Being Alive is Reason Enough
Choosing Joy in a Broken World
Every year, on the 7th day of Pesach (Passover), we re-read the Shirat HaYam (Song at the Sea). If we take the invitation from our sederim (Passover meals) literally, then, as our ancestors sang this song with great joy, we should celebrate the liberation and praise God, too. However, a genuine question arises this year, as in the past years too: Should we really break out into joy?"
Conflict rages between Israel and the Hezbollah in Lebanon and directly with Iran. Families across the UK are quietly suffocating under a cost-of-living crisis that refuses to break. Not to forget the war in Ukraine.
There is a sharp contrast between the stories of deliverance we shared around our seder tables and the harsh realities waiting for us outside
Our ancestors have crossed the waters. Pharaoh's power is finally broken. Yet their trauma remains entirely unhealed and the future is utterly blank. They have nothing but the wet sand beneath their feet and the air in their lungs. Look closely at how the song begins. It offers no strategic analysis of the desert ahead. It bursts forth with relief and astonishment. Moses declares his intention to sing, not because every problem is resolved, but because life itself demands a voice.
Rashi notices a grammatical oddity in the opening verse. The Hebrew reads Az yashir Moshe, meaning Moses will sing. We might logically expect the past tense. Yet, Rashi understands the future tense as capturing the precise moment the intention arose in Moses’ heart, just before it reached his lips.
Joy begins not as a sound but as a quiet, internal decision. A human being looks at what has been preserved and chooses to mark the moment.
Life trains us to ask hard questions. We are skilled at complicating what is good, at asking what price was paid and who is left behind. We spill drops of wine at the Seder precisely because we carry the suffering of others inside our own joy. Yet the Song of the Sea suggests a different spiritual discipline. Sometimes the soul needs the willingness to celebrate deliverance before returning to moral accounting.
Breathing in the reality of living is not an act of cruelty. It is absolute fidelity to the truth of a fragile moment.
Our ancestors could not be expected to carry the whole world in their arms at the precise instant they emerged from the sea. They were not denying the suffering happening elsewhere. They were claiming their personhood.
The great twentieth-century thinker Rabbi Joseph Soloveitchik observed a profound difference between the mind of a slave and the mind of a free person. A slave cannot sing. A slave possesses no ownership of time, no relationship with a personal past, no capacity to imagine a future. Singing requires breath, rhythm, and memory. It asserts human dignity. The Israelites freed their bodies by crossing the water. The song freed something far deeper.
Relentless news cycles press down on us today. The modern equivalent of a slave mentality is often our inability to step outside the stream of crisis long enough to notice the sheer miracle of our existence.
Abraham Joshua Heschel taught that faith does not spring out of nothing. It comes with the discovery of the holy dimension of our existence. He called us to live in a state of radical amazement, reminding us that faith means to hold small things great, to take light matters seriously, to distinguish the common and the passing from the aspect of the lasting.
Radical amazement means refusing to treat life as a given. It means looking at a warm spring morning and being staggered by its beauty.
It means sitting with family around a Seder table, or standing beside friends in the synagogue, and recognising the breath in our lungs as a profound gift. Survival is only the baseline of the Exodus story. Judaism calls us to thrive, to find deep joy in community and in the faces of those we love. We must feel genuine pride that a Jewish state exists, capable of defending its people, while simultaneously holding our loved ones close and revelling in the safety of our homes.
Ordinary moments of connection are the true substance of liberation. To ignore them because the world is broken is to surrender to the darkness. We need each other's shoulders, the shoulders of the Jewish past and the Jewish present, a siddur and a kehillah, a prayer book and a community, to give us spiritual strength.
Our faith, our voices, and our presence help one another to climb out of despair.
Pausing to rejoice can feel deeply uncomfortable. We are accustomed to holding grief and gratitude in the same hand. Sometimes the most faithful response is not to explain or compare.
Sometimes we simply need to say we lived, we crossed, we are still here to hold one another. A celebration like this is morally serious. It honours the community that endures. A people unable to rejoice in its own life gradually loses the language it will need for courage when the next trial arrives.
The song gives sacred form to the first breath drawn after fear. Let us give ourselves permission to be a singing people. Life itself is the most honest thing we can celebrate.
Chag Sameach
Sources:
Rashi, Commentary on Exodus 15:1.
Soloveitchik, J.B. (2006) Festival of Freedom: Essays on Pesah and the Haggadah. Jersey City: KTAV Publishing House.
Heschel, A.J. (1955) God in Search of Man: A Philosophy of Judaism. New York: Farrar, Straus and Cudahy.