This week’s Torah commentary, written by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Mia Zimman, has been anonymously sponsored.
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Parashat Beha’alotekha opens with light. In Numbers 8:2, God instructs Aaron to kindle the menorah so that each of the seven flames faces inward: אֶל־מוּל֙ פְּנֵ֣י הַמְּנוֹרָ֔ה יָאִ֖ירוּ (el mul peney hammenorah ya’iru, “toward the face of the menorah, the lamps shall give light”). Not outward into the dark. Toward one another. Seven flames, held in relationship.
I keep returning to this image because it names something—a posture, a way of orienting.
Dr. Deena Aranoff, in Mother’s Milk: Essays on Child-Rearing, the Household, and the Making of Jewish Culture, drew my attention to a single Hebrew root that unlocks the whole parashah: the three letters alef-mem-nun (א-מ-נ). From this combination comes amen (אָמֵן)—I affirm, I witness, I am with you. Emunah (אֱמוּנָה)—faith, faithfulness. Omen (אוֹמֵן) or omenet (אוֹמֶנֶת)—the nurse, the one who tends the infant, carries the child in her arms. Closely related, sharing its field of meaning: emet (אֱמֶת)—truth, whose letters are the first, middle, and last of the entire alef–bet. To be faithful, to witness, to tell the truth, to tend the child—in Hebrew, these are not separate acts. They live in the same root.
Aranoff argues that the most enduring transmission of Jewish culture happens not in the academy or the sanctuary but in the household—through maternal, embodied care so fully absorbed it becomes part of the person, the way milk becomes the cells of the body. This is not peripheral to Jewish life. It is the root from which everything else grows.
Now read what Moses says in Numbers 11:14.
Exhausted, undone, he cries out, “I cannot carry this entire people alone; it is too heavy for me!” The verb he uses for carrying the people (לָשֵׂ֖את, laset) shares a root (nun–sin–alef, נ־ש־א) as the word Numbers 11:12 used to describe a nurse carrying an infant (יִשָּׂ֤א, yissa). Moses is not speaking in metaphor. He is naming what leadership actually requires: the embodied, constant tending that the root alef-mem-nun holds. And he knows he cannot do it alone.
God’s answer is not to remove the burden but to distribute it. Share the spirit. And when two elders—Eldad and Medad—never even make it to the Tent of Meeting, the spirit rests on them anyway, right there in the camp. In Numbers 11:29, Moses exclaims, “Would that all of God’s people were prophets!” The tradition is not diminished when more voices carry it. It is enlarged.
Only moments later, Miriam speaks.
Numbers 12 opens with a grammatical detail we must not pass over: וַתְּדַבֵּ֨ר מִרְיָ֤ם וְאַהֲרֹן֙ בְּמֹשֶׁ֔ה (vattedabber Miryam ve’Aharon beMosheh, “Miriam and Aaron spoke of Moses”). The verb וַתְּדַבֵּ֨ר (vattedabber, “spoke”) is in the feminine singular. Aaron is named, but Miriam is the subject. She has been a prophet since Exodus 15, when she led the women in song at the Sea of Reeds, standing beside Moses and Aaron as one of three leaders of the people (as per Micah 6:4). Now, into the space Moses has just opened— “Would that all of God’s people were prophets!”—she steps.
In Numbers 12:2, Aaron and Miriam pronounce their challenge together: “Has God spoken only through Moses? Has God not spoken also through us?” The brother and sister both speak.
Only Miriam is punished.
She is struck with the skin disease tzara’at (צָרַעַת) in Numbers 12:10 and, five verses later, sent outside the camp. Moses cries out in five Hebrew words in Numbers 12:13: אֵ֕ל נָ֛א רְפָ֥א נָ֖א לָֽהּ (El na refa na lah, “Please, God, heal her please!”). God does not reverse the punishment. Seven days, alone, outside.
The rabbinic tradition read her speech as לְשׁוֹן הָרָע (leshon hara, “slander”) and treated her punishment as just. In her article, ““Parshat Beha’alotecha: The Silencing of Miriam,” Naomi Graetz—one of the first scholars to offer a feminist critique of this text—asks the question few had ever dared to ask: why was only Miriam punished and not Aaron? Graetz puts it plainly: the rabbis loved Miriam when she was saving her brother and singing at the sea—and annulled her merit the moment she was uppity. What the text has done, Graetz argues, is take the only weapon available to a woman in the biblical world—her power of language—and rename it as an evil. (Leshon hara literally means “the tongue of evil.”)
The root alef-mem-nun holds amen, emunah, omen, omenet—witness, faithfulness, tending. It also holds this: the act of naming truly. What Miriam is doing when she asks “Has God not spoken also through us?” is an act of emet. Truth-telling. The tradition could not receive it. They called it leshon hara instead; she was sent away.
Yet something revolutionary begins to erupt.
Numbers 12:15 tells us: וְהָעָם֙ לֹ֣א נָסַ֔ע עַד־הֵאָסֵ֖ף מִרְיָֽם׃ (“And the people did not journey until Miriam was brought back in”).
The whole people. Waiting. For her.
Rabbi Sharon Brous, in The Amen Effect, describes a passage from Mishnah Middot 2:2 that has guided her work for years. During the pilgrimage festivals, hundreds of thousands of Jews would ascend to the Temple Mount, enter the courtyard, and turn right—circling together, counterclockwise. But those to whom something terrible had happened—the mourners, the sick, the lonely, the brokenhearted—would enter through the same gate and turn left. Every step, against the current. And the pilgrims coming from the right, when they encountered someone walking toward them, would stop, look into their eyes, and ask: What happened to you?
This, Brous teaches, is amen. Not a word appended to a prayer. A practice of turning toward. The willingness to stop, to ask, to receive the answer, to care. It is, at its root—the root of the nurse, the witness, the one who tends—the practice the menorah enacts: flames oriented toward one another, not outward into the dark.
The people waited for Miriam. But did anyone turn left?
Did anyone ask what those seven days were to her? Did anyone ask why Aaron walked away untouched? She came back. The cloud lifted. The journey resumed. The people stopped—but they did not say amen.
What follows is silence. After Numbers 12, Miriam never speaks again. Nor is she spoken to. For thirty-eight more years, she carries the people through the wilderness—her presence so essential that the medieval rabbinic collection Yalkut Shim’oni 683 taught that a well of water followed the Israelites so long as she walked among them.
In Numbers 20:1, “Miriam died there and was buried there,” but we read of no eulogy, no mourning. And two verses later: there was no water.
I grew up in Hebrew school hearing the names of the patriarchs. As an undergraduate, I read Rabbi Lynn Gottlieb’s She Who Dwells Within, and everything changed for me. The women had been there all along. Miriam had been there all along—tending, witnessing, carrying.
We are still inside this story. Whose voice is received as prophecy, and whose is renamed as gossip? Who is sent outside? Does the community turn to one another in comfort? These are not historical questions. They are the questions of every community that has ever had to decide what to do when someone has gone against popular opinion, questioned authority, and used their voice to speak out.
Beha’alotekha is also my birth parashah. The parashah of flames turned toward one another. Of spirit carried by those who never made it to the Tent of Meeting. Of the woman who spoke truth and was punished and for whom the people stopped.
“The people did not journey.”
That sentence still asks something of us. Not just whether we will wait. Whether we will turn towards one another and towards the ones who have been cast out. Whether we will look into the eyes of the one coming toward us and ask the question that has always been harder than waiting: Please tell me… what happened?
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