Rabbi Nathan offered a striking interpretation of the word bakosharoth from (Psalms 68:7), "He takes out the bound bakosharoth." Rather than reading it as a single word, he split it into two: bakho (crying) and meshorerim (singing). Two sounds, happening simultaneously, on opposite sides of the same event.
The Egyptians were crying. (Numbers 33:4) confirms this: "And the Egyptians were burying those whom the Lord had struck among them, every firstborn." While parents dug graves and wailed over their dead children, while an empire reeled from the devastation of the tenth plague, something entirely different was happening in the Israelite quarter.
Israel was singing. (Psalms 118:15) captures their joy: "A sound of song and salvation in the tents of the righteous. The right hand of the Lord is uplifted." Rabbi Nathan added that the uplifted right hand was directed specifically against Egypt — the same hand that saved was the hand that struck.
The image is deliberate in its dissonance. Liberation and devastation are not sequential events. They are the same event experienced from two sides. The night of the Exodus was a night of weeping and a night of singing, funeral and festival, collapse and redemption — all at once. God's justice and God's mercy did not take turns. They arrived together, in a single moment that divided the world into those who mourned and those who were finally free.