Beshelach – Rising Sap, Rising Songs: Parting for a new Song of the Sea

by Lisa Greber

Somewhere on the shores of the Reed Sea, Miriam and Moses are singing; the gathered men and women of Israel sing the song back in refrain: “Ozi v’zimrat Yah, vay’hi li lishua” — “My strength and the song of the eternal will be my salvation” (Exodus 15:2). The song is full of relief and rage, celebrating the drownings of their former Egyptian masters. They are not safe enough yet for compassion, although I am sure God weeps here as well as rejoices.

Today is a special juxtaposition of celebrations: the Song of the Sea and the festival of Tu B'shvat; the first act of freedom from Egypt, the first sap rising in the trees in Israel. Though not quite yet here in Massachusetts - here it is still winter. The wind alternates bitter and relenting. The buffleheads, black and white winter ducks, dive for dinner in Dorchester Bay. On the beach where I walk, a Malibu Beach nothing like its California cousin, the tides have sculpted the ice at the high tide line into stepped curviform shapes, layers of mini history - on this day, the tide was higher than others, on another day, a bit wilder, on another day, the tide barely reached here at all.

There was more snow here earlier. Maybe there is something in us melting, a new opening into spring. The sea and the trees have been in Egypt for a long time; what in us must part to let them pass into a land of freedom, a land of milk and honey?

What is milk and honey for a beach or a tree? I do not know for sure, since they do not speak English; I can only guess from what I see or measure or dream. My beach at Malibu - I use the “my” not in the sense of ownership but of my own belonging, as in, my family – was once wide open to the larger Dorchester Bay, allowing water to flow freely in and out. Now a boulevard blocks the free exchange; sediment comes in but cannot so easily leave. The beach is choking on a dark anoxic mud that smells not simply of composting low tide, but of leftovers from ship deconstruction, sewage overflow, and oil from the nearby highway. Still, small patches of salt marsh grow, the mud snails are happy, and one great blue heron comes daily to fish. I think to Malibu milk and honey would be a return to open water, and more wild greenness within – salt marsh and eelgrass, and the lives they sustain.

If the sea and trees have been in Egypt, so have been we. If I read the Song of the Sea in this light, I can understand it as a journey from an Egypt of mastery over nature, to a new world of kinship and care. It is our own willingness to step into the unknownness of a new relationship with nature that parts the sea; it is the sense of “mastership” of nature that may keep following us that drowns in the sea. It is not easy to change; it is not without cost. I trust the nature of the ocean in our hearts and in the earth that will not waste the parts drowned in it, but will dissolve them to their constituents of carbon, phosphorous and nitrogen, to come back in a new form into the world of life again.

Somewhere on the shores of a new Reed Sea, Miriam and Moses are dancing. There is a chain between their dance and ours, their songs and ours. I am sitting on the shores of the Reed Sea; I have come through the waters, I have nearly drowned. The waters, once roiled, have quieted. They taste of salt water – sea and tears. What is the song I sing? “My strength and the song of the eternal will be my salvation” as we sit here together facing a new land, greener and more humble than the one before.