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challenge without drama. He had been 
there before.
The text gives us a clue, but in so 
understated a way that we can easily miss 
it. The chapter begins thus: “In the first 
month, the whole Israelite community 
arrived at the desert of Zin, and they 
stayed at Kadesh. There Miriam died 
and was buried. Now there was no water 
for the community …” (Num. 20:1–2). 
Many commentators see the connec-
tion between this and what follows in 
terms of the sudden loss of water after 
the death of Miriam. Tradition tells of a 
miraculous well that accompanied the 
Israelites during Miriam’s lifetime in her 
merit. When she died, the water ceased.

MOSES MOURNS MIRIAM
There is, though, another way of read-
ing the connection. Moses lost control 
because his sister Miriam had just died. 
He was in mourning for his eldest sibling. 
It is hard to lose a parent, but, in some 
ways, it is even harder to lose a brother or 
sister. They are your generation. You feel 
the Angel of Death come suddenly close. 
You face your own mortality.
Miriam was more than a sister to 
Moses. She was the one, while still a 
child, to follow the course of the wicker 
basket holding her baby brother as it 
drifted down the Nile. She had the cour-
age and ingenuity to approach Pharaoh’s 
daughter and suggest that she employ a 
Hebrew nurse for the child, thus ensur-
ing that Moses would grow up knowing 
his family, his people and his identity.
In a truly remarkable passage, the 
Sages said that Miriam persuaded her 
father, Amram, the leading scholar 
of his generation, to annul his decree 
that Hebrew husbands should divorce 
their wives and have no more children 
because there was a 50 percent chance 
that any child born would be killed. 
“Your decree,” said Miriam, “is worse 
than Pharaoh’s. He only decreed against 
the males, yours applies to females also. 
He intends to rob children of life in this 
world; you would deny them even life 
in the World to Come.” Amram admit-
ted her superior logic. Husbands and 
wives were reunited. Yocheved became 
pregnant, and Moses was born. Note 
that this Midrash, told by the Sages, 
unambiguously implies that a 6-year-
old girl had more faith and wisdom 

than the leading rabbi of the genera-
tion!
Moses surely knew what he owed his 
elder sister. According to the Midrash, 
without her he would not have been born. 
According to the plain sense of the text, 
he would not have grown up knowing 
who his true parents were and to which 
people he belonged. Though they had 
been separated during his years of exile 
in Midian, once he returned, Miriam had 
accompanied him throughout his mis-
sion. She had led the women in song at 
the Red Sea. 
The one episode that seems to cast her 
in a negative light — when she “began to 
talk against Moses because of his Cushite 
wife” (Num. 12:1), for which she was 
punished with leprosy — was interpreted 
more positively by the Sages. They said 
she was critical of Moses for breaking off 
marital relations with his wife Tzipporah. 
He had done so because he needed to 
be in a state of readiness for Divine 
communication at any time. Miriam felt 
Tzipporah’s plight and sense of abandon-
ment. Besides which, she and Aaron had 
also received Divine communication, but 
they had not been commanded to be celi-
bate. She may have been wrong, suggested 
the Sages, but not maliciously so. She 
spoke not out of jealousy of her brother 
but out of sympathy for her sister-in-law.
So it was not simply the Israelites’ 
demand for water that led Moses to lose 
control of his emotions, but rather his 
own deep grief. The Israelites may have 
lost their water, but Moses had lost his 
sister, who had watched over him as a 
child, guided his development, supported 
him throughout the years, and helped 
him carry the burden of leadership in her 
role as leader of the women.
It is a moment that reminds us of 
words from the book of Judges said by 
Israel’s chief of staff, Barak, to its judge-
and-leader Deborah: “If you go with me, 
I will go; but if you do not go with me, I 
cannot go” (Judges 4:8). The relationship 
between Barak and Deborah was much 
less close than that between Moses and 
Miriam, yet Barak acknowledged his 
dependence on a wise and courageous 
woman. Can Moses have felt less?
Bereavement leaves us deeply vulner-
able. In the midst of loss, we can find it 
hard to control our emotions. We make 
mistakes. We act rashly. We suffer from 

a momentary lack of judgement. These 
are common symptoms even for ordinary 
humans like us. In Moses’ case, how-
ever, there was an additional factor. He 
was a prophet, and grief can occlude or 
eclipse the prophetic spirit. Maimonides 
answers the well-known question as to 
why Jacob, a prophet, did not know that 
his son Joseph was still alive, with the 
simplest possible answer: grief banishes 
prophecy. For 22 years, mourning his 
missing son, Jacob could not receive the 
Divine word. Moses, the greatest of all the 
prophets, remained in touch with God. It 
was God, after all, who told him to “speak 
to the rock.” But somehow the message 
did not penetrate his consciousness fully. 
That was the effect of grief.
So the details are, in truth, secondary 
to the human drama played out that 
day. Yes, Moses did things he might 
not have done, should not have done. 
He struck the rock, said “we” instead 
of “God,” and lost his temper with the 
people. The real story, though, is about 
Moses the human being in an onslaught 
of grief, vulnerable, exposed, caught in 
a vortex of emotions, suddenly bereft 
of the sisterly presence that had been 
the most important bass note of his 
life. Miriam had been the precociously 
wise and plucky child who had taken 
control of the situation when the life of 
her 3-month-old brother lay in the bal-
ance, undaunted by either an Egyptian 
princess or a rabbi-father. She had led 
the Israelite women in song, and sym-
pathized with her sister-in-law when 
she saw the price she paid for being the 
wife of a leader. The Midrash speaks of 
her as the woman in whose merit the 
people had water in a parched land. In 
Moses’ anguish at the rock, we sense the 
loss of the elder sister without whom he 
felt bereft and alone.
The story of the moment Moses lost 
his confidence and calm is ultimately less 
about leadership and crisis, or about a 
staff and a rock, than about a great Jewish 
woman, Miriam, appreciated fully only 
when she was no longer there. 

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks (1948-2020) was a 

global religious leader, philosopher, the author of 

more than 25 books and moral voice for our time. His 

series of essays on the weekly Torah portion, entitled 

“Covenant & Conversation” will continue to be shared 

and distributed around the world. 

