To be free requires unshackling ourselves from the hold of the past and its limitations upon us. View the study sheet here. Watch the recording here.
The artist, the poet, the musician…these cause tyrants to tremble. And they are among the first to experience the tyrant’s iron fist. The Nazi banning of all modern art. Stalin’s mass murder of hundreds of Ukrainian itinerant folk singers and musicians. Augusto Pinochet’s arrest and torture of hundreds of Chilean muralists. The brutal torture and murder by Pinochet’s forces of singer-songwriter Victor Jara. The suppression of artistic expression by the Chinese government, including the arrests and ongoing harassment of artist Ai Weiwei.
Why do despots fear artists so? Because artists compose throughlines that connect people both to their origins and to their dreams. They open up to us vistas that we feel are there but that need a skilled hand or voice to be brought into focus for us. The despot seeks to control everything, to guard the gates to the past and to control the portals to the future. The artist journeys into the realm of imagination and encourages us to cross over as well, to go beyond what has been imposed upon us.
The artist Wassily Kandinsky even soared past a limitation that most of us stop at: the distinction between what can be seen and what can be heard. He experienced sounds upon gazing at colors. This cross-stimulation of senses is something that we will soon read about the Israelites experiencing at Mount Sinai.
The Shabbat on which we read Parshat Beshalach is not called the Shabbat of Going Forth or the Shabbat of Crossing the Sea. It is called Shabbat Shirah, the Shabbat of Song. And all the people sang at their crossing over from their enslavement. They set their souls vibrating, creating a resonance that to this day shakes the very foundations of oppression everywhere. This is what tyrants fear most.
There are actually two songs sung by the Israelites at the sea. And one of them shatters even the walls of time itself.
Join us here at 7:00 p.m. (PST) Thursday January 13 as we explore beyond limitations.
