JULY 11 • 2024 | 59

plained about the lack of meat. 
But it makes no sense at all to 
do so when God has already 
told you, “Speak to the rock 
… It will pour forth its water, 
and you will bring water out 
of the rock for them, and so 
you will give the community 
and their livestock water to 
drink.” Moses had received the 
solution. Why then was he so 
agitated about the problem?
Only after I lost my father 
did I understand the passage. 
What had happened immedi-
ately before? The first verse of 
the chapter states: “The people 
stopped at Kadesh. There, 
Miriam died and was buried.” 
Only then does it state that 
the people had no water. An 
ancient tradition explains 
that the people had hitherto 
been blessed by a miraculous 
source of water in the merit of 
Miriam. When she died, the 
water ceased.
However, it seems to me 
that the deeper connection 
lies not between the death 
of Miriam and the lack of 
water but between her death 
and Moses’ loss of emotional 
equilibrium. Miriam was his 
elder sister. She had watched 
over his fate when, as a baby, 
he had been placed in a basket 
and floated down the Nile. 
She had had the courage 
and enterprise to speak to 
Pharaoh’s daughter and sug-
gest that he be nursed by a 
Hebrew, thus reuniting Moses 
and his mother and ensuring 
that he grew up knowing who 
he was and to which people he 
belonged. He owed his sense 
of identity to her. 
Without Miriam, he could 
never have become the human 
face of God to the Israelites, 
law-giver, liberator and proph-
et. Losing her, he not only lost 
his sister. He lost the human 

foundation of his life.
Bereaved, you lose control 
of your emotions. You find 
yourself angry when the 
situation calls for calm. You 
hit when you should speak, 
and you speak when you 
should be silent. Even when 
God has told you what to do, 
you are only half-listening. 
You hear the words, but 
they do not fully enter your 
mind. Maimonides asks the 
question, how was it that 
Jacob, a prophet, did not know 
that his son Joseph was still 
alive. He answers, because 
he was in a state of grief, and 
the Shechinah does not enter 
us when we are in a state of 
grief. Moses at the rock was 
not so much a prophet as a 
man who had just lost his 
sister. He was inconsolable 
and not in control. He was 
the greatest of the prophets. 
But he was also human, rarely 
more so than here.

DEALING WITH MORTALITY
Our parshah is about 
mortality. That is the point. 
God is eternal, we are 
ephemeral. As we say in 
the Unetaneh tokef prayer 
on Rosh Hashanah and Yom 
Kippur, we are “a fragment 
of pottery, a blade of grass, a 
flower that fades, a shadow, 
a cloud, a breath of wind.” 
We are dust and to dust we 
return, but God is life forever.
At one level, Moses-at-the-
rock is a story about sin and 
punishment: “Because you did 
not have sufficient faith in me 
to sanctify Me … therefore 
you shall not bring this 
assembly into the land I have 
given you.” 
We may not be sure 
what the sin exactly was, 
or why it merited so severe 
a punishment, but at least 

we know the ballpark, the 
territory to which the story 
belongs.
Nonetheless it seems to me 
that — here as in so many 
other places in the Torah — 
there is a story beneath the 
story, and it is a different one 
altogether. Chukat is about 
death, loss and bereavement. 
Miriam dies. Aaron and Moses 
are told they will not live to 
enter the Promised Land. 
Aaron dies, and the people 
mourn for him for 30 days. 
Together they constituted 
the greatest leadership team 
the Jewish people have ever 
known: Moses the supreme 
prophet, Aaron the first High 
Priest, and Miriam, perhaps 
the greatest of them all. 
What the parshah is telling 
us is that for each of us there 
is a Jordan we will not cross, 
a promised land we will not 
enter. “It is not for you to 
complete the task.” Even the 
greatest are mortal.
That is why the parshah 
begins with the ritual of the 
Red Heifer, whose ashes, 
mixed with the ash of cedar 
wood, hyssop and scarlet wool 
and dissolved in “living water,” 
are sprinkled over one who 
has been in contact with the 
dead so that they may enter 
the Sanctuary.
This is one of the most 
fundamental principles of 
Judaism. Death defiles. For 
most religions throughout 
history, life-after-death has 
proved more real than life 
itself. That is where the gods 
live, thought the Egyptians. 
That is where our ancestors 
are alive, believed the Greeks 
and Romans and many 
primitive tribes. That is where 
you find justice, thought many 
Christians. That is where you 
find paradise, thought many 

Muslims.
Life after death and the 
resurrection of the dead are 
fundamental, non-negotiable 
principles of Jewish faith, but 
Tanach is conspicuously quiet 
about them. It is focused on 
finding God in this life, on 
this planet, notwithstanding 
our mortality. “The dead 
do not praise God,” says the 
Psalm. God is to be found in 
life itself with all its hazards 
and dangers, bereavements 
and grief. We may be no 
more than “dust and ashes,” 
as Abraham said, but life itself 
is a never-ending stream, 
“living water,” and it is this 
that the rite of the Red Heifer 
symbolizes.
With great subtlety, 
the Torah mixes law and 
narrative together — the law 
before the narrative because 
God provides the cure 
before the disease. Miriam 
dies. Moses and Aaron are 
overwhelmed with grief. 
Moses, for a moment, loses 
control, and he and Aaron 
are reminded that they, too, 
are mortal and will die before 
entering the land. 
Yet this is, as Maimonides 
said, “the way of the world.” 
We are embodied souls. We 
are flesh and blood. We grow 
old. We lose those we love. 
Outwardly we struggle to 
maintain our composure but 
inwardly we weep. Yet life 
goes on, and what we began, 
others will continue.
Those we loved and lost 
live on in us, as we will live 
on in those we love. For love 
is as strong as death, and the 
good we do never dies. 

The late Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks 

served as the chief rabbi of the 

United Hebrew Congregations of the 

Commonwealth, 1991-2013. For other 

teachings, go to rabbisacks.org. 

