Despite the fact that many of us will be celebrating American independence on Friday, mood-wise this is an ambiguous week at best in the Jewish calendar. True, Thursday and Friday are Rosh Hodesh, the beginning of a new month. On the other hand, the month coming in is Tammuz, a month known mostly for its 17th day, a fast day to commemorate the breaching of the walls of Jerusalem and the onset of the 3 weeks leading to the 9th of Av, the day on which we mark the destruction of both the first and second Temples.
What is more, the parashah this week, Hukkat, is mournful, and over-burdened with death. It begins with the complicated, complex, and theologically challenging rite of sacrificing a red heifer and burning its carcass so that the ashes may become part of the necessary mixture by which people are purified from the ritual impurity, tumah, that comes from contact with a corpse. Perhaps this is necessary, so that we are ready for the significant – and theologically challenging – deaths and foreshadowing of a death that take place in the next chapter of the parashah. Miriam, Aaron, and Moses – as the journey through the desert nears its end, a generation, including its most important leaders, is in the process of passing off the stage, while a new one prepares to step into its place.
The death of Miriam takes not even a full verse to relate, and so is in danger of being overlooked and/or underappreciated, but is actually particularly striking, both precisely for the terseness with which it is described, and the placement of that description within the larger narrative of the parashah. All of chapter 19 deals with the red heifer and with the tumah imparted by a human corpse or part thereof. Chapter 20 opens with the following (translation courtesy of Everett Fox):
Now they came, the Children of Israel, the entire community, (to the) Wilderness of Tzyn, in the first New-Moon. The people stayed in Kadesh. Miryam died there, and she was buried there. (Num. 20:1)
From there, the next verse goes right to what seems to be another topic:
Now there was no water for the community, so they assembled against Moshe and against Aharon. (20:2)
The rabbis are big on juxtapositions. If seemingly unrelated things are next to each other in the biblical text, then there must be some connection between them. In this case, the rabbis have answers for how this verse relates both to what came before it and what will come after it. I’m going to take up the latter of those in a moment, but first I want to take long enough for us to consider what isn’t here, that we might have expected to be here.
At the end of the chapter, capping seven verses that describe Aaron’s death (20:23-29), we are told:
the entire community saw that Aharon had expired, and they wept for Aharon thirty days, the whole House of Israel.
At almost the very end of the Torah, we are further told:
The Children of Israel wept for Moshe in the Plains of Moav for thirty days. Then the days of weeping in mourning for Moshe were ended. (Deut. 34:8)
Which provokes the question: did the people weep for Miriam for thirty, or any other number, of days? If not, why not? What happened to them – the mourning days, and/or the people?
Keep that question in mind as we turn to the juxtaposition of Miriam’s death with the next verse. The people lack water, and come to Moses and Aaron to express their displeasure. Their complaint will be a familiar one – why did you take us out of Egypt, and out into the wilderness where we will surely die! After 38 or 39 years of living in that very wilderness, you’d think they might know better by now, but apparently not.
Perhaps something has changed? In fact, this juxtaposition is the source for a very famous midrashic theme: Miriam’s well. According to the rabbis, because of Miriam’s merit, a miraculous well traveled with the Children of Israel through the desert, insuring that there was always pure water for them to drink. We "know" this because just as soon as she dies, there is no water – with her death, the well ceases to be.
There’s much to be said about Miriam’s well, and its revival as a symbol and concept in Jewish feminist thought in particular – none of which I’m going to say here. Rather, I want to go on with the juxtaposition of Miriam’s death, and the question of whether and how she was mourned, and what happens when Moses and Aaron must respond to the complaining people:
Moshe and Aharon came away from the presence of the assembly to the entrance to the Tent of Appointment, and flung themselves on their faces. The Glory of YHWH was seen by them, and YHWH spoke to Moshe, saying: Take the staff and assemble the community, you and Aharon your brother; you are to speak to the boulder before their eyes so that it gives forth its water, thus you are to bring out for them water from the boulder, that you may give-drink to the assembly and to their cattle. So Moshe took the staff from before the presence of YHWH, as he had commanded him. And Moshe and Aaron assembled the assembly facing the boulder. He said to them: Now hear, (you) rebels, from this boulder must we bring you out water? And Moshe raised his hand and struck the boulder with his staff, twice, so that abundant water came our; and the community and their cattle drank. Now YHWH said to Moshe and to Aharon: Because you did not have-trust in me to treat-me-as-holy before the eyes of the Children of Israel, therefore: you (two) shall not bring this assembly into the land that I am giving them! Those were the warers of Meribah/Quarreling, where the Children of Israel quarreled with YHWH, and he was hallowed through them. (6-13)
Together with the rite of the red heifer, these may be among the most mysterious verses in the Torah. Many, many words of commentary have been written on the nature of Moses’ act, what made it a sin, and why God responded as God did. Less commentary, but not none, has asked how this episode is connected to Miriam’s death, and the mourning that did or did not take place for her.
