There is no prophet without a people,
there is no future without a family,
there is no Reed Sea without the river
where I put my brother in a basket.
There would have been no burning bush or plagues
or the peacemaker my brother AaronBrother of Moses, chosen as Moses' interlocutor. His Hebrew name is Aharon.,
there would have been none of it – not MosesThe quintessential Jewish leader who spoke face to face with God, unlike any other prophet, and who freed the people from Egypt, led them through the desert for forty years, and received the Torah on Mt. Sinai. His Hebrew name is Moshe. –
without the quick thinking of our mother.
And if we have been led between the sea
and onto dry ground beneath the water,
it wasn’t for any visions or signs
but for all the years that preceded them,
every mother, daughter and grandmother
who stayed close to God, and to our stories,
and who taught them to us with the timbrel,
light fingers at evening on the hand-drum
or the loud, dry beat on the hottest day,
four hundred years where prayer sounded like a drum,
where love and mourning, where rest and forced labor –
where it all sounds like – and somehow it is – a drum.
My brothers can have the signs and portents,
and the ones who are wise will find the words,
and our priests will roll out a ritual,
but for us women it’s the drum and the dance.
Not something stumbled across, out of the way,
not something earned through study, a puzzle,
but the drumming, like food, that got us through.
That’s why we stand up now and start singing.
Prophecy is the glue that yokes today
with tomorrow, it is one hopeful word,
it is a string of unhistoric acts
glittering with four-hundred years of us,
four-hundred years of mornings and evenings
when no one but the drum believed we’d survive,
a drum burning to the end of our lives,
a drum with a sound stronger than mountains.
