A New Yorker cartoon pictures a bird on a branch. “It is not true,” says the bird, “that I sing because I am happy. I am happy because I sing.” So what comes first, singing or happiness?

At least with this week’s portion’s “Song of the Sea,” the answer is clear. The Israelites miraculously cross on dry land and watch the walls of water bury their pursuers; only then are they ready for song. Their leaders oblige, first Moses and then Miriam. Responding to this unexpected and incomparable joy, they appear together, two prophets, leading the people in song.

Ever since, we have replicated their example: singing to God at moments of joy. The Temple service featured a choir with instrumental accompaniment. The synagogue service followed suit. For as long as anyone knows, we have been singing the ending of this week’s song (Mi Hamocha) every single day. Eventually, the whole thing was added to the early morning service called P’sukei d’Zimra (“Verses of Song”), intended as a musical warm-up for morning prayer.

But we have become like the bird on the branch. As at the Sea of Reeds, we too know moments of joy that move us to song. But more often than not, our days are pedestrian. When we return home from work, we rarely look back on miracles that made us sing. Like the cartoon bird, our happiness usually depends upon a song sung first. Worse still, with Moses and Miriam long gone, we have no prophets to orchestrate our chorus.

Instead, we have cantors — and a rich musical tradition that rarely gets its due. Having few miracles that prompt us to song, we require Jewish song to lead us to miracles.

Western listeners find our liturgical music baffling; it has no octaves, no regularized rhythm, nothing akin to either Beethoven or the Beatles. To the beginner, it may all sound the same. I remember classical music sounding that way to me once — until someone taught me how to listen intelligently. We ought to have a mandatory Jewish music appreciation course.

Graduates would discover trope, the musical system to which the Torah and haftara are sung — and not just one pattern, but many, depending on the day: a version for Shabbat, another for the High Holy Days, one for the Purim megilla, and more. The prayers themselves are led with something called “modes,” each with its own musical flavor, to match and to mark the calendrical flow of time.

And somewhere, somehow, songs developed, sometimes based on these Jewish modes and sometimes not. Many, like our familiar Birkat Hamazon (which builds upon Eastern European folk melodies), were borrowed from music Jews heard from the cultures in which they found themselves. Or think of the usual Sh’ma — a cantor in Vienna set it as a waltz. But sometimes also, Jews repaid the compliment: Listen to “It Ain’t Necessarily So,” from Porgy and Bess, and you will hear echoes of the blessings we say when called to the Torah — a tune that composer George Gershwin learned for his bar mitzva, and never forgot.

As with any art form, music invites increasing degrees of complexity, so Ashkenazi cantors learned to improvise, a sort of Jewish jazz. Not for nothing did the plot of The Jazz Singer, the first “talkie” movie, feature the son of a cantor struggling with dual identity: to become a cantor like his father or a jazz singer. In the 20th century, a tradition of Jewish art-song emerged. By now we have everything, from choral to camp, all coming together in a uniquely American blend of sacred song.

Not to appreciate this evolving musical tradition is tragic, first and foremost because of the problem that Moses and Miriam never had to face: the need for music to evoke miracles rather than the other way around. According to the midrash, Moses did not initiate singing when Israel left Egypt, for fear that no one would sing along with him. He had to wait for the right miracle to happen. Today, song comes first. There is nothing like music to convince us of the divine miracles we otherwise do not appreciate — like love, friendship, hope, the rhythms of the universe, an unexpected favor, and even the blessing of meaningful grief in the wake of someone’s death (that too is evoked by music, the plaintive sound of El Malei Rahamim, the funeral prayer that promises divine care for the souls of the dead).

I wish I could just open my eyes to see miracles around me. They are there, but my eyes do not always take them in. So I attend synagogue to open my ears and my mouth in songful prayer, and to know what I otherwise would have missed: the miracles upon miracles that Jewish music announces by its melodies.