Miriam’s Error
Parashat Behaalotekha ends with one of the more cryptic episodes in the Torah. It begins with these words: “Miriam and Aaron began to talk against Moses because of his Cushite wife, for he had married a Cushite” (Num. 12:1). This gives us a rough idea of what was happening. Moses’ brother and sister were critical of Moses, and it was about his wife.
The next sentence, however, throws us into confusion. “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?” they asked. “Has he not also spoken through us?” (Num. 12:2). What did this have to do with his wife? We are then told that “Moses was very humble, more so than anyone else on the face of the earth” (12:3). Again this seems to be a non-sequitur. Then God summons all three of them and tells them to come to the Tent of Meeting. There He expresses His anger, and says that Moses is unique. The Divine Presence then departs, leaving Miriam’s skin leprous. Moses prays on her behalf one of the shortest prayers in Tanakh, a mere five words: “Please God, heal her now” (12:13). God refuses to remove the punishment, saying to Moses, “If her father had spit in her face, would she not have been in disgrace for seven days?” (12:14). But He does mitigate it, limiting the disfigurement to a week. Then the Israelites move on.
The questions are obvious:
1. Who was the Cushite or Ethiopian woman Moses had married? We have only been told that Moses had one wife, Tzippora, daughter of Yitro, the Midianite priest. There is no reference to Moses having a second wife, let alone an Ethiopian one.
2. What have the two reported complaints to do with one another? There seems to be no connection between Moses’ wife and his siblings’ remark, “Has the Lord spoken only through Moses?”
3. Why was only Miriam punished? The text says that Aaron too was guilty.
4. What has any of this to do with Moses’ humility?
5. Why is this episode here at all? It seems to have no connection with what preceded it, the complaint of the people about the food.
6. Whatever happened, it seems to have had lasting significance, since Moses refers to it almost forty years later, in the book of Deuteronomy (24:9): “Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam along the way after you came out of Egypt.” What was it that the people were supposed to remember and why?
Mindful of all these problems, the sages reconstructed the event, filling in the details and turning it into a fascinating story about Moses’ family life. It began, they say, with the events reported in the previous chapter, when God caused Moses’ spirit to rest on the seventy elders he had chosen, together with Eldad and Medad. A midrash tells us that Miriam said, in effect: I am sorry for their wives, because if the elders have been filled with Moses’ spirit, they are likely to do what Moses has done, namely discontinue marital relations.1See Ex. 19:10 for the need for purification prior to receiving divine revelation.
Evidently, he had ceased to have any intimate relationship with his wife Tzippora, described here as a “Cushite woman” not as a reference to her ethnic origin but rather to her physical appearance as a person of dark skin.
Miriam was critical of this, saying that God had spoken not just to Moses but to her and Aaron also, yet they had not discontinued marital relations with their spouses. Moses heard about this complaint but did nothing. That is what the text means when it says that he was a very humble man, meaning that he was unmoved by this ad hominem attack. The rabbis in general connected the skin condition known as tzaraat with the sin of lashon hara, speaking slightingly of others. That is why Miriam was punished.
Evidently, from the nature of the complaint, it was she who had initiated it – not out of malice, to be sure, but out of sympathy with the wives of the elders – which is why she, not Aaron, was punished.2Note that the verb is in the feminine singular, “she spoke,” not in the plural as we would expect if both Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses.
He was deemed guilty only of listening to lashon hara and not protesting it.3The sages said that lashon hara harms three people: the person who says it, the one who hears it, and the one about whom it is said (Arakhin 15b). Aaron fell into the second category.
So great is the sin of evil speech that Moses warned against it in Deuteronomy, telling the people, “Remember what the Lord your God did to Miriam.” Evidently the episode was still in people’s memories, so they knew to what he was referring.
A midrash dramatises the point. Miriam was punished, it says, despite the fact that that she made the complaint not in the presence of Moses, despite the fact that she was, at least in age, his senior, and despite her intention not being a negative one. Miriam simply intended to ensure that people inspired by ruaḥ hakodesh, the “holy spirit,” should not neglect their spouses. The entire episode, implies the midrash, is there to teach us how even a casual remark, made privately and without malicious intent, can still count as lashon hara, and still have potentially negative consequences.
Stepping back and seeing the passage in the wider context of the Torah narrative, we immediately see something consequential. One of the fundamental themes of Genesis is sibling rivalry. It appears, with variations, five times: in the stories of Cain and Abel, Isaac and Ishmael, Jacob and Esau, Joseph and his brothers, and the two sisters Leah and Rachel. Until now we had no reason to associate this theme with life after the Exodus. Miriam and Aaron, Moses’ siblings, had been until now admirably free of rivalry. Miriam had watched over her brother’s fate as a baby. Aaron had shared with Moses the burden of leadership from the outset of his mission. Neither had uttered a word of criticism, still less of envy, until now.
