Shabbat Shalom.

Today, I’d like to talk about musical theater. Why is musical theater remarkably still popular in America today? True, the substance has changed dramatically over the last 80 years. From the classics of Showboat and Oklahoma to Guys and Dolls, West Side Story and Sondheim. From the rock musical hits of the seventies to Les Mis and Andrew Lloyd Webber in the eighties and nineties. Then on to Rocky Horror or Rent movie adaptations like Thoroughly Modern, Millie and the Producers and jukebox musicals like Jersey Boys and Abba’s Mamma Mia.

And of course, let’s not forget the show at the heart of televising the musical theater idiom in the twenty first century, Glee across age and gender in the theaters, movies and on television. Musical theater, perhaps strangely, perhaps not strangely, continues to hold a place in our hearts. Many of your children I know are aspiring or and or are current actors in school musicals, giving you the opportunity to not only ship naches, but to revisit the reasons that we love musicals in the 1st place.

And what are those reasons? Well, I discussed this with many cantorial friends who have musical theater, Disney and Broadway experience especially has a name daniel Friedman, who was on Broadway in Forever Plaid. Mike Stein, my clergy boy brother, who was in the original Broadway cast of Jesus Christ Superstar.

It’s a job come on. Laurie Brock, who worked for five years at Disney and was a professional voice over artist. Kenny Ellis, who was with me growing up in my father’s Youth Corral and later was in the same acting class with Robin Williams and appeared at the Improv Elinor Rod, a master of children’s music, and musicologist Matt Ousterkline. One reason is that musical theatre demonstrates to us the vitality of human life and human emotion through song. We follow Tony’s love of Maria with bated breath, and when he begins with the most beautiful sound I ever heard,

Our hearts sing with him. Maria, Maria, Maria, Maria.

When Curly tells us about there’s a bright golden haze on the Meadow and oh what a beautiful morning it is we too begin to imagine that moment where the birds are chirping and nature sings to our souls and we sense the chance that we too could one day feel that everything’s going my way. And when Elphaba defies Gravity in Wicked, we are filled with life affirming triumph at the thought that we too could rise up and defy all those voices and Wizards that ever thought they could bring us down. Musical theater shows us life and takes the emotions that we are so often out of touch with, happiness, sadness, grief, fear, love and lifts them up with music.

It raises a mirror to our hearts and like all theater, shows us new possibilities of what a full, a fully vital human life can be like. A life lived with all of the zest and passion of a tap dancing, harmony singing, kicklining, high note belting, standing ovation musical number. Why am I talking about this? Because this week’s parsha features probably the most famous musical number in Jewish history. Yes, even trumping Bach and Harden’s If I Were a Rich Man, this musical number is none other than Shirat Hayam, the Song at the Sea. How else can we explain thousands of Israelites breaking into the same song at one time with no rehearsal about an event that had just happened? Well, I’ll tell you that this very fact confounded the Rabbi’s as well.

The Talmud in Sota claims that the song was repeated, that the Israelites only repeated the song after Moses. The Tosefta, on the other hand, claims that the Holy Spirit came down and filled all the other lights with the same praise. And the Midrash and Mehilta Sherta can’t abide by this and claims that Moses must have sang on behalf of all of the Israelites. But really, the reason’s not so important. What’s important is the moment. This is the iconical musical number of the Bible, the paradigm, a biblical song. This musical moment is so important that we Jews reenacted by standing and singing during the Torah reading which you just saw, and by giving this Shabbat the special name of Shabbat Shira, Shabbat of the song.

In fact, this moment is so central that the Jewish people enshrined it in our sidur, in our daily prayers. And this morning we read a paraphrase of this very scene. Moshe b’nei Isreal lecha shira, Moses and the children of Israel sang to you a song Besimaha raba, with great joy, the Amaruhullah, and they all said MI chamocha bailim adonai

Whenever we sing Mi chamocha, we are reenacting this dramatic moment. We are travelling back thousands of years and joining our ancestors at the sea. We are taking our place with them in the chorus, singing out our praises, tap dancing our joy, belting out our liberty and kick lining our way down the yellow brick road to the promised land. It’s inspiring stuff. But somehow shul seems to rarely end up being that dramatic. Which leads me to the classic question that has been asked by generation after generation of Jews. Why is shul not like a musical?

Think about it. Is it simply that some shuls don’t use instrumentation? Is it that we need a different type of music? Or maybe if more people came to shul, a lot more people with sequence, perhaps myself. I believe it is for two reasons. One is that as actors in this musical we struggle to learn our lines. The Hebrew can be challenging and the sidur, the script is really long. The musical of the service is diverse, the music of the service is diverse, and sometimes new melodies come in that we never heard before, and on a ground level we struggle to really know what the words mean.

It is clear that the musical of the sidur, like any script, requires rehearsal. If we simply knew the words, what they meant, and knew all of the tunes, it would not necessarily produce the kind of fervor and passion that we look for in musical theater. There are plenty of services out there filled with knowledgeable people and yet somehow lack passion and spirit. But how can this be? What could be missing? I believe that if services are without passion, if shul is not like a musical, it is because we are not yet like the characters.

In some ways, our ancestors had it easy. They experienced Deliverance coming out of Egypt, the hand of God, all first hand. They didn’t even have to be method actors. They lived it, but ever since then, generation after generation of Jews have prayed these words without having been there. They have simply acted as if, as if the Haggadah reminds us each year. They saw themselves as we must see ourselves, as each of one of us had been personally taken out of Egypt. Abraham Joshua Heschel, in his book Man’s Quest for God, puts the issue succinctly.

The problem is not how to revitalize prayer, Heschel says. The problem is how to revitalize ourselves. We must learn, it continues, how to study the inner life of the words that fill the world of our prayer book without intense study of their meaning. We feel indeed bewildered when we encounter the multitude of those strange, lofty beings that populate the inner cosmos of the Jewish spirit. It’s not enough to know how to translate Hebrew into English. It is not enough to have met a word in the dictionary and to have experienced unpleasant adventures with it in the study of grammar.

A word has a soul, and we must learn how to attain insight into its life. My friends, the Sidor is the script for the musical of our lives, and our job is to discover the characters that the Sidor encourages us to be. If we look, as Heschel says, to the inner life, the soul of the words, we discover much about the characters who wrote them. We find that they were sensitive to the miracles of creation, they were steadfast in their love of man, of law, and of wisdom, and they were passionate about faith and the redemption of our lives.

From the table in the corner they could see a world reborn, redeemed both by God’s hands and our own. And they rose with voices ringing, singing.

The song of the sea, the music of the people who will not be slaves again. This is our musical, the one that we enact every Shabbat and every day. And to feel that zest, to experience the vitality of life through song, not only must be prepared for our minds, our mouths and our voices, but our souls as well, to be transformed by this role that we were each born to play. It’s a commitment requiring study, rehearsal, and an open heart. For some it may come easy, and for some it will be it feel first like acting, But even acting as if, as we learned in the Seder, can have profound effects upon us, opening us to deeper experiences than we ever thought possible.

Only then, when we join in this act of 1 finale together, not only will we know the lines, we will be the characters. We will feel the redemption of our people, of our families, and what it means for us to be redeemed. We know our duty is to bring redemption to the world and pour forth our boundless gratitude to the Holy 1, the Redeemer of Israel. That is the soul of the musical theatre of the synagogue. When the beating of your heart echoes the beat of these words. There is a life about to start, and it is a Jewish life of boundless possibility.

It may seem like that life will only open and only happen tomorrow, but as as we know, tomorrow comes Shabbat Shalom.