We’re All Mourning Something
Rabbi Noa Kushner
Parashat Chukat
June 18th 2021
A teaching about the consequence of skipping grief and going to the next crisis, how we might instead shoulder the losses and build new / old ways to be together again.
1.
I know things have not been easy this year
So it pains me to have to tell you
That in addition to everything else
That this week in Torah
Miriam is also dying
Miriam, our prophetess, is in her tent and her students are gathered all around her bed
Actually, it is the children of her students because that whole first generation of the desert, are gone, that is, except for Miriam and her brothers, Moses and Aaron
And by the way I am making up this death scene because it is not in the Torah and the rabbis
While deeply creative, somehow missed this one (1)
Miriam is dying
She sleeps in the shade of the tent, her students around her
She wakes up and asks for a little water
And then, seemingly out of nowhere, says,
“Remember the songs I taught you?”
Her students say, “Yes,” because
Their mothers and fathers taught them all her songs
To be honest, some of those songs are so old, the students
aren’t really sure what they mean anymore
But yes, they know the songs
“And the one about the water?” she asks, You remember that
one?"
“Ya” they say, again, because she has asked this many times
before over the past few days, “We remember the one about
the water.”
Now the water song was a song that had a repeating chorus but
you could pretty much sing whatever you wanted for the verses,
as long as the phrasing fit
“Sing it for me,” says Miriam, and she makes all the young
people
each one, one at a time, take a verse and the chorus
The chorus that just says,
עֲלִ֥י בְאֵ֖ר
“spring up, well,
עֱנוּ־לָֽהּ
sing to it” (2)
They all sing that well song into the later part of the day
Until everyone is getting hungry
And Miriam looks very tired
“Remember, it helps to bring the water” she says
No one knows what she means
But not everything she says makes sense these days anyway
Some of it’s just mixed up stuff from the old times
So they nod politely
Before they file out to eat the evening meal
2.
That night Miriam dies (3) in her sleep
And normally there would be grieving and a ceremony
God knows enough people died in the wilderness,
It wasn’t like they didn’t know what to do
It was just that, immediately, as soon as Miriam died
At the same moment
All the water was gone
וְלֹא־הָ֥יָה מַ֖יִם לָעֵדָ֑ה /
There was no water for the community (4)
And in their thirst
And panic
They people hastily, carelessly bury Miriam
And their grief is buried, too, not expressed, not displayed
No one tells stories about her or prays for her soul
They just run to try and find some water
3.
The funny thing is, see
No one but no one makes the connection
They don’t see it was Miriam who always brought the water
That her death and the lack of the water have everything to do with one another
In fact, Tanchuma Buber tells us that there was a well, Miriam’s well, that followed us through the wilderness providing water for us at every station
Not a normal cistern but a rock that rolled from place to place
Rocking and rolling and
Opening to provide water whenever we needed it (5)
And you see, when Miriam died
That well, which just looked like a rock
Went back to being indistinguishable from all the other rocks (6)
A cruel irony for the people:
The well was right there!
The well was right there because that’s where Miriam left it but also, more
According to the mevasser tzedek (7)
The rock that becomes a well can be anywhere
With faith, it can be any stone at all
But without grieving the loss of Miriam
Without telling stories about how electric she was
Without laughing over how self righteous she could get, even as
a little child
Without recalling the angle she held her head when she played
that drum
Without grieving the loss of her songs
No one could start to make the connection that
Of course (!) she was source of their water
All they know is that they need water, they are dying of thirst
They don’t think about the prophetess they just put in the ground (8)
They don’t miss her but I imagine God does, and God weeps
“My beautiful creation, my first prophetess,” God thinks, tears falling, “I wish she could have lived forever.”
But the people don’t even hear God crying, they’re so busy looking for water
4.
