Sermon: A Different Way of Seeing 5th July 2025
Written by Rabbi Nicola Feuchtwang — 8 July 2025
Lujza Wilhelm was a prolific artist who had studied with Chagall in the early 1950s. She created some portraits, a few quirky imaginative compositions, but above all lots of light, cheery still-lifes which brightened the walls of family, friends, and not a few police stations and hospital wards in Israel. Her sister Viola was probably even more gifted, but there was often a brooding or even tortured air to her sculptures and the colours of her oils and chalks.
Lujza and Viola were 2 of my aunts. My brother has a bit of the family talent; I don’t. I spent many hours at school and at university in tears, because I couldn’t draw a leaf which looked like a leaf, or a diagram which bore any resemblance to what I could see down the microscope.
What I did learn from being in a family where art matters a lot, is a real understanding that what we see when we look at a piece of art depends on how we look – and that sometimes becoming aware of a particular detail we have previously ignored can completely change the picture for us.
With that in mind, I am now going to invite you to pretend that this morning’s Torah reading[1] is a well-known picture in an art gallery. We are going to visit it together, and I will try to point out some features which may change what you see and think.
Here is the picture. An angry old man is using a stick to hit a rock. Another old man is standing nearby but not intervening. Water is pouring out of the rock. They are being watched by a huge and rather menacing looking crowd, some of whom are already jostling their way forward with their cattle.
Let’s take a step back to understand the composition of the picture. We are in a desert in the Middle East in high summer. It feels a bit familiar, but also ominous. That crowd in the foreground is mostly men, but if we look at the background, there are what appear to be female figures, near to what looks like a burial mound…
In literary terms, our ‘foreground’ is the story we have just read. The Israelites are moaning yet AGAIN, this time because there is no water. Moses doesn’t know what to do; God tells him to speak to the rock, but he ‘loses it’, hits the rock – and that does the trick. God construes this as disobedience, and says that as a consequence, Moses & Aaron will not lead the people into the Promised Land.
In our ‘art gallery’, let’s step back a bit further and review some of the pictures nearby….because there are other desert scenes with old men and unruly crowds, but there is one in particular which is strikingly similar – – a leader with a stick, a rock emitting water – although the faces are younger and the mood is less sinister.
You see, we have heard today’s story before – 38 years ago, just after we crossed the Red Sea. (Exodus chapter 17 if you want to look it up). That desert was called Sin, this is Zin. That place was Massah-uMeriva, this is just Merivah. Some phrases are exactly the same – but some of the vocabulary is different. Our rock is Sela – rather than the Tsur of the older story; the words for cattle are different. In that first story, Moses was actually told to hit the rock – in fact maybe that is how we have been getting water in the desert throughout our journeys??
So is this a different version of the same story, perhaps transmitted down the ages in a slightly different language? Or have we, a new generation of Israelites, returned to a place to re-enact what happened to our parents and grandparents?
In the art world, we would now be asking whether modern technology can shed any light on our painting: are there different layers of paint? Might infra-red or Xray analysis reveal a previous painting hidden under the one we are looking at? I am particularly curious about that burial mound in the background – or rather the first 2 verses of the chapter:
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.[2]
Torah does not tell us how Miriam dies or any other detail, in marked contrast to the account of Aaron’s death at the end of the same chapter. The juxtaposition of her death with the shortage of water seems abrupt. Was there something else in this picture which has been erased? It is enlightening then to look at two ancient sources which may shed some light.
- i) Flavius Josephus lived in the first century of the Common Era. Born of a priestly family and highly educated, he was concerned to dispel some of the unfavourable current notions about Jews, and wrote a massive history entitled ‘Antiquities of the Jews’. This is Josephus’ version of what happened:
Then it was that Miriam, the sister of Moses, came to her end, having completed her fortieth year since she left Egypt, on the first day of the lunar month Xanthicus. They then made a public funeral for her, at a great expense. She was buried upon a certain mountain, which they call Sin: and when they had mourned for her thirty days…[3] [my emphasis].
Even if we allow for the likelihood that Josephus was being very selective and ‘Hellenising’ his account for a Greek audience, he was definitely basing it on existing tradition. This public funeral and 30 days of mourning would seem to put Miriam on an equal footing with her brothers in a way that our Masoretic text definitely does not. (Incidentally Josephus does not mention the drought or the ‘water from the rock’).
- ii) Targum Jonathan is a translation of Torah into Western or Palestinian Aramaic, probably from around the 8th century CE. The same two verses read as follows:
And the whole congregation of the children of Israel came to the desert of Zin on the tenth day of the month Nisan. And Miriam died there, and was buried there.
And as on account of the merit of Miriam a well had been given, so when she died the well was hidden, and the congregation had no water.[4]
This account seems to suggest that the water shortage was a direct consequence of Miriam’s death. In other words, we seem to be discovering a rather different picture underneath the one we have been looking at. One writer has suggested that
“Miriam … may have been more prominent in history than tradition was allowed to represent in an age characterized by man’s dominance over woman”[5]
Feminist writers in recent decades have been at pains to re-examine that figure and role, noting that Miriam is mentioned by name only seven times in the whole of Tanach. One scholar in the 1980s, Rita J. Burns, carried out a painstaking analysis of each of these references – very much a ‘microscopic examination of the paint’ approach – using then current theories about the dating of each word. She concluded that there probably was a significant female leader who was well known in the oral history of the Israelites, but may have been deliberately edited out of the Torah text as we have it.[6] Others have reviewed numerous Aggadic midrashim about Miriam, often based on her associations her with water (watching over Moses at the Nile; leading the women in song after crossing the Red Sea), to retrieve her status.
If we allow ourselves to think this way, it opens the door to some other fascinating ideas. I would like to take you back to what Moses (and Aaron) actually say to the Israelites when they lose their temper. Usually translated as “listen, you rebels…” [or “you fools…..”], the Hebrew word is ‘ha-morim’.
But look at it in unpointed Hebrew (מ ר י ם ) – it looks identical with Miriam’s name!
So here is my slightly radical re-reading of the whole story, a bit more sympathetic (I hope) than the traditional one:
Moses and Aaron are old and tired. They have just been bereaved of their sister and co-leader. Because of the water shortage, instead of comfort and space to mourn, they have to deal with urgent demands for the very resource which had been Miriam’s area of expertise. Perhaps Moses’ cry was one of distress and seeking to invoke her skills, not just anger. Perhaps some loss of control is understandable. Perhaps the end of his leadership is not a punishment at all, but a recognition that it is time to move on, permission to retire! Perhaps we should look at the whole picture again.
One of the wonderful things about great art is that we can return to the same picture on another occasion, and see details that we overlooked the first time. I believe the same is true of our Torah texts.