Teacher: "If I gave you 2 cats and another 2 cats and another 2, how many would you have?" Johnny: "Seven."
Teacher: "No, listen carefully... If I gave you two cats, and another two cats and another two, how many would you have?" Johnny: "Seven."
Teacher: "Let me put it to you differently. If I gave you two apples, and another two apples and another two, how many would you have?"
Johnny: "Six."
Teacher: "Good. Now if I gave you two cats, and another two cats and another two, how many would you have?" Johnny: "Seven!"
Teacher: "Johnny, where do you get seven from?!"
Johnny: "Because I've already got a freaking cat!
In this week's portion Chukat- Balak tells us the story, that the entire nation of Israel reached the desert, and there Miriam died and was buried. And there was no water for the people. The Jews were dreading they’d all perish by thirst. That’s when the story of striking the rock occurred. G-d told Moses to speak to the rock so it emits water; Moses struck the rock and it produced water.
What is most perplexing is the introduction to the story about the water—the death and burial of Miriam. How does that come in here?
As it turns out, that's precisely how the Talmud explains, when Miriam passed away, the crisis of the water began.
But the obvious question is: What’s Miriam's role in all of this? Why is this rock caked the Well of Miriam? What does Miriam have to do with wells?
Miriam's connection runs deeper. Take Miriam's name, it’s made up of four letters: These four letters can make up three different Hebrew words: 1. Marim, which means bitter. If you vowelize it another way it can mean 2. “Meirim,” to lift up. If you vowelize it yet another way it can mean; 3. Morim, rebels. Now think about these words, where did they show up? Water crisis number 1, how come they couldn't drink the water? The waters were bitter. There's Marim - Water crisis number 3, right before Moses hits the rock he lifts up his hand: - that comes from Meirim - to lift up. Finally, when he speaks to the people in concert with hitting the rock, Moses says: listen you rebels, once again.
Miriam is everywhere in these water crises stories, why?
But is this the only connection of Miriam to water?
Let us go back all the way to the beginning. Where do we meet Miriam for the first time? You guessed it: At the water.
The Egyptians were casting Jewish infants into the Nile. In desperation, the mother of baby Moses places him in this pitiful little box and puts him by some reeds near the shore, and when that happened it was Miriam who stood and watched her baby brother near the water. Ultimately the daughter of Pharaoh retrieved the basket and it was Miriam who brought the baby’s mother to nurse him.
If you would have asked Miriam at the Nile as the daughter of Pharaoh approaches, what's your plan? Why are you still watching? What Miriam would say is, I don't know what's going to happen, but just because I can't figure it out doesn't mean there's not a way out over here. There's a Master of the Universe here and He has plans that are greater than I can imagine.
That's the soul of faith and Miriam embodied it.
It goes back even further in time. The Talmud relates:
Following the edict of Pharaoh to drown all new-born Jewish boys in the Nile, Amram, the father of Miriam, who was the leader of the generation, separated from his wife. He did not want to bring more children to a world that Pharaoh would kill them. The other men followed his example and left their spouses. What was the point of begetting children if their destiny was a watery grave?
It was young Miriam who spoke up and said to her father: “Your decree is worse than Pharaoh's, his decree is directed only against our male children, but yours is also against the females. No more Jews will be born. So Amram returned to his wife, and so all other Jewish men reunited with their wives. That’s how Moses was born.
How can this be? Amram is the giant of the generation. He decides to separate. How can his little daughter argue with him?
Because for Miriam, faith is not abstract. It’s not in the books. It is real. You don’t have to figure out everything in life. You need to do what you need to do, and trust that G-d will complete the rest. Miriam breathed this truth.
This is why she sings her own special song after the splitting of the sea:
What happened at the Sea of Reeds was a reenactment that happened to little Moses at the Nile, decades earlier. At the Nile, one child, Moshe, was threatened by one Egyptian, the daughter of Pharaoh. Later, the danger would be an entire sea, there would be a whole sea full of reeds. That would happen at the splitting of the sea, and just as Miriam had been there the first time, so would she be there the second. And just as she would inspire with her faith the first time, so she would do it the second time.
Just as Miriam stood and watched with faith that somehow it was going to work out, so too the people at the sea they stand and watch. Indeed, it's the same words::
For 40 years, Miriam's well sustains everyone. It is not just the physical well—is she vibrant inspiration and faith of Miriam which sustained the long journey in the desert.
Around 60 percent of the body is made up of water, our blood is 90 percent water. And 71 percent of the planet's surface is covered by water. We can’t live without water. We can’t live without trust, faith, and conviction, especially when we are in a wilderness.
What does this represent spiritually? We can have faith in our hearts and souls. But it is the “water” which allows the faith to spread to all parts of the body, to be integrated into the entire organism.
For Miriam faith is not just a nice word, a crutch, or a ritual. It is real. We can live with it, breathe it, rely on it.
In every generation, we have our Miriam’s—those Jewish girls and women who make faith a reality.
