“The seder concludes with psalms of praise, singing, and hopes for next year in Jerusalem. After a full evening of storytelling, familiar rituals, eating, and drinking, we wrap up the seder with sleepy satisfaction.

The songs are the coda to the symbolic journey we have traveled over the course of the evening: from despair to joy and from slavery to freedom. Our singing reenacts the children of Israel singing Shirat HaYam (the “Song of the Sea”), after they had already managed to traverse the miraculously split waters, with the pursuing Egyptians already engulfed and drowned. The Song, in a simple reading of the text, is a song of celebration after salvation.

The Ramban, however, offers a different interpretation (Ramban, Shmot 15:19). Commenting on the phrase “ובני ישראל הלכו ביבשה בתוך הים” (And the children of Israel marched on dry ground in the midst of the sea), Ramban suggests that this phrase comes to teach us that “at the very moments 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 indeed survive. It was, in this reading, not an exalted song of celebration, but an act of faith…”

Read the full piece in The Times of Israel