Brighton and Hove Progressive Synagogue

Where was Miriam at Sinai?   If you were following the Torah narrative of the Revelation closely at Shavuot you may have noticed that someone was missing…  Not just ‘someone’, of course, the elder sister who was instrumental in saving the life of her baby brother, Moses (Exodus 2:4-9).  As the slaves flee, the Torah mentions her for the first time since that moment, telling us that she led the women in dancing and song, through the Sea of Reeds (Exodus 15:20-21) – and gives her a name:  Miriam.  The Torah even calls her a ‘prophetess’ – n’vi’ah (:20).  But Miriam is not mentioned in the Book of Exodus after the crossing of the Sea…  Indeed, all that the Torah has to say about Miriam amounts to just thirty verses; sixteen of which, occupying one short chapter in Numbers (12), appear in the parashah, B’ha’alot’cha.

 To say that Miriam is marginalised in the Torah is an under-statement!   But then the tale recorded in B’ha’alot’cha is very revealing.  We read (12:1-2): 

Now she spoke – Miriam and Aaron – against Moses because of the Cushite woman, whom he had married; for he had married a Cushite woman. / And they said: ‘Has the Eternal One only spoken with Moses?  Has He not also spoken with us?’  

 Significantly, the Hebrew is clear – and the disjunctive n’ginah (cantillation sign), pashta, which hovers over the first word, separating it from what follows, forces the reader to pause momentarily:  Va-t’dabbeir – She spoke.  Although the Torah then adds:  ‘Miriam and Aaron’, indicating that Aaron shared her grievance, Miriam is the prime-mover.  Interestingly, the two packed verses in Exodus speak not only of ‘Miriam, the prophetess’ (Ex. 15:20), but also add, ‘the sister of Aaron’ (ibid.).  The two siblings are linked because they share a similar status vis a vis their pre-eminent baby brother.  But at least Aaron becomes the High Priest – and so it’s not surprising that Miriam takes the lead in their rebellion:  Designated as a n’vi’ah, prophetess, she, more than Aaron has reason to feel aggrieved about Moses’ special relationship with the Eternal – and, perhaps, as a woman, she was also particularly upset on behalf of Zipporah, Moses’ wife, when he married again. 

 And so, although the Torah tells us that ‘the anger of the Eternal was kindled against them’ (:9), Miriam alone is punished for her effrontery – with leprosy (:10) and excluded from the camp for seven days (:14).  Significantly, the people did not journey on until Miriam was brought again (:15) – but then we don’t hear anything more about her until the Torah mentions Miriam’s death thirty-eight years later, in one brief verse (Chukkat – Numbers 20:1):

The Israelites, the whole congregation, came into the wilderness of Tzin in the first month; and the people settled in Kadeish; and Miriam died there, and was buried there.  

 That one terse statement is very telling. When Aaron’s death is recorded a few verses further on, the Torah relates: ‘When all the congregation saw that Aaron was dead, they wept for Aaron thirty days; the whole house of Israel’ (Numbers 20:29).  And again, when Moses eventually dies on Mount Nebo, the Torah states: ‘The Israelites wept for Moses in the plains of Moab thirty days’ (V’zot ha-b’rachah, Deuteronomy 34:8a). Why no thirty day mourning period for Miriam – the elder sister of Aaron and Moses; and like Moses, designated as a prophet?

 The mystery is compounded by the fact that the statement concerning Miriam’s death marks the return to the narrative of the wilderness journey in the first month of the fortieth year, following a gap of thirty-eight years. Yes, that’s right, the narrative in the previous parashah, Korach, concerns events in the second year of the journey in the desert. So, there is a thirty-eight year lacuna in the text. What happened during those thirty-eight years? Interestingly, the Sages responsible for interpreting the Torah almost 2000 years ago, not known for their feminist credentials, nevertheless addressed, both, the yawning chasm in the narrative, and the puzzling issue of the absence of any mention in the Torah of mourning rites for Miriam. And so, they linked the people’s thirst for water immediately after her death – Numbers 20, verse 2 reads: ‘And there was no water congregation; and they assemble themselves together against Moses and against Aaron’ – with the people’s loss of Miriam, and developed the legend of ‘Miriam’s Well’: a miraculous source of water which accompanied the Israelites on all their journeys, only drying up when Miriam died (See Legends of the Jews by Louis Ginzberg, Vol. III, ‘Miriam’s Well’, pp.50-44.  JPSA, Philadelphia, 1968).  While the Torah marginalises Miriam, and then, in this weeks parashah, makes it very clear that she was not at all happy with playing second fiddle to Moses, the midrash – rabbinic commentary – taking very seriously what the Torah does tell us about her, goes a long way in restoring Miriam to her proper place as a leader of the Exodus generation. As we read in Micah 6:3-4:

I brought you out from the land of Egypt, I redeemed you from the house of bondage, and I sent before you Moses, Aaron, and Miriam.

