Haredim To Bolt Moses’s Coalition Over Mention Of Miriam’s Song

Moses has yet to respond to the demand, which gives him a deadline of nightfall tomorrow to decide between including the passage in the Torah and maintaining the fragile coalition.

Wilderness of Shur, April 25 – Ultra-Orthodox members of Moses’s governing coalition in the Knesset are threatening to leave the government if Miriam’s song after the Splitting of the Sea is included in the Torah, Israelite sources reported today.

Several Haredi ministers issued an ultimatum this morning (Sunday) that they could not accept such a flagrant violation of modesty as having a woman’s public singing and dancing recorded for posterity as if that were a perfectly acceptable thing, and that if Moses would not agree to remove the account of his sister Miriam’s leading the Israelite women in singing and dancing following God’s rescue of the people from the pursuing Egyptians at the Sea of Reeds, they would leave the coalition and bring down the government.

“It is a breach of modesty for this to be given such sanction,” declared MK Moshe Gafni of the United Torah Judaism faction. “We cannot have our developing sacred text condone, let alone positively describe, a woman singing and dancing in public. It goes against traditional values and promotes licentiousness. We will not sit in a coalition that endorses such public immodesty.”

The singing and dancing took place after the people emerged from the sea and saw the pursuing Egyptian soldiers dead on the shore. The entire nation then experienced prophetic revelation and recited an epic poem praising the Lord and foreseeing how the nations in their path toward Canaan and the establishment of a Temple there would tremble in fright and melt away. Immediately following that prophetic outburst, Miriam took her tambourine and gathered the women to sing a paraphrase of one selection of the larger poem, and to dance in circles. While the women’s celebration took place separately, in keeping with Haredi sensibilities, Gafni and his colleagues are demanding that no mention be made of the event, since discussing immodest displays, even if they occurred out of the view of men, is inappropriate.

Moses has yet to respond to the demand, which gives him a deadline of nightfall tomorrow to decide between including the passage in the Torah and maintaining the fragile coalition. Analysts differ on which side will prevail, and whether Moses will be able to forge a new coalition agreement with others to maintain a majority. The leading candidate appears to be the Egypt Was Better Party, a potentially troublesome coalition partner that parted ways with Moses on an earlier occasion immediately prior to the Splitting of the Sea when they threatened national discipline by loudly insisting it would have been better to remain enslaved in Egypt than wherever Moses was leading them.

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