A Season of Singing by Sarah M. Ross

Author:Sarah M. Ross [Ross, Sarah M.]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Social Science, Jewish Studies, Music, Religious, Jewish, Biography & Autobiography, Composers & Musicians
ISBN: 9781611689617
Google: C8yQDAAAQBAJ
Publisher: Brandeis University Press
Published: 2016-08-16T04:09:27+00:00

FIGURE 3.8: “Miriam Haneviyah” (1987) © Rabbi Leila Gal Berner

In addition, Jewish women consider themselves to be successors of the women’s community that followed Miriam in dance and song (see Adelman 1990, 69) and accept Miriam’s heritage in the form of her song. Thus, rabbinical interpretations say that one reason for the fragmentary tradition of “Miriam’s Song” conveyed through the Torah is that future generations have to complete her song (see ibid., 32 and 49). The function of feminist Jewish songs about Miriam, thus, is not only to honor her and to make her present in today’s feminist rituals, but also to give women the chance to relive the Exodus and the event at the Red Sea (where Miriam celebrates the Israelites’ liberation from slavery together with the women) through song. As can be seen in performances of the Rosh Hodesh ritual, the diverse aspects of the biblical woman Miriam are performed through a wide variety of traditional and feminist songs, as well as through instrumental music (see S. Ross 2004, 41). In comparison to Friedman’s well-known “Miriam’s Song” that celebrates the early part of the prophetess’s life, Friedman and Tamara Cohen’s “The Water in the Well” (released on the album The Water in the Well, 2001; see figure 3.9) brings to light and to voice—as Tamara Cohen explained it in an e-mail message to me on November 8, 2013—some of the midrashic interpretations about Miriam’s well, and thus the association of water with the spiritual life of Jewish women.

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