Sure, in each generation we had great Rebbe’s and teachers, like Moses Aaron, who taught Torah, love, and wisdom. Yet it was usually our mothers and grandmothers, who like Miriam, kept alive the deep unbending faith of the Jewish people.
On January 27, 1945, the day Auschwitz was liberated. Thirteen children, some wrapped in oversized striped prison shirts, stand huddled together behind barbed wire. These thirteen were among just 7000 survivors of the lethal concentration camp. Seven thousand of the estimated 1.5 million people who had been sent there to die during the course of the Second World War.
Eve Kor took young people on annual summer tours of Auschwitz, where she was sent as a 10-year-old. While conducting such a tour, she died on Thursday, 1 Tamuz, 5779, July 4, 2019, at 85, at a hotel in Krakow, Poland, near the site of the former death camp.
“Surviving the Holocaust at age 10 meant that Eva emerged from a childhood full of fear, loss, grief, and displacement.” But rather than allowing the darkest moments of her life to define her, she moved forward headfirst into a life of purpose.
Eva and her twin Miriam were born into a Jewish farming family in Romania in 1934.
When the Transylvania region fell to German occupation late in WWII, they were among thousands sent to Auschwitz-Birkenau.
There, Eva's parents, brother, and two of her sisters were led to their deaths in gas chambers. But she and her sister, Miriam, were spared the same fate by virtue of their relationship: they were twins.
Some 1500 twins were subjected to horrifying experiments by Nazi eugenicists, Dr. Josef Mengele (known to history as "The Angel of Death"), who believed that studying them could advance Adolf Hitler's pursuit of creating an Aryan master race.
Eva shared later, how when they arrived in Auschwitz, the chaos was beyond description. A Nazi was frantically searching for twins in the large crowds of Jewish arrivals. When he noticed the two sisters, he asked their mother: Are they, twins?!
Their mother said to him: Is that a good thing? And he said yes.
So she said they are twins. And the Nazi grabbed them and whisked them away. “I did not know that I’d never ever see my family again.”
The twins’ father, Alexander; their mother, Jaffa; and their older sisters, Edit and Aliz, who had been separated from them upon the family’s arrival at Auschwitz, were gassed immediately upon arrival.
"Miriam and I were part of a group of children who were alive for one reason only — to be used as human guinea pigs.
“Three times a week we’d be placed naked in a room, for six to eight hours, to be measured and studied. It was unbelievably demeaning."
Blood was drawn, and germs injected into their arms to see how their bodies would respond.
"During our time in Auschwitz we talked very little," she wrote. "Starved for food and human kindness, it took every ounce of strength just to stay alive."
She and her twin sister, Miriam, were 10 years old and managed to survive the regular mystery injections from Mengele.
Kor recalled how after one injection she fell very ill. Suffering a high fever, she saw Mengele at her bedside, "laugh sarcastically".
"Too bad, she's so young. She has only two weeks to live," she recalled him saying.
Crawling on the floor because she was unable to walk, Kor said she went on to find her sister who had been injected with a substance to freeze the growth of her kidneys.
"If I had died, Miriam would have been killed with an injection in the heart. Mengele would have performed the comparative autopsy. When I didn’t die, he carried on experimenting with us and as a result, Miriam’s kidneys stopped growing. They remained the size of a child’s all her life.”
On January 27, 1945, the two sisters watched as Russian soldiers liberated Auschwitz. "They had smiles on their faces. They gave us chocolate, cookies, and hugs. That was our first taste of freedom," Kor said.
Eva and Miriam emigrated to Israel. Eve served for 8 years in the IDF. Her sister Miriam died in 1993 from kidney disease. (Mengele, one of the most notorious Nazi war criminals, escaped to South America and died in 1979 while swimming in the ocean off a beach in São Paulo.)
Eva Kor traveled to Germany in 1993 to meet with a former doctor at Auschwitz, Hans Münch, who had been acquitted of war crimes. He accepted her invitation to go to Auschwitz with her and sign a document acknowledging the existence of the camp’s gas chambers. On the 50th anniversary of its liberation, they stood together before the charred ruins of its crematories.
On that occasion, she also did something many survivors resented: She said she forgives Mengele for what he did to her. She said later, that many survivors “call me a traitor. But I do it not because they [the Nazis] deserve it, but because I deserve it.”
In 2013, Kor was approached by Rainer Höss, the grandson of Rudolf Höss, who commanded the Nazi death camp Auschwitz for much of the war and who began the use of pesticide Zyklon B to kill prisoners in the camp’s gas chambers. Today, his grandson Rainer is an advocate against the rise of neo-Nazism in Europe. Rainer had by then repudiated his family and its Nazi past. He asked Kor to be his adoptive grandmother, and after meeting him, she consented.
Her actions triggered a deeply emotional and fascinating debate. But one thing was clear: This woman was a bulldozer. Her inner sense of confidence, faith, conviction, and her stubborn refusal to hold on to the past was incredibly powerful.
With our faith today we will overcome the challenges of this pandemic and move on with much more strength to make this world a better place.
Shabbat Shalom,
Rabbi Yoseph Geisinsky
Tom Peacock wrote...