How Lucky We Are That We Get to Sing
A few days ago, someone in our community asked me what it is that I love the most about tefillah, Jewish prayer. What an amazing question—we should ask each other this more often! My relationship with prayer has changed a lot over years, and it is still very much a work in progress, so it was hard to give her a single answer. I love that our tradition encourages us to pray in community with others, with its assumption that something transformative can happen when our private longings are spoken aloud in a shared space. I love that the words of the siddur are a collage that represents literally thousands of years of Jewish history, from Torah quotes to medieval poetry and everything in between. I love the fact that the text is always the same, but each day I get to approach it anew.
But in the moment, I simply said, “I love that we get to sing our prayers.”
Nearly all of the most powerful Jewish memories in my life—both happy and sad—revolve around song: singing at the top of my lungs during Friday night song sessions at camp when I was a kid; singing “od yavo shalom aleinu” with the Jewish community on my college campus after the Tree of Life shooting in 2018; singing the last Avinu Malkeinu as Yom Kippur comes to a close each year. I’m grateful that ours is a tradition with a melody for nearly every moment of a human life—songs for grief, songs for joy, songs for awe, songs for gratitude, and songs for those moments that refuse to fit neatly into any category at all.
The first part of Shaharit, the morning service, is “p’sukei d’zimrah,” or “verses of song.” It’s a collection of poems and psalms that we use to warm up our souls in the morning and prepare ourselves for the rest of the service. I am always struck by the closing lines of the first blessing, Barukh She-amar:
With David’s psalms we will praise you, Adonai our God;
we extol You with songs;
we celebrate Your fame with melodies…
Blessed are You, Adonai our God,
whom we extoll with songs of praise.
The blessing essentially says: How lucky are we that we get to sing our way through the tefillah that lies before us?
Each time we come to this blessing in services, I can’t help but smile. There are so many ways we could connect with God during prayer, and the tradition asks that we sing. Of course, there is space for silence, for study, for meditation. But in tefillah, we always return to song.
Song can help us go deeper into our tefillah when we need to focus. Sometimes I’ll pause in my recitation of the words of a particular prayer and let the voices of the people around me wash over me as I search for that deeper place inside my soul.
And, just as importantly, singing during tefillah can help us get out of our own heads when we are in need of a broader perspective.
Mary Oliver wrote a gorgeous poem that captures in English what the blessing of Barukh She-amar offers in Hebrew. Here’s her poem “I Worried:”
I worried a lot. Will the garden grow, will the rivers
flow in the right direction, will the earth turn
as it was taught, and if not how shall
I correct it?
Was I right, was I wrong, will I be forgiven,
can I do better?
Will I ever be able to sing, even the sparrows
can do it and I am, well,
hopeless.
Is my eyesight fading or am I just imagining it,
am I going to get rheumatism,
lockjaw, dementia?
Finally, I saw that worrying had come to nothing.
And gave it up. And took my old body
and went out into the morning,
and sang.
The poem expresses how powerfully song can shift our perspective, out of what the Kabbalists call mohin dekatnut, or “small-mindedness,” and into mohin degadlut, or “big-mindedness.” Sometimes singing can be just the thing we need to interrupt the flow of our own anxieties, doubts, and fears.
Pesukei dezimrah ends with this blessing: Blessed are you Adonai, Sovereign God, to whom we offer thanks and ascribe wonders, who delights in the chorus of song—the sovereign God, giving life to all worlds.
The Hasidic master Ze’ev Wolf of Zhitomir, the Or haMeir, remarked that two Hebrew words in this concluding blessing—shirei zimrah or “chorus of song”—can be vocalized differently and also read as shayarei zimrah, “what is left over from our song.” The Or HaMeir taught that song has the power to peel away the husks that surround our hearts and cut through everything that holds us back, and that our truest, deepest tefillah can be accessed in the quiet moments after we sing. God delights in that moment of catharsis and authenticity, when our souls finally speak in their own unguarded voice. We sing to go into ourselves, and we sing to come out of ourselves, to remember that we are held in something larger than our own inner monologue.
As we head into the week of Thanksgiving, I am feeling particularly thankful that ours is a tradition of song. I’m grateful that God delights in the sound of our voices. And I’m grateful that BJ is a place where we keep singing—to awaken ourselves to gratitude, to soften the edges of our worry, and return us to the spaciousness of our souls.
Shabbat shalom,
Joe Blumberg