Claude Debussy said, “Music is the silence between the notes.”
Perhaps, but when I think of the absences and the possibilities for expression in Judaism today, I tend more toward an admonition and a musical instruction from another composer, John Cage: “Begin anywhere.”
An anticipatory hush, or a resting lull can be marvelous; and Jewish ritual and cultural life tends to be full of such moments – think of the sanctuary just before the first shofar blast, or the space between interlocutors in a study-hall just after a moment of insight, or the pause between melodies at a Sabbath table.
“A nothing can be just as expressive as a something,” says the American composer and writer Jan Swafford, “It depends on the frame, what it is that echoes in the silence.”
But for too many, I think, the silence has somewhat taken over. Whether it is because of imagining one may have nothing to contribute, or because of waiting for more clarity, waiting for the right moment, waiting for a sign, the silence just before the sound, heavily pregnant as it may be, tends to be where many Jewish people in our own time have settled.
I would rather we risk a jumble of noise than experience a catastrophe of silence. In other words, I urge a jumping in. Then one can make order and, at a stretch, even sense, then one can listen to oneself and figure out what one actually is expressing, then one can feel and know what it is to take part with others in making the sounds of this tradition, then one can inflect that music in one’s own way—
“Then,” says our Torah this week, “Moses and the Children of Israel sang this song to the Eternal One.” (Exodus 15:1)
That particular “then” – just after the crossing of the Red Sea – is one of the most extensively interpreted words in the close-reading rabbinic enterprise and legacy of Midrash, of demanding meaning and message from our laconic scriptures. Was that “then” a time of being sure of God’s embrace, or a moment of fearing God’s wrath? Was it about filling in for the heavenly angels, who were too dismayed to sing at seeing so many Egyptians drowning in the sea? Was it a moment of suddenly articulate wisdom, or more a realization of just how much can perhaps never be expressed? Or was that “then” actually an echo from the future, framing a moment yet to come? Those are just some of the possibilities (per Midrash Genesis Rabbah 23:1-10).
In any case, that “then” is an initial moment – an entire people, previously kept captive, breaking into self-expression.
That sense of starting fresh may be why, in many synagogues, the Song of the Sea is read from the Torah using a special melody, in some rites its own tune, in some a mode of cantillation reserved for just several scriptural passages. One is meant to hear these verses differently, to listen for and respond to them especially. (Synagogues that eschew the practice follow teachings that object to setting apart any verses of the Torah as seemingly more special than others – we are pretty much never a people of unanimity, much less unison.)
Actually, not just Debussy, but John Cage, too, believed in silence. Cage said, "The sound experience which I prefer to all others is the experience of silence." "And," he expanded, sitting by his window on 6th Avenue in New York City, "the silence almost everywhere in the world now is traffic." That is, he liked a silence full of sound.
This Shabbat is the “Sabbath of the Song,” a celebration of our storied moment at the Sea. It may be a good time for plunging in, or popping out, for hearing oneself start anew. In any case, only if we each begin – from wherever we may be – will we all know our own particular “then” – that moment that is, was, or will be just on the verge of our soul’s singing.