Posted on February 7, 2025 by Rabbi David Katz
Tonight is Shabbat Shirah, named after the song the Children of Israel sang when they crossed the Red Sea. There is a quaint midrash that describes the miracles that occurred. Apparently, when the waters parted even the embryos in their mothers’ wombs sang “Mi Chamocha!” – “Who is like You among the gods, O Eternal One!” So we read: “But not alone the adults took part in this song, even the sucklings dropped their mothers’ breasts to join in singing; yea, even the embryos in the womb joined the melody, and the angels’ voices swelled the song.”
Quite a picture! So fanciful.
But when I was surfing the web I found a science article that describes how fetuses actually do hear words and music within weeks of being conceived and how singing may affect the fetus. This is astonishing.
There is both the science and the magic of music. Whether we are talking about brain waves or the miraculous songs of sucklings’, we understand that music can carry us along, see us through, and lift us up. Rabbi Abraham Joshua Heschel wrote about how difficult it is to find strategies to pray. He commented, “The inadequacy of the means at our disposal appears so tangible, so tragic, that one feels it a grace to be able to give oneself up to music, to a tone, to a song, to a chant.” [1] It is in the music of the Jewish people, said Rabbi Heschel, that one finds …the joys and triumphs, the tenderness and warmth, the agony and sorrows, the protest and the prayer… [2]
Tonight is Shabbat Shirah, the Sabbath of Song. Our cantor and our choir will sing and our hearts will rise.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi David Katz
[1] Abraham Joshua Heschel, Man’s Quest for God, Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1954, page 39, quoted in Samuel H. Dresner, ed. I Asked For Wonder: A Spiritual Anthology, New York: Crossroad Publishing, 2002, page 32.
[2] Based on Judith Kaplan Eisenstein, Heritage of Music: The Music of the Jewish People, Wyncote, Pennsylvania: The Reconstructionist Press, 1990, page 3.
