Chukat: Water from the Rock
This week’s parsha (Torah portion) is full of death, loss and mystery. Beginning with the strange law of the Red Heifer, continuing through the loss of both Miriam and Aaron and the announcement that the third sibling – the last of that generation –Moshe himself – will not cross over into the promised land. For the Israelites, this is a parsha about grief and healing and the challenging journey between the two.
I. The Loss of Water
Miriam’s death is dropped into the text like an afterthought or a small detail.
1 The entire congregation of the children of Israel arrived at the desert of Zin in the first month, and the people settled in Kadesh. Miriam died there and was buried there.
2 The congregation had no water; so they assembled against Moses and Aaron.
– Numbers 20:1-2
In that blink-and-you-might-miss-it moment, Miriam – our Miriam - died and was buried. We don’t have Moses’ or Aaron’s reaction (although midrash says they are the ones who buried her). We have no sentences of public grief. Yet if you linger on it, the sadness and the loss in the silent space between verse one and verse two is palpable.
And all of the sudden, the congregation has no water. Rashi ties the two verses together, saying that Miriam kept the people hydrated through a magical well that followed the Israelites because of her merit. This makes sense, as much of Miriam’s narrative circulates around water. As a child, she follows her baby brother Moshe along the riverbed helping him find safety. Her song marks the end of the miraculous parting of the red sea, and even when she is punished with leprosy, she is described as being “white as snow ” (Numbers 12:10) – an incarnation of water
It’s also worth noting who the Israelites are at this moment. It is not until this week’s Torah portion, Parshat Chukat, that we as readers find out the startling news that
within a few chapters, according to Rashi, thirty-eight years have passed since the freed slaves left Egypt and the entirety of that older generation has died in the desert This generation, having lost their blood parents, are about to lose their communal parents as well.
When Miriam dies, the Israelites cannot access life. They lose not just their source of drink, they also lose the “water” it takes to shed tears, of which there are no record. The people fall into the void between the sentences – the dried out desiccated place with no “mother”, no water, and no ability to cry or grieve. They are like the psalmist who writes, “My soul is thirsty for You, my flesh longs for You, in a dry and weary land, where no water is.” (Psalm 63).
This is real, deep grief. This is the feeling when the bottom drops out, as it has in many of our lives, and all there is, for miles around, is desert and lifelessness. How are the Israelites supposed to move on? How are we, when these moments in life present themselves to us?
II. Turning Towards the Rock
Interestingly, God in Chukat does not turn on the whining Israelites with anger, as God has in most other instances of their shaky faith. Perhaps recognizing their grief beyond words, their existential thirst, the Divine turns towards the Israelites with compassion and the generosity of new life: water from a rock.
What could this rock represent? Stephen Levine uses the language of rocks when writing about grief:
We store fear and disappointment, anger and guilt in our gut Our belly has become fossilized with a long resistance to life and to loss. Each withdrawal, each attempt to numb our grief, turns the belly to stone. Have mercy on this pain you have carried for so long, the pain that sometimes makes you want to jump out of your body (Unattended Sorrow, 2005).
His remedy? Turn towards the rock and soften and loosen around the belly where the grief is held. Make space and breathe around the weight, the hardness, until the grief has space to be seen and felt and fully experienced. Slowly, softly, that grief will then move through the body and we will have the space to experience joy, love and freedom once again.
Mary Oliver’s poem “Heavy” echoes this theme of managing the weight of grief. She writes:
That time I thought I could not
go any closer to grief without dying
I went closer, and I did not die. Surely God had his hand in this, as well as friends. Still, I was bent, and my laughter, as the poet said, was nowhere to be found. Then said my friend Daniel, (brave even among lions), "It's not the weight you carry but how you carry itbooks, bricks, griefit's all in the way you embrace it, balance it, carry it when you cannot, and would not, put it down." So I went practicing. Have you noticed?
Have you heard the laughter that comes, now and again, out of my startled mouth?
How I linger to admire, admire, admire the things of this world that are kind, and maybe also troubledroses in the wind, the sea geese on the steep waves, a love to which there is no reply?
At times of great loss, going on with living, Levine writes, often feels like sacrilege. Nevertheless, “it is in our own time the work we do to honor the life we share with all who have ever been born and will ever die.” (Unattended Sorrow, 2005). By refusing to put down or numb our grief, by breathing into it, softening it over and over again, we allow a path to healing to emerge that lets us honor the person who has died with our own life.
God finds water for the people when they thought there was none left to be had. Gushing water – so much water it fills them and their animals. It brings them back to life and gives them the strength to continue their journey.
III. A New Grief
A few short verses later, the Israelites suffer another major loss – Aaron goes up to the mountaintop to die. When the people learn of this, the text says the entire congregation weeps for thirty days. (Numbers 20:29). They have found their tears. They have located the living grief within them and are allowing themselves to feel it this time. It seems like such a small change, but the moment of growth is pivotal. The generation of the children of Israel prepares to take their place as the leaders in the land.
Zornberg writes:
It is an ending and a beginning. The three leaders fade from the scene, and the people reach a moment of transition. This is the moment when all the dying is done. The death of a generation has been completed; Those who survive are now set on a different journey, to life and not death.” (198).
Their parents are gone. The story of the living is theirs now.
The Institute for Jewish Spirituality’s mission is to develop and teach Jewish spiritual practices so that individuals and communities may experience greater awareness, purpose, and interconnection.
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