Yet lashon hara is contagious and seems to exist in almost every human grouping.4See Robin Dunbar, Grooming, Gossip, and the Evolution of Language (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998). Dunbar argues that language is an essential part of human bonding and group formation, and that it is used to establish reciprocity and trust. In a sense, then, gossip plays a large part in the ability of groups to act cooperatively and altruistically – but this is specifically in relation to supplying the group with factual information about individuals within the group. Idle gossip, on the other hand, and specifically if it denigrates individuals, is destructive of the group. That is why lashon hara is so dangerous and why the sages were right to dramatise its effects. For an excellent modern study of lashon hara in Jewish law and thought, see Daniel Feldman, False Facts and True Rumors: Lashon HaRa in Contemporary Culture (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2016).
There is a fascinating indication of this in the previous chapter. Before we hear about the people’s complaints about the food, we read: “And the people were as murmurers, speaking evil in the ears of the Lord; and when the Lord heard it, His anger was kindled” (Num. 11:1).
What is striking about this episode is that the Torah gives us no indication of what the people were complaining about. Usually we are told exactly what the issue was – but not here. The Torah seems to be implying that they complained because that is what they had become accustomed to doing, even when they had nothing specific to complain about. When that happens, the whole mood of the group is badly affected. People find fault where there is none. And the result eventually is that it can affect even the best, even two people as generous-spirited as Moses’ own brother and sister.
We are social animals. We are affected by those around us. Consciously or unconsciously, we conform to the norms of the group. Social phenomena are contagious. Recent research has shown that if your friends are overweight, you are more likely to be overweight.5Nicholas A. Christakis and James H. Fowler, “The Spread of Obesity in a Large Social Network over 32 Years,” New England Journal of Medicine 357, no. 4 (2007): 370–379.
An entire way of speaking – lifting your voice at the end of a sentence as if asking a question, using “like” in every sentence and so on – spread from the San Fernando Valley in southern California (hence the name “Valleyspeak”) through almost the whole English-speaking world. And so on. Already in the twelfth century, Maimonides had codified social contagion as an axiom of Jewish law.6Maimonides, Mishneh Torah, Hilkhot Deot 6:1.
The Torah – as understood by the sages in the light of Jewish history from the days of Moses to their own – attaches huge significance to the tone of conversation within a society as a whole, within communities, and even within families. It may sound extreme to say so but freedom depends on civility, on people speaking courteously of and to one another.7See Os Guinness, The Case for Civility (New York: HarperOne, 2008).
In any group, where the predominant tone is one of complaint, criticism, envy, backbiting, cynicism, and mutual suspicion, not only is the group itself weakened; a profound disempowerment also takes place. Free people do not blame others for their misfortune. They accept and practise responsibility. They assume that if something bad has happened, they must work together to put it right. When criticism is necessary, and it often is, they do so constructively, without animus, and with respect for the person concerned as well as the good of the group as a whole.
The prophets of Israel were not Pollyannas, naïve optimists, blind to the evils and injustices of the world. They were deeply critical of the failings of their generation, sometimes to the point of near despair. But they spoke out of loyalty and love. Even the most critical of them never left the people without hope. Their belief that society and people could change testifies to their deep faith in humankind, and in their people. Speech does not have to be positive to be lashon tov, good speech. But it does have to be constructive, creative, positive in intent. And the lead has to be given by the leaders. That is why God was angry with Miriam and Aaron. If leaders speak like this, how can one blame the people for doing likewise?
One can understand Miriam and Aaron’s concerns about Moses. They did not know what it meant to be the unique individual that Moses was. One can sympathise with Miriam’s concern if she believed, as the midrash suggests, that Moses’ wife (and perhaps his children also) suffered from a lack of attention. That is one of the burdens of leadership in general – all the more so in the case of one who felt the need to be perpetually ready for a communication from God Himself.
Moreover, Miriam was expressing her concern for the wives of Moses’ newly inspired leadership group, in case they too suffered husbandly neglect. Her motives were honourable. Miriam was never less than a heroic and compassionate human being. Yet because others less noble might derive the wrong lesson from her behaviour, she was stigmatised for seven days by an unsightly skin condition that Moses recalled many years later to remind the people how dangerous it is to “judge the judges” and heap unjustified criticism on leaders.
Never give way to sibling rivalry. Never speak badly of others. Never underestimate the damaging effect of words. These are the lessons from the story of Miriam in Parashat Behaalotekha, and they remain intensely valid today.