Miriam – The Woman Who Never Waited for Permission

The first in a new weekly series, Real Role Models: Wisdom from the Torah, G-d willing and health permitting, exploring the Torah’s most compelling figures, their greatness, their flaws, and what we can learn from both.

Why Start With Five Words?

This week’s Torah portion, Beha’alotcha, contains one of the most quietly devastating moments in the entire Torah.

Moshe’s sister Miriam is punished for speaking critically about her brother. She is struck with tzara’at a skin condition the Torah associates with divine displeasure and expelled from the camp. The entire nation stops travelling and waits.

And Moshe, the man who spoke to Pharaoh ten times without flinching, who argued with God himself after the Golden Calf, who would later deliver the longest speech in the Torah looks at his sister and prays:

אֵל נָא רְפָא נָא לָהּ

“Please, God, heal her, please.” (Numbers 12:13)

Five words in Hebrew. The shortest prayer in the entire Torah.

No theological preamble. No carefully constructed argument. Just the raw cry of a brother who loves his sister so deeply that all his eloquence falls away. A man capable of moving mountains with language is reduced, by love, to five words.

That tells us something profound about who Miriam was.

A person who strips Moshe down to five words is not a minor character. She is not a footnote to her brother’s story. She is someone he loves with everything he has and, as we will see, someone who earned that love across an entire lifetime of remarkable courage and compassion.

She is this series’ opening role model. She deserves to be.

Who Was Miriam?

Before we look at what she did, it helps to understand what she was up against.

The Jewish people are enslaved in Egypt. Pharaoh has decreed that every Hebrew baby boy is to be killed at birth. The people are in the depths of suffering, ground down by generations of hard labour, cut off from hope.

Into this world Miriam is born. A Hebrew girl. A slave. With no power, no status, no official role of any kind.

And yet, from a very young age, she takes it upon herself to act.

That is the thread running through every stage of her life. Not waiting for permission. Not asking whether it is her place. Looking at what is needed and doing it with compassion, intelligence, and a courage that should honestly take our breath away.

Here are five moments that show us who she was.

The Midwife Who Brought Life Into the World

The Talmud (Sotah 11b) identifies Miriam as one of the two heroic Hebrew midwives in Egypt. The Torah names them Shifra and Puah and according to Rashi following the Talmud, these are the professional names of Yocheved and Miriam, mother and daughter.

The name Puah Miriam’s midwife name is telling. It comes from the root meaning to coo, to murmur gently, to soothe. The Midrash describes her cooing softly over newborns, coaxing struggling babies to breathe, calming infants in distress. She was not a midwife by accident or assignment. She was someone for whom bringing life into the world was a natural expression of who she was.

Pharaoh summoned the midwives and ordered them directly: kill the boys at birth. They refused. They feared God more than they feared Pharaoh.

But Miriam went further than refusal. The Midrash (Exodus Rabbah 1:13) records that when she heard the decree, she looked Pharaoh in the face and said:

“Woe to you on the day of judgement, when God will come to demand punishment of you.”

She was a child. A Hebrew slave girl. And she told the most powerful ruler in the ancient world that God would hold him accountable.

Pharaoh was furious enough to want her killed. Only her mother Yocheved’s quick thinking defused the moment: “Pay no attention to her. She is just a child. She does not know what she is saying.”

Miriam knew exactly what she was saying.

This is our first glimpse of her: a girl with no power, in a world that could erase her without consequence, choosing life and truth over silence and safety.

The Daughter Who Argued With Her Father and Saved the Jewish People

When Pharaoh’s decree came into force, Amram Miriam’s father, described by the Talmud (Sotah 12a) as the leading scholar of his generation made a devastating decision. If every boy born would be killed, what was the point of bringing more children into the world? He separated from his wife Yocheved. Every other man in Israel followed his example.

Miriam, still a young child, went to her father and told him he was wrong.

