According to kabbalistic tradition (Zohar 2:25b), dibbur, the capacity to speak, was in exile during the enslavement in Egypt and returned as part of the redemption. Pesach is a holiday that moves us from this place of exiled, restrained speech to an overflowing place of song – the song at the sea. Below, I will trace this movement in our internal experience.
Our Lost Childhood Voice
Think of the way a child sings and dances with jubilance and abandon, unrestrained, unself conscious, at the top of her lungs, with passion and energy and life force. See if you can recall that experience in your body from some point in your own childhood, to be as wild and elated and expressive as you please, letting it all out, feeling the flow of energy in your limbs and the openness of your heart and your throat, the pleasure of being fully in your body and of freely expressing yourself.
The Restraints
What happened to that song in you? Where did it go? In the course of growing up, we all learned to restrain it. This song, that true voice of yours, got exiled inside you like the Israelites’ voice, their dibbur, got exiled and shut down through the shackles of slavery in Egypt.
Maybe you can sense in your body this feeling of restraint, the way that some passionate life force energy wants to express itself, but there are inner chains and ropes that hold you back, hold back the words, the actions, the song, the dance, the natural flow of life energy. You might sense it as tension in your body – tension is essentially an internal force that is trying to keep you controlled, restrained, in check.
Of course we do need some of these restraining forces to help us function in society. But we should notice what gets lost here – some aspect of our true song, our essence, our voice. Can you sense what that loss was for you – that exiling of some song in you – like the closing of a long ago open door to the fresh breeze outdoors. Maybe there is some grief and sadness around this loss and maybe also some yearning for its return, an inkling of its still alive glimmer deep inside your heart, like the little bud of green that pokes up through the cracks of the pavement, snippets of your soul song still poking through the constraints.
The Loss in Growing Up
Losing something of our original voice is in a way a part of the process of growing up. We can read the midrash part of the Haggadah as telling such a story about growth. The people grew and became large in Egypt, like a young woman, the verse from Ezekiel says, who grows and blossoms like a plant of the field, developing breasts and reaching puberty (Ezek 16:7). And just at this point, as we grow into something powerful and free and large, the metzarim come along, something comes to restrain us. Mitzrayim (Egypt) comes and says – this growth of yours makes me nervous. You’re getting too big, too strong, too dangerous in your blossoming. It’s time to put some shackles on you.
We have, thank God, not been enslaved, but I think that socialization along with the inherited trauma of oppression lays its own kind of shackles and constraints on us as we grow up. There is some fear of our wildness and largeness and power if we are left too free, especially of our untamed feminine aspect.
Reclaiming Our Voice
I think that Pesach offers us an opportunity to reclaim this lost wild essence, our own exiled dibbur voice. Some have interpreted the name Pesach as made up of the words peh and sah which means “mouth speaking.” Indeed the heart of the seder is a mouth speaking, the speech act of maggid, of telling the story. Whereas in Egypt, Pharaoh proclaimed that he was worried pen yirbeh, lest the people multiply, here in the haggadah we use this same growth word to encourage the proliferation of speech – kol hamarbeh lesaper – whoever multiples her talking about Egypt is praiseworthy. Instead of having our voice restrained and exiled, we are encouraged to let it grow, multiply and take space. We add interpretation upon interpretation, words piled upon words, as a way of reclaiming our right to express ourselves, reclaiming our dibbur, our speech, our voice, from the forces that have wished to restrain and suppress it. Can you sense that possibility, that inkling, inside you, the torrent of speech that wants to flow out of you if the tap could be opened, if the ropes that hold you back could be undone, sensing the muchness, the harbeh, of the words that want to topple out of your body, both words of freely expressed song and also words of pain, the stories that have been trapped in the cells of your body waiting to be released and unbound, sensing their desire to burst forth.
