You Are Not Free Until You Can Sing Egypt is more than a geographical location where our ancestors were once enslaved. Egypt represents the boundaries that confine and limit each one of us. We are commanded to "remember the day you left Egypt every day of your life", because, each day, we are empowered to escape our own personal Egypt, to escape the stagnation and confinement of our habits, nature, and circumstances. But even after we escaped Egypt, we are not yet entirely free. Just as the Jewish people were frightened of the Egyptians until the Red Sea was split, we too are under threat from our confining limitations until we cross the metaphorical sea within ourselves. Only then are we fully liberated, capable of singing, as our ancestors sang, the "Song of the Sea". The sea, explains the Kabbalah, represents the barrier between the conscious mind and the soul's hidden deeper recesses. When our experience is limited to our conscious self, then, even if we are free, we are susceptible to sadness, melancholy, and boredom, which drains us of passion and excitement. To experience the joy of life, we have to split the sea. We must tear the barrier between the conscious mind and the core of our soul. For our soul never gets bored of life, it is never drained of excitement. Like a torch continuously surging upward, our soul is in constant motion, continually yearning to transcend and reunite with its source. The soul's yearning is what fills it with joy every time it can act on its desire to transcend. Every connection with another person, every Mitzvah it performs, is as exhilarating to the soul as cold water is to the person in an arid desert. Since the conscious mind is oblivious to the thirst and yearning of the soul, it is therefore indifferent to the passion of the soul's never-ending dance between longing and joy. Just as we are commanded to remember the exodus of Egypt every day, the Midrash explains, so are we commanded to mention the splitting of the sea each day, which is why we include the "Song of the Sea" in our morning prayers. The key to connecting to the passion of our soul is music. For unlike almost any other pleasure, we don't get bored of music. When learning, inquiring, or reading, enjoyment is associated with novelty. We enjoy the new idea the moment we hear about it, and from then on, the "return", the pleasure, diminishes. The same is true about eating delicious food or any other pleasure. The second piece of chocolate cake is never as enjoyable as the first. Music is an exception. Generally speaking, the music we love most is the music we heard many times over. In fact, the more we listen to a piece of music, the more we enjoy it. That is because music touches the core of our soul, which feels the intensity of the continuous dance of life, the yearning, and the joy. Each morning, as we sing the Song of the Sea, we participate in the dance. We sing together with our soul, feel its yearning, and rejoice in its pleasure of connecting to G-d. Ohr Hatorah Shmos, vol. 2 page 397.
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