Her argument, recorded in the Talmud and Midrash (Sotah 12a; Exodus Rabbah 1:13), was direct and precise:

“Pharaoh’s decree is only against the boys. Yours is against boys and girls both. Pharaoh is wicked his decree may or may not be fulfilled. You are righteous your decree will certainly be fulfilled.”

Think about what this takes. A child, speaking to the most respected figure in her community who is also her father in front of everyone, saying that his logic, however understandable, is a mistake that will cost the Jewish people everything.

She was right. Amram listened. He remarried Yocheved publicly, with ceremony. Every other man followed. From that remarriage, Moshe was born.

The Exodus. The plagues. Sinai. The Torah itself. All of it traces back to the moment a young girl found the courage to tell her father he was wrong not out of disrespect, but out of a deep refusal to let despair win.

The Girl at the River and the Bridge She Built

Yocheved could hide her baby no longer. She placed him in a waterproofed basket and set him among the reeds of the Nile. The Torah tells us simply: “His sister stood at a distance to see what would be done to him.” (Exodus 2:4) That sister is Miriam.

The Midrash adds a heartbreaking detail (Exodus Rabbah 1:25): when Yocheved was forced to place the baby in the river, she turned to Miriam and said: “My daughter, where is your prophecy now?”

Miriam did not move. She stood at the water’s edge not to see whether her prophecy would come true, but to see how.

Pharaoh’s daughter came down to bathe. The Midrash names her Batya meaning “daughter of God,” a name she earned by what she was about to do. She saw the basket. She heard a baby crying. She understood immediately this was a Hebrew child, which meant she understood that rescuing him was an act of defiance against her own father’s decree.

She rescued him anyway.

And Miriam stepped forward. A slave girl approaching royalty an act of considerable daring and made a simple, practical offer: she knew a Hebrew woman who could nurse the child. Would the princess like her to fetch her?

She was not just quick-thinking. She was reading the emotional reality of the moment with extraordinary intelligence. She saw that Batya’s heart had already opened, recognised the window, and built a bridge between two worlds an Egyptian princess and a Hebrew slave family that would change everything.

The suggestion was accepted. Yocheved was summoned. Moshe grew up in Pharaoh’s palace, nursed by his own mother, knowing exactly who he was. His identity his sense of belonging to his people was preserved by his sister’s presence of mind at a river’s edge.

Without that moment, the story ends differently.

Rabbi Lord Jonathan Sacks captured the broader picture precisely: “Moses was close to God. Aaron was close to the people. Miriam led the women and sustained her two brothers.” Three leaders. Three complementary gifts. And Miriam’s sustaining, bridging, ensuring life continues expressed itself in everything she did, from the banks of the Nile to the far side of the sea.

The Tambourines

Decades pass. Egypt. The plagues. The final night. The miraculous crossing.

And then, on the far bank, after Moshe leads the men in the Song of the Sea, this happens:

“Miriam the prophetess, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and dancing.” (Exodus 15:20)

Where did the tambourines come from?

Rashi, following the Mechilta, gives an extraordinary answer: the righteous women of that generation were so certain that God would perform miracles for them that they prepared their tambourines before leaving Egypt.

Let that land for a moment. These are women who have lived through generations of slavery, who watched their sons taken, who are fleeing into an unknown desert in the middle of the night. And they packed musical instruments because Miriam had taught them to believe there would be a moment of celebration worth preparing for.

The men sang at the sea. The women sang and danced with instruments they had packed in advance.

The Talmud (Sotah 11b) frames this theologically: in the merit of the righteous women of that generation, Israel was redeemed from Egypt. Miriam did not merely share that faith. She transmitted it. She created the conditions in which an entire people could continue believing, even in the darkest years, that the tambourines would one day be needed.

The Mistake That Became a Law

And then, in this week’s parasha, she does something that costs her dearly.