What about Moses? You ask. Surely her brother grieves her —
Well, Moses is a mess in this parasha
And rather than insisting on marking his sister’s death
He jumps to full problem solving mode on the whole lack of the water situation
He acts out, calling the Israelites ungrateful millennials / I mean
rebels
And hits rocks (9) with his old magic rod, you know, the one that
he used to split the sea? You know the one that hasn’t seen the
light of day in ages? (10)
He’s trying to impress all the young people with his old school tricks
But it’s not working
All the rocks look the same
And Moses hitting them only goes so far
Now, speaking gently, as God suggested, might have worked
Rav Kook says all of creation was waiting and listening for those
gentle words
But instead Moses brought anger and impatience into the world
Until the world could no longer listen (11)
In the end, Moses’ old magic forces some water out
But it’s all short lived
And the people’s thirst is quenched but they’re also irritated
At his tone deaf, display of force
We could say it’s just maybe Moses has been in that job too
long, which is true
But we could also say, that maybe, in his need to be the one to
get the water
Maybe it is also because he did not stop to say goodbye to his
sister
His only sister who once stood on the banks of the waters of the
Nile, so that when he was a helpless baby in a basket, he would
have the chance to live
“She watched over me,” Moses thinks, “but when she died, I ran.”
6.
The irony, see, is that all these problems are the same problem
The people and Moses don’t realize Miriam was the source of the water No one realizes how much they miss her
Or how connected everything always is
And so they also miss the fact that she taught them everything they need
The way she would sing, and make them sing back, sing their own verses
She taught them everything they need, only they don’t know it yet
7.
What a year it has been
I really missed you, I missed all of us together
So much I cannot tell you
I was worried we would never be together again
Kitchen-ite Ellen Friedman awakened me to the idea of all the grieving that needs to happen now, personally and communally in our country
That we need a way of integrating what we’ve gone through as a country
That, like those in the desert, confused after the death of Miriam
We cannot keep responding to the next crisis
We have to attend to those we’ve lost and all that has been lost
What times will not return, what years
What events, passages and holidays
What relationships
And, as part of that grieving we also have to articulate for ourselves
What needs to change, and not revert
What promises are, as yet, unfulfilled
What we’ve lost will not kill us, as we sometimes fear
It may ricochet around our ribcages right close to our hearts
But I promise it will not kill us
It will not kill us but skipping the grieving could
And we cannot revert back to the old ways of fixing
Beating these problems into submission like Moses tried to do
Team Rock or Team Moses is not going to do it this time around
No, we need to grieve
And need also new ways to go forward as well, maybe ways we
haven’t fully invented yet
8.
In order to in order to look for new ways forward part
I’m a rabbi
So I decided to look at the old ways
We can call them the new / old ways
Specifically I wanted to know
What do we do the day after Purim?
You see where I’m going here?
Purim is the most radically destabilizing day of the year
A holiday that’s so confusing we’re commanded to not be able
to tell the difference between good people and bad people
A day when we access parts of ourselves that we usually keep under wraps
A day when we’re not sure ourselves who we really are
Maybe by now you can see why I think Covid has some of the markings of a very extended Purim
Definitely less fun than Purim but still eerily similar
So I needed to know, what are we supposed to do after Purim?
And I learned that on the 15th of Adar the beit din (rabbinic court) would dispatch workers to make repairs to the roads (12)
You heard me right, infrastructure
See Purim comes after the rainy season and we’re then
only a few weeks away from Passover and the time when many will need to make pilgrimages to the Temple
Seeking peace and forgiveness
Trying to find all the things and people that have been lost, to repair marriages, and make amends (sound familiar?) to finish that have been left unfinished over the last few months
We need those roads see
Because we need to be able to get back together
And our tradition understands
That in order for any spiritual pilgrimage to take place
We can’t go straight from Purim to Passover — we don’t go from radical destabilization to freedom
We need roads
Further, importantly, we learn that people who made big mistakes over the last season
Specifically, in Torah, people who committed a big crime by accident
Remember this is even before twitter
Committed a crime by accident but are vulnerable to be harmed from someone seeking revenge
Those who deserve to go to a sanctuary city where they can be safe
The roads are specifically fixed for them too
What do we do after Purim?
