Singing abides deep in the intrinsic nature of existence. It cannot be alienated.

In the dark times, will there also be singing?
Yes, there will be singing.
About the dark times.
~ Bertold Brecht

That is why the authors, whoever they were, who composed Perek Shirah, ‘The Chapter of Song,’ were not satisfied that the ancient Mishnaic texts which reached them should speak only of law and ethics. For beneath even the basic, essential truths that address the will and conscience, they sensed a further depth of consciousness, an awareness of the sacred, and that consciousness sings. Not only, therefore, did they compose their chapter in its honour, but it seems they backdated pseudepigraphically it to that core creative rabbinic period of the first and second centuries of our epoch, as if to say: This is not only equally as valid and as holy, as necessary to the life of the spirit as keeping the Sabbath, or proclaiming ‘God is one’: it is, in fact, the true meaning of ‘God is one,’ the truth that nourishes all subsequent truth, the essence of being itself. Hence, they understood that not an orb, nor a whale in the ocean, nor a bird, nor a human soul in its journey across the span of life, but will, sometimes even unknown to itself, be susceptible to song.

Song may be bleak and painful. The other prisoners, tortured by the Apartheid regime in South Africa’s jails, would sing, whether from horror, fear or solidarity, while their fellow victims of the regime, innocent as they themselves were except for protesting the tyranny of their government, were taken for execution. And today, the priests, rabbis, imams and population of Minnesota and elsewhere who stand against the extra-judicial murders of their townsfolk, sing. Song is indefatigable in its protest.

The poets and musicians may themselves be killed; those who hate freedom will continue to seek them out and murder them, but their poetry and songs cannot be put to death:

You took away all the oceans and all the room.
You gave me my shoe-size in earth with bars around it.
Where did it get you? Nowhere.
You left me my lips, and they shape words, even in silence.
~ Osip Mandelstam

And even when those lips can no longer make words, – Stalin had Mandelstam exiled and he died in transit – the words they shaped continued to be learnt by heart, whispered while tyranny reigns, but sung when freedom returns.

For there exists a deeper music to which the human soul, and the spirit of every being, responds. This music belongs to no one, which is why it cannot be locked away. It is the vibrancy, the rhythm and resonance of life itself, of infinity, of God if you will, of the sacred energy as it flows through all creation, through everything that exists. Only the hard heart cannot hear it; that is why the cruel in spirit persecute those who can.

It is this song, taught Rabbi Yehudah Aryeh-Leib of Ger, that the Children of Israel sang when Pharaoh was defeated, not on account of his death, but from the joy of liberty. And in their own song of freedom, they sung the freedom song of all creation. For the Torah says: ‘They sung this song,’ but to what does this refer? he asks, rejecting the obvious answer that it refers to the words which follow in the text. No, he insists, this points to the song that has existed from the moment of creation, the music which is present but concealed in all things, and which although so often unheard, is the invisible essence and source of energy of all that exists. It is the song of the earth ‘from whose corners we hear music;’ of the trees of the forest which clap their hands and dance, and of the wild geese, pulsing forth in honks and powerful wingbeats as they traverse the sky: ‘A voice calls out in desolate places: make straight the pathway through the wilderness for God.’ It is the song which shall be sung in the time to come, when the world is redeemed.

Is this true? One doesn’t hear such music in the headlines about brutality, murder, injustice, contempt and incitement to hatred that fill the virtual realms of social media and the press. There is little if any testament to such music in the reports from witnesses to mass killing, secret murder, torture, sadism, lying, deceit and pretence, a literature so vast and horrible that it’s unbearable to contemplate for long, but which must also be heard and heeded. Song, or sob, which is the deeper reality? The answer must be both, or else we too will join the heartless throng.

But the singing remains, inalienable, even when inaudible. For it derives from a source which flows deeper and sustains life more truly than the selfishness, fear, envy and anger, the failure of compassion and imagination, which shrink the heart.

And were it not for this singing, humanity would have no hope.