By Sarah Adams

This week’s parshah covers quite a bit of ground, from the cleansing ritual after touching a human corpse, the death of Miriam and Aaron, some battles with societies encountered in their final year of wandering, and the first sight of Jericho across the Jordan. It is hard to zone in on one story for this week, as each Aliyah is a self-contained story of crisis, catharsis, and triumph, so I’m going to exercise a little editing discretion, but for a more detailed description of the parsha in all its glory, see here.

The second and fifth aliyot of this parsha cover the death of Miriam and Aaron respectively, in the fortieth year of the Jews wandering in the desert. Miriam’s death is not described, but it is surely felt, as the waters that have flowed from her miraculous well dry up with her passing. “The people complain bitterly” I think, does not give enough credit to a people lost in the desert, as the loss of water would more logically lead to fear and panic rather than whining and resentment. The people cry out for their leaders to do something. The remaining siblings Aaron and Moses, having taken for granted the work done by Miriam for decades, find themselves unsure and insecure about how best to move forward.

God guides them gently in a similar way, we might imagine, that he did long ago to Miriam herself. He leads them to a rock and tells them to speak to it, and the rock will give them water. Raised with a memory of vicious plagues and a masculine socialization which encourages physical confrontation, the men, with a full audience of panicked and dehydrated people, find themselves doubting God’s instructions. In a moment of ill judgment, Moses strikes the rock. Water pours forth and the crisis is averted, but there is real damage done in the relationship between these prophets and their god. They have betrayed God’s trust, particularly in the act of violence towards the earth, and this mistake has grave consequences. Moses and Aaron are barred from entering the land of Israel, less than a

year from its borders. This interaction is not so foreign from the dynamics of a tzevet at machaneh. As we begin to breathe life into our tochnit, we designate tasks and empower small groups of tzevet to create a program which the rest of the us will execute. Though it can be difficult, we have to trust the directions we are given for how to best do our jobs and bring machaneh to a place of accomplishing our collective goals. Especially being in the spotlight, in front of hundreds of hungry (or tired, or bored) eyes can be nerve racking. Some of us thrive there while others are uncomfortable from the start, but either way, it is a vulnerable place to be. We all have enough training and good judgment to see that if we really needed to, we could strike the rock. We could abandon the original plan in order to get things done in a cinch. But the consequences for this are not so simple. Though we share basic goals, ditching the plans of our friends can be felt as a betrayal, an act with real personal and emotional impacts. It can affect the way we work in the future, our friendships, and our hadracha. These relationships are the foundation of our tochnit, and though they might not be felt as clearly by kids, we have to value them in their own right in order to do the best we can do.

Aaron dies soon afterwards in a lavish ceremony where he passes on his priestly robes to his son Elezar on a mountaintop and dies. This dramatic moment is followed by thirty days of mourning. I’m personally interested in how the practical role of a female leader is felt physically, but not acknowledged emotionally, and the death of the more spiritual male leader commands attention for weeks but creates no real changes for the community. REGARDLESS this is clearly a significant year for the Jewish people, with a complete overhaul of their leadership and the

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