Parshah Commentary
Parshat Chukat
The rabbis of the Talmud are famous for making meaning from the smallest of textual oddities. In the case of this week’s parshah, Chukat, their attentive eyes notice a seemingly jarring transition from one topic to the next: “The Israelites arrived in a body at the wilderness of Zin on the first new moon, and the people stayed at Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there. The community was without water, and they joined against Moses and Aaron.” What is the connection, the rabbis ask, between the death of the prophetess Miriam and the community’s need for water?
They respond by explaining that the Israelites had been drinking from a well that was provided to them on the basis of Miriam’s merit, and when she died, the well dried up. (“Miriam’s well” later became a recurring motif in Jewish feminist ritual, most famously through the practice of placing a cup of water, known as Miriam’s Cup, on the Passover seder table.) At first, the replacement for this well comes through the violent assertion of power. Moses strikes a rock: “Listen, you rebels, shall we get water for you out of this rock?” he asks, and water flows once again; God punishes Moses for his outburst, telling him that he is no longer allowed to enter Canaan. But despite this error, the Talmud teaches that after Miriam’s death, the water returned through the merit of Moses and Aaron.
Later in Parshat Chukat, however, we are presented with an entirely different way to understand this well, and thereby communal sustenance. After Aaron dies, we get an odd little scrap of poetry. The Israelites arrive in Beer (a site in the desert that literally means “well”), where God tells Moses, “Assemble the people that I may give them water.” The Israelites then sing a song to the well, which the medieval commentator Rashi claims is the same one they have been drinking from all along: “Spring up, O well—sing to it—the well which the chieftains dug, which the nobles of the people started with maces, with their own staffs.” This is water brought forth in some way by the entire people, and accessed without hierarchy, without strife—a well by and for the people. This image of abundance through collectivity echoes a midrash that teaches that when Moses and Aaron initially gathered the Israelites around the rock to get water, each person was, impossibly, literally adjacent to the rock, able to access the water without pushing or waiting. This is, in the language of the midrash, “one of the places where the small can encompass the great,” where a tiny space comfortably holds huge numbers of people.
Today I cannot read these stories of a thirsty people panicking and crying out for water without thinking of Gaza. We have no miraculous well, no prophetic leader who will summon a solution in an instant. But we do have one other. Audre Lorde, in her iconic essay “The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle the Master’s House,” teaches that “without community, there is no liberation, only the most vulnerable and temporary armistice between an individual and her oppression.” So despite the temptation to fixate on individual responsibility—to pour energy into questions like how many GoFundMes for starving Gazan families can I stretch my funds to donate to, or can I make it to this protest on this day—we must remember that it is only together, assembled in solidarity, that we can hope to sing forth the nourishment that is needed.
Avigayil Halpern is a rabbi and writer based in Washington, DC, whose work focuses on feminist and queer Torah. Read more of her writing here.
