After a full evening of storytelling, familiar rituals, eating, and drinking, the seder concludes with psalms of praise, singing, and the hope for next year in Jerusalem. The songs are a coda to the symbolic journey traveled over the course of the evening: from despair to joy and from slavery to freedom.
As we sing with sleepy satisfaction, we reenact the children of Israel singing after they traversed the miraculously-split Red Sea and the pursuing Egyptians drowned (Exodus 15). In a simple reading of the text, Shirat HaYam, the Song of the Sea, is a song of celebration after salvation.
The medieval commentator Ramban (Nahmanides) offers a different interpretation. Commenting on the words וּבְנֵי יִשְׂרָאֵל הָלְכוּ בַיַּבָּשָׁה בְּתוֹךְ הַיָּם “And the children of Israel marched on dry ground in the midst of the sea,” he suggests that this line teaches us that “at the very moment the children of Israel were walking through the waters, they sang.” In other words, the singing took place as they were fleeing the Egyptians, before it was clear that they would survive, not after. It was not an exalted song of celebration, but an act of faith.
The Ramban’s insight extends to the entire Exodus story: We did not emerge from slavery to immediately enter the land God had promised. Rather, what lay before us was desert, the vast unknown and the unfamiliar, and an as-yet unfulfilled promise of return to the land of our ancestors. And it was in the very midst of that journey that we were tasked with creating a people worthy of the promised land.
The moment Israel and the Jewish people find themselves in today is not dissimilar. We are in the middle of war, turmoil, and profound uncertainty. We do not yet know how, when, or if our dreams of peace and security will be fulfilled. They feel too distant for any song of celebration. And yet, like the children of Israel amid the sea, we must summon the courage to sing now. We should surely sing not as an act of celebration, but as an act of faith and commitment. We need to be, as our tradition charges us, רוֹדְפֵי שָׁלוֹם “pursuers of peace,” even before we know exactly how or whether we will achieve it, and even as we defend ourselves forcefully against our enemies.
This year, singing songs of celebration feels premature and perhaps even inappropriate. And so, as we stumble bleary-eyed through the end of the seder, let us sing with a different intention. Let us sing to show that we believe that we are committed to our ideals and our faith, and that we accept our responsibility to create and re-create a world that manifests peace.
Excerpted from our Resources for Passover 5785
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