February 7, 2015
One of my favorite things to do is write children’s songs. Over the years I have written lots of innocuous little ditties for kids as a way of teaching them about Jewish holidays and rituals, ethics and values, and how to treat families and friends. Long ago when I was just starting out as a teacher in religious school I realized that singing a song was an easy and relatively painless way to learn important Jewish lessons about life. So I wrote songs about everything I could think of – from “Hands Hold the Torah Way Up High,” and “Shabbat Shalom Comes to Our Home” to “Kibbutz is Not the Last Car on a Railroad Train.” Kids seemed to like them, and in the process of singing they learn some of the most important lessons about Jewish life.
Three thousand years ago Moses had pretty much the same idea. As he led that bedraggled band of ex-slaves out of four hundred years of Egyptian slavery, he sang them across the sea of reeds to quell their fears, bolster their spirits and teach them that what this invisible God of the Hebrews demanded perhaps more than anything else, was that people be free. Moses’s “Song of the Sea” became the first number one hit song in Jewish history, and we still sing some of its lyrics at every single service in the form of the Mi Hamoha.