Miriam speaks to Aharon about Moshe’s withdrawal from his wife Tziporah (Numbers 12:1). The Torah uses the singular feminine verb she initiates it. Both Rashi and the Ramban find no malice in her motives: she is genuinely concerned. Moshe, in his unique prophetic role, has withdrawn from ordinary married life. Miriam and Aharon are also prophets. They have not had to make this choice. She cannot understand why he must.

She speaks from love. She gets it wrong.

God’s response is swift. Moshe’s prophetic level is unique in all of history direct, face to face, unlike any other. Miriam is left with tzara’at and sent outside the camp for seven days.

And Moshe prays. Five words. The same prayer we started with.

“El na refa na lah.”

No anger. No score-settling. Just a brother asking God to heal his sister the most compressed act of love in the Torah.

The nation waits. Every single person. For seven days. Until she returns.

She had once waited for him at the Nile. Now the whole nation waits for her.

This moment Miriam’s mistake became the foundation of one of Judaism’s most important ethical teachings. The Torah commands: “Remember what God did to Miriam on the way when you came out of Egypt.” (Deuteronomy 24:9) The Ramban counts this as an independent positive commandment: we are obligated in every generation to remember and speak about what happened to Miriam, precisely so that we never underestimate the damage that careless speech can cause even when it comes from love (Ramban, Hasagot on Sefer HaMitzvot, Mitzvot Aseh she’Shachach HaRav, no. 7).

Why anchor this law to Miriam specifically, rather than to a lesser or hypothetical figure?

Because only her example carries the necessary weight. If the greatest woman of her generation prophetess, leader, the person who saved Moshe’s life before he was born, who sustained a people’s faith through generations of slavery could cause harm through speech born of love, then none of us can afford complacency. The law needs a real person. It needs Miriam.

The Well

There is one more thing to say about Miriam, and it may be the most beautiful.

The Talmud (Ta’anit 9a) teaches that throughout forty years in the wilderness, Israel was sustained by three miraculous gifts. The manna fell in the merit of Moshe. The clouds of glory that protected the camp existed in the merit of Aharon. And a miraculous well a rock that travelled with the people from camp to camp, always present, always flowing existed in the merit of Miriam.

We know this because of what happened the moment she died.

Parashat Chukat records her death in a single brief verse: “Miriam died there and was buried there.” (Numbers 20:1) The very next sentence: “The congregation had no water.”

Just like that. No water. Because Miriam was no longer there.

For forty years, every morning that hundreds of thousands of people woke up with water to drink in the middle of a desert, they had Miriam to thank. Most of them probably never even knew it.

That is the most Miriam thing imaginable.

She never did what she did for recognition. She did it because there was life to sustain, people who needed something, and she was the one who could provide it. The well did not flow because of a single dramatic act. It flowed because of who she was a woman whose entire life was oriented toward giving others what they needed to survive.

When she was gone, the water stopped.

What She Teaches Us

A role model does not need to be perfect. A role model needs to show us what it looks like to act from conscience rather than comfort, to give more than is asked, and to come back from failure with the same dignity they brought to their greatest moments.

Miriam was a force of compassion who gave life to babies under Pharaoh’s decree. She was the voice of reason who talked her father back from despair. She was the girl at the river who read a stranger’s heart and built a bridge that saved the future. She was the prophetess who sustained a people’s faith across generations of darkness. She was the woman who led the singing when everyone else was still catching their breath.

She was also the person who spoke about her brother from love and got it wrong.

And she was the woman in whose merit an entire people had water to drink for forty years quietly, continuously, without asking to be noticed.

Remove her flaw and you have an inspiring story. Keep it, and you have something true.

The prayer Moshe prayed for her tells us everything. Five words. From the most eloquent man in Jewish history. Because when it came to his sister, words were not the point. Love was the point.

And Miriam, across her whole extraordinary life, was always the point.

Next week, health permitting, please G-d: A new role model from Parashat Shelach. The series continues every Shabbat.