We make the world that is safe enough for pilgrims and the wrongly accused
That is, for all of us
So that we can all go to Jerusalem, so that we can all find our sanctuaries, no matter what went down this year, so that we can all flourish
This takes time, patience, planning
Some roads need to be revamped
And, as we all know after this year, some new roads need to be imagined, built
So that there are enough trusted roads for everyone
And you know what else we repair?
And by the way it is not only workers who repair
This is everyone
You know what else we repair right after Purim?
The wells
Because no one is getting anywhere if we cannot have water
9.
Which reminds me of what happens at the end of our Torah
You see, after Moses, god bless him, messes everything up
After Aaron dies and everyone grieves him properly, formally,
truly, elaborately
I imagine the people gather around a rock
It seems they need water again but this time they don’t ask Moses for help (13)
This time they arrange themselves around a rock they’ve chosen
And I imagine they go back near where Miriam was buried
As if they know there’s unfinished business
And, then, this part is right in our Torah
They sing
עֲלִ֥י בְאֵ֖ר
“spring up, oh well,
עֱנוּ־לָֽהּ
sing to it” (14)
See, they finally sing the old song
The one with the chorus and the verses that they each make up
And I imagine when they get to that chorus they sing really loud and all together
Crying and laughing and crying
Remembering Miriam’s singing
Singing late into the evening, singing and laughing and crying
The Sfat Emet says (15)
Sometimes
We struggle to learn things for 40 years and then, at the end of those years, we’re given those lessons as a gift
By now I don’t need to tell you what the older ones already knew
Miriam’s prophecy was inside that song
And as the grief poured out, and the water poured out,
They remembered
How they already knew everything they needed to know
And how every rock can be a well if you sing to it in right way.
Or HaChayim does not create a scene but also notices it’s absence to Numbers 20:1:2: “This leaves us with the question of why the Israelites did not pay Miriam the kindness Aaron had assumed they were showing her. According to Moed Katan 28 the manner in which the Torah described Miriam's death as immediately followed by her burial without a word about anyone mourning her showed that due to the failure of the well the people immediately suffered thirst. This preoccupied their minds more than the respect they should have shown Miriam by mourning her properly. The Torah makes this even plainer by stating immediately after reporting Miraim's burial that there was no water "for the congregation."
Numbers 21:17
Numbers 20:1
Numbers 20:2
Tanhuma Buber to Numbers 20:1: “And how was [the well] constructed? Like a kind of rock. It rolled along and came with them on the journeys.”
See also Louis Ginzberg, Legends of the Jews, Vol. 3, p. 310, “On the way to the rock all Israel followed [Moses] halting at any rock on the way, fancying they might fetch water out of it.”
From, Speaking Torah, Ed. Arthur Green, p. 42 Moses says, “Shall we bring you water out of this rock?” In other words, [it is] the [physical] rock you see [and not it’s spiritual equivalent.”].
Rabbeinu Bahya to Numbers 20:2 “The people had not appreciated Miriam brought the water until the well ceased with Miriam’s death. [Here I imagine it took them an even longer time to make the connection because they had not grieved.]
Rashi: Moses struck Miriam’s rock, because he did not want to draw forth any water for Israel, because Miriam had died (Taanit 9a).
See Avivah Zornberg, Bewilderments, p. 201
Sapphire from the Land of Israel, R. Chanan Morrison, p. 298
See Eliyahu Kitov, The Book of Our Heritage, p. 449-450
Numbers 21:17
Numbers 21:17
Sfat Emet, Green, Trans., The Language of Truth, p. 253. He’s noticing how their first song was 40 years ago and only now, after Torah has been absorbed, can they sing again. See also, Midrash Tanchuma, Chukat 20:1 (to Num. 21:17:) “Then Israel sang this song.” This song (of the well) was uttered at the end of forty [years], while the well was given to them at the beginning of the forty [years]?130 So what was the purpose of writing [it down] here?
