Episode 4: Shiru L’Adonai - Sing Right [the F*ck] Now
Amid pain and fear, joy can sometimes feel like betrayal. Yet, the mystics point out that Miriam’s joyful song at the Red Sea is a major liberatory act. Our Survival Guide Miriam has some sharp and clear advice on the subject that we’ll talk about in this week’s episode, along with tambourines, Somatic Experiencing, the mystical power and gender politics of a circle, bell hooks, and a practice for bringing Miriam’s living Torah into our own lives.
SHOW NOTES
You can find the account of the people at the sea and the songs of Miriam and Moses in Exodus Chapter 14 and 15. Nachshon is named as the first person into the sea in the Talmud, Sotah 37a.
Maor VaShemesh, Beshalach 20 offers an extensive teaching on the power of Miriam’s song versus Moses’s song and the magic of circle dancing.
Rabbi Beroka’s conversation with Elijah the Prophet can be found in Taanit 22a:7
Find out more about Dr. Marcie Beigel here.
Look out for Becca Goldstein’s web presence coming soon!
Find an overview on Dr. Peter Levine’s Somatic Experiencing here
The Zohar describes Yocheved and others singing Miriam’s exalted song in Sh'lach 25:199.
Bell hooks speaks ofPatriarchy as the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation in her essay “Understanding Patriarchy,” chapter two of The Will to Change: Men, Masculinity, and Love (Washington Square Press 2004)
The Alshekh’s teaching on Miriam’s tambourine can be found in the Alshekh on Torah, Exodus 15:20.
You can see Rabbi Jericho’s current Shiru L’Adonay playlist here.
Reb Nachman of Breslov on the roshei teivos of “Vataan Lahem Miriam Shiru L’Adonay, Miriam chants to the people, Sing right now to Goddess,” can be found in Likutei Moharan 27:6:10.
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n the past couple of months, I’ve had a number of conversations with people where I ask how they’re doing and they say—well, it feels weird or inappropriate to say this, with the world falling apart and all the horrors that are unfolding, but I’m actually doing really well, my life is surprisingly good.
It’s hard to know what to do with happiness when we’re in a spiritual wilderness. Are we supposed to stay solemn, stay angry, stay in grief all the time? What role does joy play when we’re lost or overwhelmed or in crisis?
Our Survival Guide Miriam has some sharp and clear advice on the subject that we’ll talk about in this week’s episode, along with tambourines, Somatic Experiencing, the mystical power and gender politics of a circle, bell hooks, and a practice for bringing Miriam’s living Torah into our own lives.
I’m Jericho Vincent, your local feminist trans Kabbalistic rabbi and. This is a Survival Guide for a spiritual wilderness.
Let’s continue on the path.
In our previous episodes, we encountered the ancestor Miriam when she was a child, a strange and wise child with powerful wisdom for navigating the spiritual wilderness of slavery. Well, Miriam grows up. She’s a slave, she’s beloved by her people, and she becomes a leader, the kind of leader who is in the trenches with the people, who suffers as the people suffer. Then everything changes. A series of pandemics and ecological disasters hit the land, and Miriam, with her baby brother Moses all grown up, and with the help of Goddess, who leads the people out of slavery.
Many many thousands of them are on the run, heading out into the great unknown, tasting freedom after generations of abuse and suffering. After a couple of days of traveling, the people arrive at a vast sea. Suddenly, they hear horses in the distance– their oppressors, their slave masters–coming after them, screaming for blood. The people are trapped between a rapidly approaching army and the water. It’s all over. But then, one brave person, filled with spiritual chutzpah, Nachshon ben Aminadav, starts marching forward into the sea. Our stories say that a miracle happens, the sea splits, the people cross through, their former slave masters jump in after them, but then the water comes crashing down and washes away the oppressors.
The people teeter on the sand, safe on the shores of a new land, the wind knocked out of them. They’ve just been through another trauma, they’ve just landed in a new country, a wilderness that stretches in front of them as far as the eye can see, and they’ve just had their lives saved in an awe-inspiring miracle.
As they’re catching their breath, the leader Moses, the little boy in the basket all grown up, he starts to sing, and he says: Ashira L'Adonai. One day I’ll sing about this. The mystics are puzzled by this– why is he singing about singing in the future? They understand this to mean that subliminally Moses is saying, one day, in the future, when I’m really and truly safe, when I’ve processed this whole experience, when I feel secure, then I’ll REALLY celebrate that I was saved from death by the splitting of the sea.
