{"id":41833,"date":"2018-10-10T16:59:20","date_gmt":"2018-10-10T13:59:20","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/?p=41833"},"modified":"2022-05-04T14:40:02","modified_gmt":"2022-05-04T11:40:02","slug":"history-in-poetry-and-song","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/wp.929.org.il\/en\/history-in-poetry-and-song\/","title":{"rendered":"History In Poetry And Song"},"content":{"rendered":"
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Occasionally Elie Wiesel would open his class by singing a niggun, a wordless melody, according to a<\/span> new account of his time in the classroom<\/span><\/a>. Wiesel\u2019s rationale for his singing was, according to former teaching assistant Ariel Burger, \u201cAs you know teaching and learning do not happen only through the sharing of information: there must be an added element.\u201d Wiesel talked about how he had been lecturing all semester \u00a0and yet there was a lack of engagement in the classroom. Wiesel explained his pedagogical decision, \u201cAnd yet I felt something was missing: the melody. So I decided to sing.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n

\u201c<\/span><\/i>Shirat Hayam<\/span><\/em>,\u201d the Song at the Sea, is \u00a0recounted not just by staid and static words but in the movement of Miriam and the women in dance and in drumming (Exodus 15:20-21). This section of the text – signaled to us in the visual cue of the brick wall arrangement of the words themselves – appears different to get our attention as readers, to let us know that this moment, this experience is unlike anything we\u2019ve encountered before. It is not the first poem in the Hebrew Bible, which is Genesis 4:23-24, according to Robert Alter\u2019s <\/span>Art of Biblical Poetry<\/span><\/em>, but it is the first retelling of a historical event through poetry.<\/span><\/p>\n

Poetry creates a heightened experience, elevating the ordinary and causing the reader\/ listener to pay attention to the totality of the text, from the sounds in the words to their look on the page to how the language functions. This way to grasp the power of poetry, as we need to for a full understanding of Exodus 15, is evident in a recent PBS show on<\/span> Poetry in America<\/span><\/a> hosted by \u00a0Harvard English professor Elisa New. The series brings poetry into prisons and shoe designs, museums and shirt factories with \u00a0twelve unique American poets, including Emma Lazarus and Robert Pinsky. Prof. New confessed to me in a phone interview that she had cried with her rabbi Claudia Kreiman when they finished taping<\/span> the episode<\/span><\/a> about poet Allen Ginsberg\u2019s <\/span>Kaddish<\/span><\/i>. Poetry and song (\u201cshira\u201d in Hebrew has both meanings) should affect its hearers, as Wiesel and New know.<\/span><\/p>\n

One aspect of the poem I\u2019ve always been intrigued by \u00a0is the interplay between Moses\u2019 singing in the singular (Exodus 15:1) and Miriam\u2019s call to others and performance in the plural (Exodus 15:20). Moses creates the shell of the experience in the language of the poem, and Miriam fills it in, adding the sound and the rhythm and movement, the fuller meaning, that the shell of the words alone won\u2019t access.<\/span><\/p>\n

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