D'var Torah

How do we carry forward the legacies of people we’ve loved, and lost, after they die? How do we find our own way forward, for ourselves?

These are two of the central questions of this week’s Torah portion, Chukat. In Chukat, we meet the Ancient Israelites in a time of collective loss, and transition: the prophets Miriam and Aaron both die in Chukat, and Moses, while grieving his siblings, learns that he too will not live to enter the Promised Land. What will he do next? And what will the entire community, who was led for so many years by these three powerful leaders, do next?

These questions are not fully answered in Chukat, but the stories the portion tells (especially in Numbers 20 and 21) begin to gesture towards ways to approach them.

After Miriam dies (in Number 20:1), the community finds themselves without water, and falls into chaos as a result. Moses and Aaron go to God for help. They are told to ask a rock for water, and instead Moses hits it. Hitting the rock does produce water, but also incurs censure from God. (Whether this censure is fair and why it’s in the Torah is the subject of a lot of debate in Jewish thought — and a topic for another d’var.) 

Just before Moses hits the rock, though, the Torah offers us a fascinating play on words that might be an insight into one process of grief: Moses cries out to the people (who are protesting his leadership and their lack of water) “listen, you rebels!” The word Moses uses for “rebels,” morim, is spelled differently here than anywhere else in the Torah: מ–ר–י–ם, (mem-resh-yud-mem). Without vowels (and the Torah was originally written without vowels), this could also spell Miryam, or Miriam. A number commentators¹ have speculated that perhaps this unusual spelling of morim is a small clue in the text that Moses’ erratic behavior in this moment (his lack of calm with the people, and his decision to do something a lot more violent in his quest for water than God had originally suggested) may be related to grief for his older sister. 

The lack of water the community experiences in Chukat after Miriam’s death is also one of the catalysts for ancient midrashim (stories and commentaries on Torah) that imagine that Miriam had a well of water that traveled with the community as long as she was alive, and disappeared after she died.²

The story of Miriam’s well offers us, in some ways, a concretization of one of the big things many of us experience after losing someone: there are talents people have, beautiful things they bring to the world, that are totally unique. In Miriam’s case, her unique sparkle was represented by water, the life and sustenance she brought to her community. In some ways, when someone dies, the unique sparkle they brought to the world goes with them – just like Miriam’s well seemed to disappear with her. 

In other ways, though, we can help sustain a person’s legacy after they are gone by carrying on the work that mattered to them, and remembering the ways they touched our lives. The ancient midrashim about Miriam’s well also teach that her well eventually returned – first for Moses (when he was able to get the community water after all) and later, for subsequent generations in need.³ Today, many of us remember Miriam and honor her unique contributions (including her well) on Passover, with Miriam’s cup, a clear glass of water. 

There’s a beautiful poem by Marge Piercy that reads in part “bless the gift of memory/that breaks unbidden, released/from a flower or a cup of tea/so the dead move like rain through the room…”⁴

Part of what Chukat teaches us is that peoples’ legacies can be like water: sometimes elusive but sometimes beautifully present, nourishing, flowing around and through us in ways we expect and in ways that we don’t. May we be open this week to noticing and honoring the ways that the actions of people we have loved and lost, and people we never knew but who came before us, ripple through our lives … like water, like a well, present as a source of sustenance when we need. 

¹ I’m not sure of the first place I read this interpretation, but one of the essays that explores it is a commentary on Chukat by Ora Horn Prouser, on p. 931 of The Torah: A Women’s Commentary (ed. Tamara Cohn Eskenazi and Andrea L. Weiss (2008)).

² Miriam’s well appears in a number of midrashim, as well as the Mishnah and Talmud (which were composed contemporaneously with classical midrashim). One nice source where you can read about some of the different classical midrashim about Miriam is the Jewish Women’s Archive’s encyclopedia article “Miriam: Midrash and Aggadah,” accessed online at: https://jwa.org/encyclopedia/article/miriam-midrash-and-aggadah#pid-16154. 

³ See for example BT Shabbat 35a, which poetically suggests that Miriam’s well could be seen by subsequent generations if they were to visit the Sea of Galilee (which would have been one of  the nearby water sources for some of the Talmud’s original audience).

⁴ From part two of “Amidah: On Our Feet We Speak To You,” by Marge Piercy.