But then Miriam steps forward, she has a tambourine in her hand, and all the women follow her, and Miriam and the women start to dance in circles. Miriam chants a different song than her brother, וַתַּ֥עַן לָהֶ֖ם, the song she chants to the women and the men and the nonbinary folks–all the people there– Miriam’s song is not Ashira L’Adonay, one day I’ll sing. Miriam’s song is Shiru L’Adonay. Sing right the fuck now. I know we’re scared about what we’re facing, I know we’ve been through hell, I know this is a crisis, but this a moment of joy, our lives were saved, don’t wait to be happy. Seize and relish your happiness right now.
This is the fourth part of our five-part survival guide: Shira L’Adonay. Sing right now. If you have a moment of joy, seize it. Joy is sacred. It is our responsibility to foster joy in a spiritual wilderness. Joy is fuel for survival.
We have a lot of responsibilities here in the spiritual wilderness of this historical moment. I like to think about it like we each have two plots of land: a field of grief and a field of joy. They both need tending. How well have you been tending your field of joy lately? Tending our field of joy is not a luxury, it’s a sacred obligation.
In the sacred text of the Talmud there’s a story about Rabbi Beroka, a second century sage, who is sitting in the marketplace in conversation with Elijah the Prophet, an immortal spirit guide, who points to two brothers in the marketplace and says: these two brothers, they’re definitely going to paradise in the afterlife. Rabbi Beroka wonders why, what wonderful thing have these brothers accomplished to be promised such a reward, maybe they’re great scholars or teachers or leaders. So he goes over to the brothers and asks them ‘What do you do’? The brothers answer him, they say: We’re comics. We cheer people up.
This is how holy joy is. Creating and fostering joy is the route to paradise.
Our joy is not a betrayal of the grief or outrage we might feel in a spiritual wilderness. Miriam tells us no, to the contrary: we need our joy alongside our grief and our outrage, we need every particle of joy we can find or create.
As my student/member of my community, behavioral specialist Dr. Marcie Beigel says:
“Miriam models the way that joy is an essential ingredient for building our resiliency.”
But how do you do this? There can be this feeling of whiplash when something nice happens in the middle of an unfolding catastrophe, and you want to lean into the joy but the grief is so intense.
Miriam teaches us how we do this Shiru L’Adonay, sing right now. She models it. She gets up, with her beloveds, and she starts to dance. Movement.
As my student, urban ritualist Becca Goldstein says:
“Miriam shaking off the trauma, she’s co-regulating her nervous system with the nervous system of her beloved friends, and then they’re inviting the whole community, all the tribes, to co-regulate along with them.”
Two thousand years later, Peter Levine developed Somatic Experiencing, teaching people how animals shake off trauma by literally shaking their butts, but Miriam knew this way back when. She’s telling us: this is how you transition from fear and sadness to joy, this is how you make space for the full range of your emotions, this is how you make sure you don’t miss out on any experience of happiness while it’s happening.
The mystics love the brilliance of Miriam’s attitude towards happiness, and buried in the patriarchal Kabbalistic texts, you can find a bonanza of teachings celebrating the power and the wisdom of Miriam’s Shiru L’Adonay, sing right now.
The Zohar, the central Kabbalistic text, tells us that Miriam’s singing is such a defining moment, that three times a day, every single day in the spirit world, Miriam and Moses’s mother, Yocheved, sings Miriam’s song, and the angels sing along with her.
The 19th century Kabbalistic giant, the Meor v’Shemesh loves that Miriam dances in circles. You might not have known that Jewish circle dancing, like the hora, is not just a European folk tradition, it goes way back, all the way back to this moment with Miriam, and our circle dances are heavy with power, radiant with meaning.
The Meor v’Shemesh explains that the circle is the ultimate power system, one in which each person has equal access to the center, non-hierarchical. He explains that in Kabbalistic cosmology, the universe was created in the middle of a circle of potential, and in the future, when liberatory consciousness has spread—that moshiachtzeit we talked about in episode one–righteous people will dance in a circle around the Divine, pointing at the Divine, saying, yes, this is what I had faith in, all will grasp truth equally. So the world comes into being with a creative circle and the world is moving towards a revelatory circle, and Miriam, the Meor vShemesh explains, had access to this highest truth, that’s what she was conjuring in her circle. Circles are places of creativity, revelation, conjuring and truth. And what’s more, the Meor vShemesh undercuts the hierarchy of patriarchy, where men believe they’re higher or better then women, and he explains that Miriam understood the very deepest truth that explodes the binary, explodes the patriarchy:
לְהַמְשִׁיךְ עַל יְדֵי הַקָּפוֹת אֶת אוֹר הָעֶלְיוֹן אֲשֶׁר אֵין שָׁם בְּחִינַת דְּכַר וּנְקֵבָא
She drew down, through her circles, the highest, most sacred light, in which there is no distinction between male and female.