Two late midrashim fill in some of the "between" story of these two events. The following is from Otzar Midrashim:
Miriam died, and the well was taken away so that Israel would recognize that it was through her merit that they had had the well. Moses and Aaron were weeping inside, and (the Children of) Israel were weeping outside, and for six hours Moses did not know (that the well was gone), until (the Children of) Israel entered and said to him: For how long will you sit and cry? He said to them: Should I not cry for my sister who has died? They said to him: While you are crying for one person, cry for all of us! He said to them: Why? They said to him: We have no water to drink. He got up from the ground and went out and saw the well without a drop of water (in it). He began to argue with them...
What intrigues me here is not the substance of Moses’ argument with the people, but the very fact that his reaction is one of anger. Granted that his mourning has been interrupted, but perhaps there is a genuine crisis here! In fact, Moses’ reaction feels very familiar to my own experience of mourning. For a month or more after my mother died, I couldn’t even begin to really cry; I think on some sub-conscious level I feared, or knew, that if I started, I might not be able to stop. Instead, I was irritable, constantly irritable. I could watch myself get irritated, know it was happening, and still not be able to stop the reaction. Was I really mad at my children, or my husband, or my friends, or the stranger in the car on the road in front of me?
Is Moses really mad at the Israelites, or is he channeling his grief at his sister’s death indiscriminately outwards? In The Torah: A Women’s Commentary, Ora Horn Prouser makes a striking and startling observation:
Before hitting the rock, Moses cries out ‘Listen, you rebels!’ (v. 10). The word for ‘rebels’ is morim, and it appears nowhere else in the Bible in this form. Remarkably, in their unvocalized form the words, morim (rebels) and miryam (Miriam) are identical; both words are made up of the same four Hebrew consonants: m-r-y-m. (931)
This is what we really feel when someone dies: I am angry at you for leaving me. But that’s hard to say, and usually unfair when you come down to it. It’s not as if my mother chose to have a brain-tumor that slowly robbed her of her ability to speak and her mobility before killing her; she’d have been just as happy to live to 120, thank you very much. So we redirect that anger, all too often at others who don’t deserve it.
So where can we direct that anger? Here is another version of the interacting crises of Miriam’s death and the disappearance of the people’s water source, from Yalkut Shimoni:
And when the well was taken away, they began to gather against Moses and against Aaron, as it is written... Moses and Aaron were sitting and mourning for Miriam. God said to them: Because you are mourners, they should die of thirst? Get up and take your staff and give the community and their cattle something to drink.
A little further on, the passage suggests slightly different, harsher, words from God:
"The Glory of YHWH was seen by them" – The Holy One, Blessed Be, said to them, to the servants of the community: Leave here, quickly! My children are dying of thirst, and you are sitting and mourning this old woman?
So finally, my midrash on the midrash... Is it just me, or does it seem like God is actually trying to provoke Moses? Why might God do that? My thought is that God is trying to draw off Moses’ hurt and anger, onto Godself. The idea of being angry at God may feel a bit heretical, but also, frankly, perfectly logical. After all, God is the creator of all, including evil and death (see Isaiah 45:7). We may believe in a blockquoteine plan beyond our ability to comprehend, but in the meantime, we are in pain and we know God has something to do with it!
The midrash, at least as I want to read it, tells us that God will accept and absorb our feelings of hurt and anger, even that God is the most proper One to accept and absorb them. Indeed, one is surprised that Moses, of all people, seems to forget this in this moment. Moses’ sin manifests itself in misdirected anger, but is more fundamentally rooted, as God says, in a failure of trust, a failure of relationship. If Moses forgets to have faith in God’s on-going love for him, even when he gets upset and angry at (from the human perspective) the unfairness of it all, how can the rest of us hope to remember? And yet we must, for if we do, we will find that God can be, as God is described many times in the Bible, our Healer. It is part of the human condition to be, too often, broken-hearted, angry, and in despair. But if we direct even those terrible emotions towards God, towards relationship and connection with God, then God can be for us, in the words of Psalm 147:3, "the Healer of broken hearts."
Shabbat shalom.