Parashat Beshallah: In the Aftermath of Song

Imagine the high the Israelites felt at the Red Sea – a joy born of overwhelming relief and a clarity of gratitude and faith in life, in God, in all that is good -- such joy, washing over them like the waters of the Sea, rising up in them as waves of jubilant song.

But then, after the high, the everyday problems of life return, stronger and more bothersome than ever. There is the matter of water that is too bitter to drink, and the continuing dogged basic issues of food and drink in the barren desert.

That is our experience, too, of spiritual highs. They feel good at the time, but then we’re left with a sense of emptiness, of hunger and thirst afterward. The children cry and whine; the car breaks down; the mundane peeks its nasty head back up, as if to taunt us in our attempts to escape it – don’t think you’re so great for having sung and fasted all day on Yom Kippur, for having tasted briefly some other spiritual realm – you’re still the same human with a normal life to lead, full of daily exasperations that can get you down. And you’re still capable, maybe even more capable, of complaining about it all.

One intense spiritual experience does not a life of faith make. It takes a lifetime of training -- 40 years of desert dependence, 40 years of seeing the manna come down from heaven each day anew, 40 years of single days, to become a people of faith.

Each day in the desert the people received only what they needed for that day – dvar yom beyomo. The goal was to learn not to look back longingly at the pots of flesh in Egypt nor to worry over tomorrow’s food and drink and the possibility of starvation in the desert. But just to sit with the gift of today and be thankful. For today.

That is the training that balances those rare moments of intense spiritual highs, the ability to sit with today and feel its miraculousness, the fact that today, I am well-fed, and that today, the sun rose (as we say each morning – hamehadesh bekhol yom tamid ma’aseh breishit, “Who renews each day the work of creation”), and that, today, I breathe and live.

What good is the song then? What good those spiritual highs, those rare moments of ecstasy and intense connection? They, too, have their place. They begin the journey, as here; they are the source of inspiration, the touchstone we return to through the trials of everyday life. Perhaps, on some level, the goal is to erase the distinction, to create such a strong sense of joy and gratitude in the everyday manna that we receive that we can sing every day as we did at the Sea, that we can feel that every day is the day of redemption. The memory of that song reminds us of the kind of joy we are capable of; we are training ourselves to carry it with us, to make each day – no matter its difficulties – its own song.