I really love that Miriam uses this deep knowing of her own equal and full power as a woman—to create safety for the men, who were too dysregulated to be fully present… remember she sings out to the men, come, dance with us, sing right now, we’ll help you be safe.
Gender trauma has been present in just about every major spiritual wilderness since we left the Garden of Eden, and it’s certainly front and center in the spiritual wilderness we’re in right now. I see in this mystical teaching and in Miriam’s actions an invitation for women and nonbinary folks to stretch into their own power, and to notice the ways that this patriarchal wilderness has damaged men. As the great theorist bell hooks taught: “Patriarchy is the single most life-threatening social disease assaulting the male body and spirit in our nation.”
Yes, men drive patriarchy and use it to hurt women and nonbinary folks, but they are also caught in a system of oppression much older than themselves, oppression that’s harmed them too. How can women and nonbinary folks use our power to invite men into the safety of surrender, into the safety of the circle, into the safety of power relations where we put truth and not men in the center? It’s a big project, a communal project, and it’s never been more ripe than it is at this moment.
Speaking of community, another thing we want to notice about Miriam’s Shira L’Adonay, sing right now: when her brother, shook from his near-death experience sings, he sings Ashira L’Adonay, one day I’ll sing about this. When Miriam chants: Shiru L’Adonay, sing right now, the Hebrew is in the plural. Shiru, we’re going to sing. Miriam understands that when you’re in a spiritual wilderness, the waves of feeling that come at you are too big to digest on your own. You have to find your people, be with your people, digest with your people, that’s how we stay afloat.
Another lesson from Miriam’s actions comes from the Alshech, a 16th century teacher, who points out that Miriam had a tambourine, she took a tambourine with her out of slavery, made sure to pack that as she fled, because she knew that music facilitates prophecy. This song of Miriam’s, Shira L'Adonai, sing right now, was a prophetic song, a song that was rich with Divine power.
So too, we need to carry our tambourines with us, have music at the ready, to enable us to open portals of spiritual power when we stumble into a moment of happiness. Make your Shira L’Adonay spotify playlist. Know your songs. Reach for music to help you access the deepest power of your joy. Here’s a snippet from my Shiru LAdonay playlist:
Kabbalists use a mystical technique called roshei teivos where they look at the first letters of words in a phrase, or some other sequence in a sacred text, and find meaning in what they spell out. Reb Nachman of Breslov points out that if you look at the phrase “Vataan Lahem Miriam Shiru L’Adonay, Miriam chants to the people, Sing right now to Goddess,” the first letters of these words, the roshei teivos, make up the word Shalom. Reb Nachman says this is a gesture towards the truth that through Miriam’s powerful song, the people found peace.
Making space for joy, alongside our grief is key for our own peace when we move through a spiritual wilderness.
One of my students asked me: how do I allow myself to feel joy, when my joy has been taken from me in the past? I wonder if that resonates with you, consciously or subconsciously, an anxiety or unwillingness to feel happiness, because we’re afraid of losing it. It’s a legitimate concern. It makes sense as a response to a history of hurt.
My answer is this: we don’t own happiness. Happiness is something that moves through us, that we get to enjoy while it’s there… and the more open we are to it, the more we’re able to be transformed by it… and then, when it passes through us we’re able to give it to the earth. Whatever happens after, that happiness is like the rain. You’re nourished by it long after it’s gone.
My husband and I, Ben Ash, got married on Nov 11, 2016. We had a couple fall dates to choose from and I was partial to the palindromic date for our future anniversaries—-11/11.
Our wedding was in San Diego, where my father-in-law lives. We were scheduled to fly out of New York on November 9th, and I remember, so vividly, my daughter, who was then five years old, climbing into my bed early in the morning on that travel day. It was still dark outside. I held her to my chest and I said: “Honey, I have bad news.”
I put my hand on the top of her head, my palm pressed against her skull, as if I had the power to protect the fragile organ beneath the bone. I said to my daughter: “Hillary Clinton did not win.”