The Mighty Arm That Releases
How do we do this? How do we release the constraints that hold all of that dibbur, that speech, back? There is only one force in the universe that can help us truly release – the yad hazakah, the powerful arm of healing that released us from Egypt and is ever desiring to help us release from our bonds. We need to know and believe that there is this great divine force of healing in the universe and that we can tap into it. Ana bekoach gedulat yeminkha, we say, please, with the might of your right arm, tatir tzerurah, undo the knots of the bound up one, and then kabel rinat amekha – and then, rinah, song, will emerge. There is a song bound up inside us waiting to be sung, one which only our Higher Power, the fierceness of the universe’s strong arm of redemption, can release in us.
This is not something that we do. It’s something that we allow to happen inside us. Relaxing and letting this strong arm of redemption, however you understand it, allowing the strength of the healing force of the universe and of your own intuitive bodily knowing, allowing that to act inside you, to unwind the knots, to release the constraints that hold your tzerurah, your bound up soul back from singing. Maybe you can feel the untying of knots, and the freedom, release and opening it brings, the ropes and tension that constrain us softening and melting like a rock turning into water, hahofkhi hatzur agam mayim, as we say in Hallel, all the hardness in us beginning to dissolve.
The Words That Pour Forth
What wants to emerge when this bodily release takes place? Sometimes when we get a therapeutic massage and some tension in our body is unwound, there is a sudden torrent of words that wants to flow out with it, like a tap opened up. All that tension was holding back the story, but now that there is release, our story can pour forth. Maybe you can feel this experience in your body, a sensation of outpouring, an opening of all the pores and cells, with or without any content, the sensation of words that want to pour through you, words that have been stopped up, exiled, silenced, here they are now, wanting to emerge
We were all the she’eyno yode’a lishol child, the one who couldn’t ask, couldn’t even speak at all, our dibbur exiled, and now – at petah lo – someone opens us up again on this night of haggadah, of story telling. We were held back from speaking, disempowered, we lost our voice, and now we reclaim ourselves and our voice and our own narrative and stories. We will not be silenced. We own our own history, both personal and collective, we tell it in our own way, and this telling saves us, redeems us, heals us. Maybe you can check inside for parts of your own story that have not been told, even inside yourself, and feeling the strength and the healing power of giving those stories a voice. “This is how it was for me,” you say. Do you hear me? I speak it into the universe, and through the speaking, reclaim my silenced voice, reclaim my own power.
God Calls Us Back Into Our Voice
God is continually calling to us on the wind to do this, to reclaim our voice – hashmi’ini et kolekh – let your voice be heard, my beloved, for your voice is beautiful (Song of Songs 2:14). Et hazamir higa, the time of singing has arrived. Sing out like the turtledove, my dove, sing out now as freely and naturally as a bird. You, too, have a song, God calls to us, kumi – arise, sing it out now into the world (Song 2:12-13). Can we hear that gentle divine call awakening us inside, awakening the song of our soul to flutter, arise and sing forth?
Song Like Water
Because on Pesach, we don’t just speak our story. We sing it out like a bird. The words and the narrative and the pain of the past (and the present), the sippur, all of it gradually shifts and blossoms into shir, into song. As we make our way through the seder and beyond, we are drawn inexorably towards the free expression of ourselves in song, drawn towards Hallel and Nirtzah and towards Shir Hashirim, the Song of Songs, and then shirat hayam, the Song at the Sea. It is as if a dam has burst inside us, at first the stories and words tumble out in fits and starts until finally the water flows smoother and more strongly, like a song of water. We stand at the sea and become ourselves like the sea, our mouths filled with song like water – ilu finu male shira kayam (from Nishmat Kol Chay, a Shabbat morning prayer). Maybe you can sense that water-like song in yourself now, in your mouth and your throat and your whole body, the song of your soul that has been wanting and waiting to pour out of you like the sea, letting it flow, this shirat hayam, your own natural flow of song.
Ozi vezimrat yah. This song is a song of oz, of strength, both mine, ozi, and God’s, belonging to yah. It is a song of strength, of empowerment, of my return to my own divine voice and essence, to inhabiting myself as I once did as a young child, freely expressing myself in all my full throated and fully embodied self. I return now to this essence but stronger, with more intention, aware of and aligned with the divine, including the past and the suffering and restraint in my tale and in my song, becoming whole again, becoming myself again in strength. May it be so for all.
