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.

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........

© The Times of Israel (Blogs)