What radio stations do you listen to? My guess is that the answer to the question varies depending mostly on age. My default station is KUHF for the classical music and NPR news.

But it's not the only station I listen to. I also listen to light jazz occasionally. However, the station I listen to most when I'm not tuned to KUHF is the one that plays music from my personal past...music of the 40's and 50's and 60's. Why? Because associated with much of the music being broadcast are personal memories.

There are a couple of songs they play from time to time that my mother and father loved to dance to, so hearing the music makes me think of them. There's one that I learned to cha-cha to. Another that was my favorite jitterbug with Mary Virginia Hardison in the 6th grade; I hear it, and I'm 12 again. Of course, there are a few that were gems for making out in the back seat of my mother's '57 Chevy. And I can't hear The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face, without thinking of Linda's and my wedding. That was the song the band was supposed to play for our first dance, but didn't because they couldn't find the music. What's funny is, I'm not sure what song they did play, so if I hear that one I have no association with it. The one they were supposed to play was our song, so that's the one that conjures up the memory and the feelings.

The point, of course, is that music has this magical quality to lift us and move us and touch us in very personal ways. One song means the world to one person and is just a song to another.

But there are songs, there is music, that plucks a common thread. I can't speak for you, but the Star Spangled Banner and Stars and Stripes Forever touch the patriotic American inside all of us. Kol Nidre and Hatikvah touch the Jewish part of our my soul. And what is a Jewish wedding without Hava Nagilah, that gets everyone's feet moving.

Tonight, we have another instance of the power of music. Contained in this week's portion are the words to the Mi Chamocha. And though we sing many other parts of the service, this one began as a song. It's part of the longer song sung by Moses and the people of Israel as they stood at the shore of the Reed Sea after crossing safely to the other side and seeing the Egyptians drown. Rejoicing that at last they were truly free, free of slavery and free of a Pharaoh who kept changing his mind, they broke out in song to celebrate.

While the melody may have changed, the words we sing are the same: "Who is like You, O lord, among the gods that are worshiped? Who like You, awesome in holiness, can work such wonders?

And we sing the words, albeit to a different melody than our ancestors standing at the edge of the sea, we connect with them and their experience. Like listening to a song on the radio that connects us to a moment from our individual past, this song connects us to a moment from our shared past. "It enables us," to quote one commentary on this verse, "to experience the event as if we were there. When we chant the Mi Chamocha, the wind blows through our hair, the salty spray stings our eyes, the water rushes as it parts. We relive the power of that ancient moment each time we pray, each time we sing the words composed by our newly freed ancestors."

Together the works and the music conjure shared memories of suffering, struggling, relief, hope, freedom. Not just those memories from that moment, but from throughout history. We are a people with a history, and words like this connect us to that history.

But they also reminds us that we live in a present that needs opportunities to sing such a song of rejoicing. While we stand not just at the shore of freedom's sea but really far beyond, not everyone does. The Mi Chamocha helps to keep us focused on some of the most important values in Jewish history by reliving one of its moments. If the prayer is to have meaning for us when we sing it, then it's not enough to remember our ancestors' triumph over their oppression; we have to also commit ourselves to helping others in our day triumph over their oppression.

And that, after all, is one of the major functions of prayer in Judaism. Not only to communicate with God, not only to remind ourselves of who we are and what our history is, but to commit ourselves to live by the values we learn from our history that God expects us to live by. Not just the Mi Chamocha, but ultimately every prayer in the prayer book:
The prayer for peace.
The prayer for healing.
The prayer for plenty.
The prayer for forgiveness.
The prayer for.... You get the idea, surely.

And underneath it all, underlying all these values is our belief in a universal God who cares not just for us but for all human beings, in whose image every one of us is created, regardless of our station in life. Beneath the differences that distinguish us from one another, beneath the strife and the turmoil the result from our disagreements and arguments, beneath the evil and horror that we are too often perpetrate on each other, lies a God-given soul that each of us must strive to discover in ourselves and respect in others.

You know the midrash by now, I'm sure, that while the people of Israel were singing the Mi Chamocha, the angels were also rejoicing. And God chastises them for rejoicing, because even though the Egyptians are Israel's enemy, they are still God's children.

To sing the Mi Chamocha, then, is not only to remember the rejoicing, but also the remember the chatisement. It is to stand at the shore on the far side of the sea elated for freedom, and at the same time, like God, sad that human beings had to die to accomplish it.

There is a lyric most of you know which says something like, "the song is over, but the melody lingers on." The song sung by the Israelites as they stood at the shore ended as they turned to continue their journey. But the melody, in this case the values we can learn from those who sang it, like the scent of fine perfume, lingers and enriches us.

Let us never forget the joy of freedom, so that we will help others rejoice as they go free. And let us never forget the shared humanity that binds all of us into one family, all created in God's image, all defined ultimately by the soul placed there by the Creator of us all.

Shabbat Shalom.

Based on an idea by Rabbi Donald Goor and Cantor Evan Kent