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The Songs We Sing in a Broken World: Chukat (In memory of Phyllis Hecht ז"ל)

Updated: 7 hours ago


(For a printable PDF scroll to bottom)

לעילוי נשמת גיטל פאשע בת מאשה רחל

In memory of an extraordinary human being who gifted those who knew her with love, inspiration and hope. Her love of life, torah and HKBH knew no bounds. May her memory be a blessing for am Yisrael and the world.


The World As It Could Be

Can the world be other than it is? I have spent a year teaching that it can. But honestly — there are moments when I have doubted it.


Yesterday was one of those moments. And then God winked.


It was the last session of my Tuesday morning courses at Matan HaSharon.

The first class has spent the year travelling through what I can only describe as the biblical revolution of becoming. The Torah makes a claim that was genuinely radical in the ancient world: human beings are not fixed. They are not prisoners of their nature, their past, their circumstances. The person you are today is not the person you are condemned to be tomorrow. This is not self-help optimism — it is a theological statement about the nature of the human being, made flesh in story after story: Avraham leaving everything he knows, Yosef in the pit and then the palace, Moshe who cannot speak becoming the man who speaks an entire book. The biblical narrative insists, again and again, that the next moment, the next hour, the next year will look different from this one. This matters especially in adversity. When we are in the pit, the biblical posture is not to ask why — but what. What can I become from here?


In my second class, we studied Rabbi Jonathan Sacks' To Heal a Fractured World. His central claim: the world can be other than it is. God calls on us — small, imperfect, ordinary us — and asks that we act in greatness. Every act we perform, however modest, has the capacity to shift something in the world. Tikkun — repair — is not metaphor. It is mandate.


Both classes ended. My husband and I got in the car and drove south.

God's Winks

I believe in God's winks — moments when something that felt like coincidence reveals itself as more. A reminder, arriving precisely when you need it, that you are being heard. Because despite everything I teach and try to live, despite the inspiration I get from my truly special students and the blessedness I feel from so much in my life, sometimes the despair creeps in. And then we walked through the gates of Kfar Adi, and everything wove itself into a seamless tapestry of meaning. God was winking at me. I felt it.


Kfar Adi is a village for adults and children with severe physical and cognitive disabilities, situated just outside Ofakim. It is genuinely, unexpectedly beautiful — considered spaces, fields the residents work in, places designed to give people dignity and the simple pleasure of a life that feels like their own. The angels who work there — nurses, caregivers, sherut leumi girls and shnat sherut volunteers — do so with a quiet devotion that has zero interest in being photographed or celebrated. You cannot post the faces of the residents. And those that work there are not doing this for you to know about it. But I am.

We walked into the hospice wing. The residents were strapped into their chairs, eyes apparently fixed on nothing. And then — yes, here is my proud Ima moment — my daughter Noa and her friends from Sherut began to speak to them — not at them, to them — and a light switched on behind those eyes. A half-smile. A shift. A twinkle. These young women don't see disability. They see the soul living inside the body and they know exactly how to reach it.


This is avodat kodesh — holy work. There is no other phrase.


We heard how it began. Doron Almog, a Major General in the IDF, had a son named Eran born with a severe disability — he would never develop beyond the level of an eight-month-old infant. Searching for somewhere that could care for Eran with dignity, he found instead beautiful souls warehoused in conditions that broke his heart. What he needed didn't exist. So he built it. Together with a woman named Ariella Ringart, who had already begun offering respite care in her own home, Almog created Kfar Adi — a real village, a real life, for people the world had written off. He did what Rabbi Sacks describes: he walked into the gap between the world as it is and the world as it ought to be, and got to work on his small corner of it.

Miriams Death and the Song of the Well

This week's parsha gives us Miriam's death — and I was thinking about her all day.

Miriam understood something the world around her had forgotten: that reality is not fixed. She grasped it not as an abstract idea but as a lived posture. Consider where she first appears — in Egypt, in the depths of slavery, in a world so stripped of identity that the early chapters of Shemot barely use names. There is no coherence, no future, no language adequate to the darkness. And it is precisely here, in this nameless world, that Miriam teaches the women to sing.


This is not Pollyanna optimism. Miriam does not pretend the bitterness isn't real. Her very name carries it — mar, bitter; yam, sea. She is named for those bitter waters that carry drowned Israelite babies down the Nile. She knows exactly what the world is. But she refuses to let what is have the final word over what could be. She takes the mar yam — the bitter sea — and transforms it into melody, into movement, into life -for her baby brother Moshe and her people. She leads not by denying the darkness but by insisting, from within it, that another reality is possible. She sees the water at the bottom of the dark well.


When she dies, in this weeks reading, the water dries up. The life force, the ability to see something more. And Moshe — the man who became Moshe Rabbenu, the paradigmatic teacher, the man of words — cannot speak. He reverts to striking the rock rather than speaking to it. I don't read this as failure or anger. I read it as grief so total it swallows language. He is not just mourning his sister. He is mourning everything she represented — the capacity to see beyond what is, to find song in the bitter sea, to hold the broken world and still believe it can be otherwise. When Miriam dies, that vision seems to die with her. The water is gone. The words are gone. There is only the hard fixed place - the rock, and the impulsive response - striking.


But here is what the people do. Immediately after — almost startlingly so — they sing. Shirat HaBe'er, the Song of the Well, rises up from the people as a spontaneous act of collective memory. It is their eulogy for Miriam, their embrace of Moshe, their refusal to let grief close the world down. It is an testimony to Miriam's act of seeing and singing. She taught them, in the heart of slavery, that song is not a response to freedom — it is the path toward it. That you do not wait until the bitter waters turn sweet before you sing. You sing, and the singing is what turns them.


They give Moshe back what he has lost — not through argument or theology, but through the very act Miriam taught them. They carry her forward into the next moment. They make the world, just slightly, other than it is.


Yesterday, I watched young women do the same thing. They walk into rooms of people the world has rendered invisible and draw out the light. They see beyond the barriers of physical disability and sing directly to the souls. They don't waste time asking why. Instead they say what can I do, right now, with what I have.


That is what it means to be a person of becoming. That is what it means to see the world other than it is. That is what it means to live the Biblical revolution.


Yesterday God winked at me and answered my despair with evidence of hope. He showed me that the world can be other than it is — because I watched people making it so.


Go visit Kfar Adi. Tell them I sent you.


I promise you will come out of there other than you are.


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To listen to my podcast on Rabbi Sacks book To Heal A Fractured World: Episode 5: To Heal A Fractured World (Part 1) | Books & Beyond Podcast


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