The Song Grief Wrote: Miriam, Moshe and a New Generation
- Dr Tanya White
- Jul 3
- 6 min read
ללעילוי נשמת ישראל סמל
נתן בן אברהם חיים וסאם הי"ד
In Memory of Captain (Yisrael) Natan Rosenfeld ז"ל
Death shatters all illusions of self-sufficiency and sovereignty. When we tear keriya, we bear witness to the rupture at the core of human existence. We affirm the raw, sterile anguish of our mortality — the truth that life is marked by alienation, rupture, and deep fracture. That sometimes, the delicate thread holding our world together begins to fray and unravel.
In moments of extreme grief, words elude us. After the Holocaust, there was a 20-year silence – Yehuda Amichai, the Israeli poet, wrote: “After Auschwitz, no theology.” No one had the theological or human terms to start speaking about the event. Words are how we structure our subjective experience and translate it into a shared reality, but something so cataclysmic resists translation. The maturational process, we are told, begins by formulating a sentence from individual words – creating order and structure from parts. Words suggest human autonomy, majesty, and even omniscience. But in truth, words are an illusion. Because when faced with extreme tragedy or even ordinary loss, the absurdity of life creeps into our consciousness, and the fissures at the heart of human mortality remind us how very small, very limited, and very banal words can be.
Elie Wiesel once said that the word is an act of violence because it breaks the silence. Over the last 20 months, there have been so many silences. The silence of the unspeakable acts of violence perpetrated on October 7th, the silence in the face of the betrayal of the so-called liberal allies, the silence of grief as we bury soldier after soldier. The silence at the pain etched in the faces of the hostage families.There are no words, there is no order, there can be no structure. Words are a breaking out from coherence.
For 38 years, the people of Israel wandered in silence. The Torah itself is silent, offering no recollection of events from this time. It is a period marked by loss — the loss of a dream, of a land, of an entire generation. The loss of innocence. And now, in this week’s parsha, the loss of a visionary, a leader: Miriam. A woman who mastered the art of bringing order to disordered reality. In the heart of slavery, it is Miriam who teaches the women how to sing. In a nameless world — reflected in the absence of names in chapter 2 of Shemot — a world stripped of the coherence of identity, Miriam reframes the Israelite story. She restores Moshe’s individual identity and reclaims the Jewish people’s national identity. Miriam is order. She is coherence. She is creative apperception. Miriam is presence beyond the immediacy of the here and now. She reminds us that in the absence of words, there can still be song.
So, her loss in this week’s parsha is devastating — not only for the people, who have lost a leader and the source of their water, of life, vibrancy, and energy — but also for her brothers, Moshe and Aharon. Over forty years, we witness Moshe transform from a man who "could not speak" into a leader whose words gently nurse a people into maturity. His personal journey mirrors his evolving relationship with language. Lo ish devarim anochi — “I am not a man of words,” he declares in self-described muteness — yet he becomes Moshe Rabbenu, the paradigmatic teacher, the man of words.
But suddenly, when faced with a simple task of bringing water from a rock through speech, he finds he is only capable of hitting rather than speaking to it. Some commentaries note that Moshe was following precedent – when forty years earlier he had been asked to hit rather than speak. Others note that he failed to distinguish between the complaints of the first and second generations – whilst in the past the people complained about travelling to the land, stating they would rather return to Egypt, here they are asking to go to the land, a land they describe as good. Moshe’s inability to detect the difference shows he is the perfect leader of slaves, but an imperfect leader for free people, and consequentially cannot bring them to the land.
But perhaps we can read it in a very human way. Moshe might have been the greatest human to live. But he was still deeply, perfectly imperfect. That tear at the heart of our ordered reality – the contingency of our existence – does not evade even the greatest amongst us like Moshe. And in this moment of raw grief and loss for the woman who gifted him his life, he cannot be expected to find words. Moshe cannot bring water from the rock because his sister – the source of all water, the source of his own life – is no more. Her death has been cleared for publication, and Moshe cannot breathe, cannot speak, cannot summon forth words of order and peace. Instead, he reverts to a primal state — acting out rather than giving form through language. He responds from the depths of the subconscious, and he strikes — just as he once struck the Egyptian at the beginning of his journey.
It may not be right in a world governed by order and reason — but in a moment of primal rupture, it is a deeply human, profoundly fallible response.
And we — the readers, the children of Moshe our teacher — we know him. We feel him. We understand him. We know what it is to lose something you love, to face the absurdity of existence, to experience a rupture so cataclysmic it feels as if the ground beneath your feet has disappeared. We know — because we too are human. We too are fallible. We too belong to a people for whom loss is inextricably woven into our very being. And we too understand that what Moshe needs in that moment is not judgment, but presence — to be held, to be seen, to be told that this moment of primal instinct may not be the right response, but it is an understandable one. All we can do is be with him. Hold him in the loss of his dream. Hold him in the loss of his words. Hold him tightly. Because when words fail — there is nothing else we can do.
We need to promise him that we will carry forward the legacy of the one he loved most. That we will do all we can to honour their memory. That we will bring their essence to bear in the world. That we will live, and love, and sing again — because, despite everything, the human thirst for water, for life, for meaning and purpose, defies even the deepest absurdity.
And that is precisely what the people do. Immediately following Moshe’s incident of hitting the rock, the people sing a song. Echoing Miriam’s essence, her being, her framing of reality, they make the bitter waters sweet, offering Moshe comfort by carrying forward her legacy in their own way. Shirat HaBe’er (Numbers 21:17), the Song of the Well, is the people’s love-song eulogy to Miriam. It is their response to the rupture at the rock. It is their embrace of Moshe. The ancient creation of our modern-day sticker — a microcosm of a person brought into the world anew through song, memory, and presence.
Music, as we know, touches the deepest recesses of our inner being — our souls. It reaches places in the psyche that words, actions, or even images cannot. Where language falters, music prevails; it expresses the inexpressible. That is why, while religious leaders and theologians continue to search for the right words to make sense of our current reality, Israeli artists are experiencing nothing short of a renaissance. They have entered a space of unprecedented grief and cataclysmic rupture and birthed a genre of music that is not only therapeutic and cathartic, but also deeply relevant and profoundly powerful — finding the words and melodies to give voice to what cannot be explained through reason.
This second generation not only has the emotional maturity and intelligence to understand Moshe’s actions at a deeper level – of grief rather than anger – they also have the capacity to respond in line with the very object of loss itself. Utilising song, the dimension of the ‘unspoken’, they affirm the truth of human fallibility, the knowledge that life is bitter and that words are sometimes not enough. But that despite it all, we live. We translate our experiences of bitterness into a song. And ultimately, it is love that incurs loss, and loss that births acts of love.
Sam and Avi, no words will ever be enough. But over these past 20 months, we have witnessed — as with so many others — how Natan’s legacy will live on: through the acts of love of his friends and family, and through countless others who never even met him. As you so beautifully recounted at his funeral on Sunday, his infectious laughter, his radiant smile, and his rare ability to live life fully — embracing its immense joys as they are — will continue to weave their way into the land of the living, gently permeating the heavy and bittersweet reality we now face.
Your grief is our mandate. A nation embraces you, as we did Moshe. The words of recently released song eretz by popular Israeli singer Idan Raichel, expresses this mandate so powerfully:
הופכים כל כאב לשיר
אבל אהבה נפשי
גם כשקשה
עוד יהיו חיים”
“And still, from the beginning, we turn every pain into song. But, my soul’s love —even when it’s hard, there will still be life.”
יהי זכרו ברוך
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