At the airport, that smug hate-filled face filled the television screens hanging from the ceilings. I said to my daughter: Let’s look out the window at the planes. But she wouldn’t look away from the tv. She was only five, but she was a sensitive child, picking up on every emotional current that moved through our house. We had told her about this unpleasant man. She didn’t know a lot, but enough. As we flew across the country composed of so many people who had decided to put him in power, my daughter saw me crying. She understood, at least on some level, why.
We felt shell shocked. It seemed bizarre to go ahead with our wedding, to celebrate the miracle of our love in the aftermath of this disaster. On the day of the wedding, we went over to the venue, and changed there. I felt excited, but also uncomfortable—-the grief and shock of the election still echoing in my bones. Ben and I met in the courtyard, along with my daughter, for photos and to make some last minute preparations. As we were fussing around with set up, I noticed my daughter had slipped away–she was over on the dance floor, her gold shoes kicked off to the side. She slid across the floor in her tights, eyes closed, spinning and leaping in her white wool dress, her joyous face radiant as a mystic’s, all joy, all joy, in that moment.
She was Miriam, calling out with her dancing body Shira LAdonay— yes, we’ve been afraid, but now, now we open to the joy and dance.
It shifted everything for us. We put down our fear, our anxiety, and we flowed through that wedding relishing and savoring every ounce of happiness it contained. It was such a gift, to have seized that island of joy amidst a very difficult time.
Let’s take a moment to practice some of Miriam’s Shiru L’Adonay, Sing right now, together.
You’ll need a little space. When you’re ready, take a moment in quiet contemplation to locate a seed of joy in your life. It can be something large or it can be something very small. Then, notice how much grief you’re carrying right now. Maybe a little, maybe a lot. Get up on your feet, in body or spirit, and start to move, start to shake the grief away a little, you’re building a little pocket of space around you with the movements of your body, you’re saying: I see you grief, I feel you in my body, I release you for the next little bit, I return to the solid truth of my body. And then, when you’re ready, begin to dance. Bonus points if you can do this with other people— or animals—dance the joy in your life, hold in your mind the thing that is bringing you happiness and dance it out, dance it in and through the grief. Imagine that with your body, your weaving indigo Miriam energy, the loving, healing, sustaining energy of the ancestor Miriam in your space, into your body, into the world. Feel Miriam dancing with you, laughing with you, celebrating the precious joy with you, indigo Miriam energy tumbling from her body, surrounding you with joy.
Use your arms to gather all of the indigo Miriam energy from all around you into a small condensed seed. In our first episode, we plant Miriam energy in our belly, in the next episode we allow that seed to grow roots to stabilize us, and in the last episode, we felt the seed sprout what became a trunk of supple strength that moved up our spine. Now, plant the Miriam energy of your dance with your right hand, hand of compassion, palm down, on your belly, left hand, hand of strength, palm down, on top. Feel that Miriam energy feed the seed within, flow down to your roots, up your trunk and then sprout branches of joy, reaching out to the world through your shoulders, your face, the crown of your head. Imagine your body is that tree and feel the rain fall on you. Feel curiosity and delight wash over your head, stream down your neck, down your spine, through your seat, and your legs and then into the earth.
I want to pray for us in this moment. I pray,
Morah Miriam,
Ancestor Miriam,
Thank you for the reminder of the value of joy
Even in the most difficult of times
Call to us, today, and in the days ahead,
Remind us, Shira L’Adonay,
There is reason to sing right now,
There is power to sing right now,
To laugh, to goof off, to dance with friends, to celebrate the moment
Because every moment is precious.
May you guide us as we build a world of so much more joy for everyone.
Next episode is the very last episode in this limited series. We’ll encounter the famous well of Miriam and learn how it can sustain us day to day on our journeys through the spiritual wilderness.
I'm rabbi Jericho Vincent, and I'm so excited to take this trip with you, guided by the ancestor Morah Miriam. This is a Survival Guide for a spiritual wilderness. I'll see you on the path.
Thanks to Ella Joy Meir for the beautiful original music, to Becca Goldstein and Dr. Marcie Beigel, to the Kanfei Edges Group, to my creative partner Ben Blum, to Morah Miriam for her guidance, and to Ruach HaOlam, the oneness within, between and beyond us all. Survival Guide for a Spiritual Wilderness is a part of the Judaism Unbound family of podcasts made possible with support from Lippman Kanfer Foundation for Living Torah.
