she proposed to her partner of 9 years and she will be married for the first time in her life, at age 58! None of us know how long she can survive, when will the chemo be worse than the cancer? When will it just stop working all together? But she is LIVING, she is DANCING, she is praising God. To me she is an inspiration. I was awed seeing her on vacation, seeing how happy she is, how she will not let pain slow her down. I pray she is able to continue with that optimism and happiness for a good long time, that she will see many more simcha's in her life and maybe even a cure. But for now, I will think of her whenever I think of the Israelites crossing the sea. She is like Nachshon and she is like us all: a mixture of mourning and blessing, embracing God to help us balance it out.
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So whether you are like the immigrant wondering if your journey is worth the trouble, or whether what you left behind was really so bad, or you are struggling to just survive the hand you have been dealt, I hope you will remember that most things are mixed mourning and blessings, and pray that God will be your partner on the journey, helping you find the dance, the blessing and the praise.
Sing: Mourning into Dancing (Debbie Friedman)