The Greatest Song

Living Emunah By Rabbi David Ashear

Rabbi Menashe Reisman asked, "How could it be that the Jewish people sang the אז ישיר after Kiryat Yam Suf with so much joy, being that the Chazal told us that 80% of the Jews died out during מכת חושך ?" That means so many of their relatives and loved ones had just passed away. There were so many orphans and widows, and so many of them lost children when the Mitzriyim threw their babies in the Nile. Yet, we say every day that they sang בשמחה רבה with great jubilation! How do we understand such a thing? It was the first Shabbat after the Belzer rebbe was freed from the nightmares of the Holocaust. He was in Haifa, and he said, "How could we possibly sing and praise HaShem when our families and friends have all perished?" When Miriam brought out the instruments for the ladies to sing with, they could have easily said to Miriam, "Now is not the time to sing. We lost so many of our family members." Yet, they too, sang with great jubilation. How is that possible? The Rabbi brought from the Shem MiShmuel as well as others who expounded upon a fundamental taught by the Zohar Hakadosh that the ים (sea)is a mashal for something being hidden. The world as we know it, with so many things that we don't understand, is also called the ים . When HaShem split the sea, it was not just a physical sea that He split. He also split open the covering of the world, which prevents us from fully understanding His ways. Every single person who passed through the Yam Suf was able to see with such clarity, the secrets of the world. When it says the maidservants saw more than the prophets of the later generations, it doesn't mean the maidservants were on a higher level than them. It means they were able to see things in a light that even the greatest Nevi'im were not זוכה to see. They did not only understand the present, they were able to see the past and the future as well. They understood at that moment why they had to be in Mitzrayim for so many years. They understood how every brick was coming to make a tikkun for דור הפלגה that sinned with bricks. They understood why the babies had to be thrown in the Ye'or as a tikkun for what took place during the generation of the mabul( השׁחית כּל בּשׂר את דרכּו ). And when they looked into the future, they were able to understand the tikkun that the people who died in Makkat Choshech needed to make. The Maharshak said, at the end of days, all those people who died in Choshech are going to come back and live again, and we believe we are living in the final generation. They saw their loved ones sitting at a seder table telling over the story of Yetziat Mitzrayim. They saw them celebrating and greeting the mashiach, and they had no questions. They were able to sing with the greatest joy because they had so much clarity. The Ramban explains that shirah applies to past, present, and future. The midrash says, from the day the world was created, nobody ever sang shirah to Hashem until the Jewish people at Yam Suf. Although many people thanked and praised Hashem throughout the generations, no one was able to sing shirah because they did not have the full understanding of everything that was taking place in their lives. When Hashem reveals himself in the future, we are going to sing the greatest shirah of all because then the entire plan of the world will be understood, even the persecutions of the Jews throughout the generations, including the Holocaust, and Lo aleinu, the massacre that we have witnessed. We anticipate that glorious day when we will all sing the greatest shirah and we hope it will come bekarov .