Parshat Hukat: Shades of Grief

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My father in law died in an ICU in Portland Oregon on October 7th. In the last hours of his life, I sat with him chanting psalms, unaware of the horrors unfolding for our brothers and sisters in Israel. There is only one breath between life and death, and yet the span between these two states is the single most impenetrable boundary we encounter. This week’s Torah portion offers us a kind of a prism to turn and turn so we can look at death, and its ancillary – grief – from many different angles. We need Parshat Hukat this year in a way we may not have needed it in recent past. For each of us, in different ways, our grief is more complex, deeper, more complicated than it was when we read this parsha last year.

Grief courses through this parsha – we lose both Miriam (Numbers 20:1) and Aaron (Numbers 20:23-29). The Bible’s style is not always explicit about grief – for that we have midrash. The Bible invites Midrash when it says very little or leaves gaps, as is the case in Numbers 20:1:

וַיָּבֹ֣אוּ בְנֵֽי־יִ֠שְׂרָאֵ֠ל כׇּל־הָ֨עֵדָ֤ה מִדְבַּר־צִן֙ בַּחֹ֣דֶשׁ הָֽרִאשׁ֔וֹן וַיֵּ֥שֶׁב הָעָ֖ם בְּקָדֵ֑שׁ וַתָּ֤מׇת שָׁם֙ מִרְיָ֔ם וַתִּקָּבֵ֖ר שָֽׁם׃
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.
וְלֹא־הָ֥יָה מַ֖יִם לָעֵדָ֑ה וַיִּקָּ֣הֲל֔וּ עַל־מֹשֶׁ֖ה וְעַֽל־אַהֲרֹֽן׃
The community was without water, and they joined against Moses and Aaron.

The most remarkable part of these verses is hidden, or left out; there seems to be an elipses in the middle: Miriam died and was buried. But what about the people she left behind? How did her family mourn Miriam? How did the people she served mourn Miriam? We read that the people begin to grumble and complain against Moses and Aaron according to Abarbanel “just at the time when they ought to have comforted (Moses and Aaron) for the loss of their sister the prophetess.” To translate this into contemporary language: there was no funeral, no shiva, no one to comfort the mourners…the family just buried their sister and showed up at the office the next day.

Many have noted the juxtaposition of the lack of mourning rituals described in the wake of Miriam’s death with the more elaborate mourning rituals described when Aaron dies. My teacher Ora Horn Prouser suggests that Moses losing his temper at the rock may be related to complicated grief over the loss of his sister….perhaps he “learned the hard way that the public silence about Miriam’s loss was a mistake.” (The Torah: A Women’s Commentary) And here, in the wake of Miriam’s death, we find a story of inhibited grief, of what happens when we don’t have mourning rituals to ground us, when we are missing our crucial spiritual technology.

Grief is a generous form of love; grief is our very human way of praising those whom we love. Grief has as many shades as love does, as fear does. Since October we have seen and felt so many of these various shades of grief, together, and separately – in our own hearts and minds. Grief is a form of praise. Yet, we don’t see much praise in Hukat – we see lots of complaining! Perhaps the Israelites protracted grumbling is a result of the inhibited grief they experience upon losing Miriam. They don’t have a container for their sadness and fear, so it spills out as anger. Martin Prechtel writes (The Smell of Rain on Dust: Grief and Praise) that “without grief we can never grow ourselves into real people.” Prechtel is talking about being a mensch! Perhaps you can’t grow into a proper mensch without experiencing this most human of experiences. In Hukat Moses is not his best self, not acting like a mensch. The people are not acting like mensches.

Our parsha opens with the words זֹ֚את חֻקַּ֣ת הַתּוֹרָ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֥ה / This is the ritual law that God commanded, describing the esoteric ritual of the red heifer. The mysterious law/hok described at the opening of our parsha requires the ashes of the unblemished red heifer to be combined with mayim hayim – living, fresh water – as part of an elaborate ritual in which the mixture is sprinkled on one who has become impure through corpse contact. What does the red heifer have to do with the other stories of grief in our parsha? What does the red heifer have to do with our own experiences of grief? Quite a lot, actually, since the red heifer ritualizes death – it is a means of transversing that liminal space between life and death. Death is the most powerful source of impurity in the Biblical mind. Purity and impurity are human categories; they do not apply to God. Yet God can only dwell among the people when the people are pure. So purity rituals are a means of re-establishing our relationship with God; in fact, this paradigm offers us another way of thinking about the work of grief. Grief, and our mourning rituals, are our process of re-establishing our relationship with the Sacred. The red heifer rite sounds so strange and foreign to our modern ears, yet it contains some of the crucial elements that make ritual a powerful means of transmuting emotions. Ritual works on the nonverbal level. Talking about grief – or joy- is not a substitute for the rituals we need in order to metabolize these experiences.

Its no accident that water figures so prominently in our parsha today, and in our rituals. Water plays important roles in the Jewish tradition (as it does in many world religions). Water cleanses and purifies; used in the Mikvah it facilitates change from one state to another. And of course water figures in the simple yet powerful act of washing hands when we leave the cemetery. Just as grief runs through our portion, so does water – or the absence of it. The rabbis responded to the gap in this text with the midrash of Miriam’s well (Taanit 9a) – as long as Miriam was alive, the well followed the Israelites wherever they journeyed. When Miriam died the well dried up. Commentators have noted that the difference between the Hebrew words Miryam (Miriam) and mayim (water) is one extra letter. וְלֹא־הָ֥יָה מַ֖יִם לָעֵדָ֑ה/ and the community was without water: If water is life, Miriam’s death is a compounded loss – a loss of one singular life, and also a loss of life writ large, a loss of hope.

So if we imagine this story as a needlepoint and turn it over, we find that water and grief are threads woven together to create this tapestry, a tale of ritual and the lack of ritual. Suddenly, the ashes of the red heifer mixed with mayim hayim/living water makes sense as a means to transform our grief; and it makes sense to juxtapose this esoteric ritual law to Miriam’s death, and the people’s angry thirst.

Martin Prechtel – a non-Jewish thinker and writer – says that the ocean is the best place to grieve. Prechtel suggests that when you experience grief, you should take a trusted friend and go to the ocean or another natural body of water. The ocean “converts all pain to life;” the ocean (Prechtel imagines) is a giant womb that gives birth to all life. So the ocean takes every grain of sand, or piece of glass, or shell or pair of lost sunglasses and transforms it, melds it so that these individual grains of sand become one beach. “The water of the ocean is salty because it is made of the tears of all the grief of the world’s losses since forever.. the losses that make up life, not just yours, but also yours.” The ocean, he says, is “holy and alive and listening” – the ocean listens to us…and makes room to accept our grief and turn it into new life.

Pretchel’s creation of a novel ritual to process grief highlighted for me the power of our traditional Jewish rituals, the timelessness and utility contained within our ritual playbook for mourning. There is only one breath between life and death, and yet the span between these two states is the single most impenetrable boundary we encounter. When we do encounter this mysterious and powerful span, we hover in the liminal space of grief. This is the space where words fall short, so we let them go. Instead, we tear our clothes, we feel the sensation of our hands on the shovel as we fill a grave with dirt, we cook a meal, we show up for shiva….we let our rituals hold us up.