The Holy Place We Keep Trying to Skip
Jewish tradition understands the human need for beginnings and endings. We mark our transitions with care. We build rituals to tell us when one chapter has closed and another has opened. We count days, name stages, and construct order around uncertainty, because uncertainty frightens us. We want to know where we stand in the story.
But life does not always move according to the structures we build for it.
When my father died on Rosh Hashanah, I learned this in the most personal way. Because the festivals interrupted the mourning calendar, the formal structures of grief moved quickly. Shiva lasted three days. Shloshim ended after seven days, instead of the usual thirty. Judaism, with all its wisdom about loss, gave me a framework for moving through it—and yet my soul did not move at the framework’s pace. The rituals had ended. The calendar had advanced. But I was still somewhere in the middle.
There was a dissonance between the story the outside world was telling and the story I was still living. The formal markers said one chapter had closed. But I knew I was still standing in the doorway between what had been and what would become.
Many of us know this doorway. A person finishes treatment and goes on living with everything the illness changed. A relationship ends, and someone is still discovering who they are without it. A child is born, and a mother is still learning the contours of a self she does not yet recognize. A chapter closes before the next one has fully begun.
We like to imagine life as a series of clean boundaries: before and after, departure and arrival, exile and redemption. Yet some of our most transformative moments happen in the spaces between the chapters.
Parshat Chukat asks us what to do with that space. What do we do with the middle?
The Israelites have left Egypt. The greatest miracle in Jewish history is already behind them. They have crossed the sea, stood at Sinai, and received the Torah. And still, they are not home.
The Land lies ahead, but the generation that left Egypt will not enter it. The generation that enters will not be the one that knew slavery. The beginning belongs to one generation and the destination to another. Between them stands the wilderness generation.
We tend to remember them through the lens of failure: the wanderers, the ones who did not make it. But that is an incomplete reading. They were the generation of transformation. The wilderness was where slaves became a people, where a national identity was forged, where dependence on God was learned, and where the Torah itself was given. Our most foundational revelation took place in liminal space.
The Mei HaShiloach, the Ishbitzer Rebbe, reads the wilderness as the landscape in which familiar structures fall away. Egypt was a place of oppression, but it was also a place where the Israelites knew exactly who they were. The Land promised rootedness and purpose. The wilderness was the unsettling space between, where the old identity had dissolved and the new one had not yet emerged. And it was precisely there that God sustained them.
The wilderness, then, was not an interruption in the story of redemption. It was the condition that made redemption possible.
No one embodies this more fully than Miriam.
The Torah introduces Miriam before we even learn her name. She stands at the Nile as a young girl, watching over the baby brother her people’s enemy has condemned to the river. She is present before redemption is visible. Before there is a leader, before there is an Exodus, before there is any sign that the slavery will end, she is already watching, already protecting, already holding space for a possibility that no one else can yet see. Later she stands at the sea and leads the women in song, after redemption has come. And finally she dies in the wilderness, before the people enter the Land. Miriam belongs to every chapter of the story and fully to none of them. She is a woman of the threshold, a woman of twilight, and perhaps that is why the Torah ties her death to the disappearance of the well.
The Gemara in Ta’anit teaches that Israel received three gifts in the wilderness: the manna in the merit of Moses, the clouds of glory in the merit of Aaron, and the well in the merit of Miriam. The well was Miriam’s particular gift to a people still becoming. And the well belonged only to the wilderness. It did not follow Israel into the Land. It existed precisely during the years we are tempted to dismiss as incomplete. The Torah suggests the opposite: those years were full of hidden gifts.
The Rambam, in the Shemoneh Perakim, his introduction to Pirkei Avot, teaches that the miracles of the Torah were not improvisations or interruptions of the natural order. God wove their potential into creation from the very beginning; they were always meant to be there. And Pirkei Avot tells us exactly when they were woven in:
“Ten things were created on the eve of the Sabbath at twilight… among them the mouth of the earth, the mouth of the well, the manna, the staff, and the tablets.”
The mishnah could simply have told us these miracles were created. Instead it emphasizes the moment: bein hashmashot, twilight: the threshold between day and night. The very objects that sustain people through their in-between times were themselves made in the in-between. The well that carried Israel through the wilderness was formed in the world’s own wilderness hour.
The Gemara in Shabbat struggles to define that hour. One opinion measures it by the changing colors of the sky. Another by physical distance. Rabbi Yosei offers the most haunting description of all: twilight is like the blink of an eye, one reality departing as another arrives, too quick to measure. The rabbis are trying to describe something that refuses to sit in a category. And that is the point. Twilight is its own kind of time.
The wilderness generation is a national twilight. Miriam is a human twilight. The well that sustained Israel and the Torah that transformed them both rise out of the same sacred uncertainty.
We imagine miracles as the things that carry us out of uncertainty. Yet the Torah offers a more profound vision: miracles emerge within the wilderness. They become the wells in the desert, the hidden sources of strength that sustain us through uncertainty and allow transformation to take place before the destination is visible. This was Miriam’s greatness. She provided water while the journey was unfinished. She sustained a people before they knew who they would become. She revealed that the spaces we experience as incomplete can already hold holiness.
I think of this now when I think of those three compressed days of shiva, when the calendar rushed ahead and left me standing in the doorway. For a long time I felt I had been cheated of the middle, that grief had been folded shut before I was ready. I understand it differently now. The doorway was not the absence of mourning; it was its own kind of time, with its own hidden well. God does not only meet us at the places where we finally arrive. Sometimes God meets us in the twilight, in the sacred space between what was and what will be, where the water is already waiting, and where, if we know how to look as Miriam did, we discover that the unfinished never meant empty.