 Of course, by rights, both, as the eldest sibling, and the one responsible for taking action to ensure that Moses survived Pharaoh’s genocidal decree against the newborn baby boys, Miriam deserved to be mentioned first, but given the way in which the Torah narrative focuses on her brothers and their leadership roles, there is no escaping the fact that Miriam is relegated to third place. At least, the early rabbis succeeded in reminding subsequent generations of the Jewish people how important Miriam’s leadership was during the years of wandering in the wilderness.

 Rabbi Elizabeth Tikvah Sarah

This week’s double portion, Tazri’a-M’tzora (Leviticus 12:1-15:33) is not for the squeamish.  Starting off with childbirth, the Torah goes on to consider, skin eruptions – and, by extension, the impact of tzara’at, ‘leprosy’, on garments – rising damp (and other related problems that can ‘plague’ one’s home), seminal emissions and menstruation.  It’s all part of everyday human experience – but what’s it all doing in a ‘sacred’ text like the Torah?  What’s it got to do with ‘holy’ living?  According to classical Liberal thinking – not a lot – and, of course, the ancient rites and practices regarding bodily states and ritual purity have not been part of Jewish life since the Romans destroyed the Temple in Jerusalem, and its system of worship, almost 2000 years ago.

So why continue to read about it all?   An obvious response is that it helps us to remember what ancient Jewish worship was like back then.  But is that enough?  Maybe it wouldn’t be enough if there weren’t actually some very important things for us to learn. 

First, we learn that the sacred is not just about ‘spiritual’ issues; it also concerns blood and guts – and, yes, bodily fluids.  For our ancestors, there was no distinction between the physical and the spiritual: each and every creature – including the animals – was a nefesh chayyah – a living being (Genesis 1:24; 2:7).  For them, nefesh did not mean ‘soul’ – a Greek idea – but the tangible life-force represented by the blood coursing through us – which is why, the dietary laws include not eating the blood (Genesis 9:4).  In recent years, there has been increasing interest in ‘holistic’ thinking and practice – in particular, ‘holistic’ approaches to health as we have become dissatisfied with the tendency for classically western-trained doctors to treat the various ailing parts of their patients, rather than attend to the whole person.   So, maybe Tazri’a-M’tzora no longer seems so irrelevant? 

And there is more:  Another aspect of contemporary attitudes to medical practice is the notion that the patient is not simply a passive object, a set of symptoms and ailments to be cured by the expert physician, but rather, an active agent, who should be empowered to participate in their own healing.  Similarly, although the Book of Leviticus describes a hierarchical religious system, dominated by the priests, who had the power to pronounce the individual both diseased and ‘whole’ once more, each and every person played an active role in dealing with their condition, undertaking rites of purification and bringing offerings after varying periods of confinement or segregation.  Of course, the details may seem alien, even repugnant – but the point is that the individual was actively involved in healing themselves.

One last thing to think about: The anthropologist, Mary Douglas, in her book, Purity and Danger (1966), helped us to understand how the sacred separations we find in the Book of Leviticus, functioned to enable our ancestors to contain and manage human conditions and situations that broke boundaries or categories, and so were potentially disruptive of the social order.  Modern attitudes to childbirth, skin ailments, seminal emissions and menstruation may seem radically different – less primitive, more rational and scientific – but one of the consequences of the great ‘progress’ we have made is that we have succeeded in essentially privatising human experience – which may partly explain why, perhaps, in reaction, there is now a growing appetite for ‘reality’ television programmes that explore people’s personal lives in graphic detail.  We all have bodies – indeed we are all, basically, bodies, underneath all the layers of sophistication we have acquired in modern times; Tazri’a-M’tzora reminds us that we are matter, and that our bodies, and everything about them, matter – not just to us personally, but also, to the society around us.  Perhaps, thinking about all that this double parashah has to teach us, it may soon be time for Liberal Judaism to consider re-instating the body-aware morning blessing that thanks God for ‘opening’ all the parts of our bodies that need to open and ‘closing’ all those that need to close?

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