On Silenced Women and Ageing Male Leaders by Rabbi Richard Jacobi
This coming Shabbat, I have the delightful contrast of a Shabbat morning B’nei Mitzvah for a 13-year-old, coming after an Adult Bat Mitzvah celebration on Erev Shabbat for a woman nearly five times the young person’s age.
Let me clarify, lest you be concerned, that the Friday night is NOT a relegation to a lesser space, but an opportunity to celebrate on her birthday. And Tracey Grant, the older adult, is leyning a full story from the end of the parashah. She is one of a group of women celebrating Adult Bat Mitzvah this year, and each service is proving unique and uplifting.
In her D’var Torah, my Adult Bat Mitzvah student very much became my teacher in presenting her response to the story that she is leyning and which ends this week’s parashah. Quite rightly, Tracey raises serious concerns about the fact that Miriam is punished after she and Aaron jointly mount something of a sibling rebellion against Moses.
The episode, which fills the sixteen verses of Numbers chapter twelve begins by stating that “Miriam and Aaron spoke against Moses because of the Cushite woman he had married,” but the substantive complaint comes in the next verse. There, they (both) say “Has the Eternal spoken only through Moses? Has [God] not spoken through us as well?” (v.2)
This seemingly gets God incensed, descending into the Tent of Meeting and giving them a telling off and a strong defence of Moses’ special place as a unique servant of God. As God departs, Miriam is “stricken with snow-white scales!” (v.10) Aaron implores Moses to intercede with God and he does so, uttering the well-known short prayer “El na, r’fa na lah – Please God, heal her please” (v.13). Even then, the punishment is commuted to a seven-day exclusion for Miriam from the camp.
There are so many questions and challenges in this short text, including possible racism by Miriam and Aaron, the identity of the Cushite woman, the sibling dynamic among the trio, the image of the angry intervening and punishing God, the silent roles of both Miriam and the people of Israel. However, I feel the most important is the question of why Miriam alone is punished.
My congregant teacher cited a recent article by Rabbi Robyn Ashworth-Steen published on Voices for Prophetic Judaism, in which she wrote: “I know that my task as a Jewish readier is to read critically and thoroughly and to ask the question as posed by the scholar Carleen Mandolfo, ‘where does the biblical text fall short of its own ideals of justice?’ (2007: 9). For if I am not challenging and demanding more of the biblical texts then I leave one rigid, harmful interpretation of the texts to do its damage in the world today.”[i]
There is a powerful challenge given to us by both Ashworth-Steen and Mandolfo, which is to offer narratives that both by their quantity and quality provide a counter-balance to the entrenched misogyny in both the Bible and the long history of biblical commentary.
Let me give just one example. Many of us use The Torah: A Modern Commentary, edited by Rabbi W. Gunther Plaut as one of our core reference books. In the Gleanings for this story comes this clever, but pernicious comment by David Daiches:
[Miriam (note just Miriam, Aaron is given a free pass by Plaut here!) has complained about the black wife whom Moses has married. Now she herself was “stricken with snow-white scales.”] Was this an example of divine irony? Perhaps the implication is:
“She’s too dark for you, is she? If you prefer whiteness, I’ll make you whiter than ever.”[ii]
As an anti-racist comment, it might score some marks, but for its embedded misogyny, I think I’d place it among the harmful interpretations referred to by Ashworth-Steen and Mandolfo.
Ellen Frankel, in her wonderfully scholarly, creative, and challenging text The Five Books of Miriam devotes a total of six pages to different aspects of these sixteen verses! This, to me, is an indication of how important a text this is for her context. By comparison, the Ten Commandments in parashat Yitro in Exodus get just over two pages!
Frankel’s voicing of Miriam answers a question asked by “Our Daughters” about why Aaron speaks for Miriam after she has been punished and why she is silent in this whole episode. She, as Miriam, says: “Not even I, matriarch of the ruling family, was granted a powerful voice. For here, in my bold bid for such a role, I was slapped down, whitened out, and silenced. In fact, my only solo moment in the entire Torah is at the Sea of Reeds, when I echo a single verse of my brother’s song, and even then I “chant for the women,” not for myself. After my challenge to Moses, I appear only once more in the Torah – at my death. Even then, the people pass over my death in silence. But the women heard my words – even though the Torah failed to record them. Let them live through you, my descendants.”[iii]
Writing here as yet another man providing commentary, I dare to hope that I can add something to redress the balance so that Miriam’s descendants, the women of Judaism, can find their voices and valuable perspectives elevated. Witnessing again the ageing men of the Torah – Aaron, Moses and a very masculine God – dominating the text and silencing the lone woman should make us squirm.
Watching as ageing men, especially in the USA, Russia and Israel do such harm to other people reminds me that we need to re-double our efforts to elevate and amplify those voices, so often women’s, who provide prophetic visions of a better world.
Shabbat shalom
[i] Hineynu: re-defining of prophesy through a feminist lens, Rabbi Robyn Ashworth-Steen https://voicesforpropheticjudaism.uk/2025/05/22/hineynu-re-defining-of-prophecy-through-a-feminist-lens/#_ftn2
[ii] The Torah: A Modern Commentary, Plaut 2006:973, citing Moses: The Man and His Vision D. Daiches 1975:164
[iii] The Five Books of Miriam, Ellen Frankel 1,996:212