Sing to It

Yesterday, I sat at my desk with a bottle of water and logged into our rabbi's Zoom parsha study — for the first time in six weeks I didn't have to calculate what time it was somewhere else. No more joining from an Airbnb near Machane Yehuda — though the rav's joke about which direction Torah is meant to flow (from Jerusalem, not to it) was humorous. Eastern Daylight Time. My desk. My bottle of water.

It is a small thing, a midweek study session on a screen. It is also the kind of thing that really centers things.

My husband and I have been home for a week and a half. We are already (well, mentally anyway) packing again. Nine days from now we fly back to Israel with the Atlanta Israel Coalition — eleven days on the ground, bringing supplies and showing up wherever we're needed.

Every one of us is paying our own way: flights, hotels, meals. Every dollar raised through the Hearts United campaign goes straight to impact — care packages for reservists, supplies for children in hospitals, essentials for families who lost their homes.

We are going out of love, and because solidarity between our community here in Atlanta and the greater community of Am Yisrael is not an abstraction. It is something you do with your hands and your feet. It's not a joyful moment, but this is a manifestation of Jewish Joy. I'm sure we'll also bring some of the Kosher Ducks.

But that is next week. Now, it is time for parsha study, and the parsha is Chukat.

Chukat — "statute" — covers more ground than almost any other portion in Torah. It opens with the red heifer, the most famously inexplicable commandment in the entire text:

זֹ֚את חֻקַּ֣ת הַתּוֹרָ֔ה אֲשֶׁר־צִוָּ֥ה יְהֹוָ֖ה לֵאמֹ֑ר דַּבֵּ֣ר ׀ אֶל־בְּנֵ֣י יִשְׂרָאֵ֗ל וְיִקְח֣וּ אֵלֶ֩יךָ֩ פָרָ֨ה אֲדֻמָּ֜ה תְּמִימָ֗ה אֲשֶׁ֤ר אֵֽין־בָּהּ֙ מ֔וּם אֲשֶׁ֛ר לֹא־עָלָ֥ה עָלֶ֖יהָ עֹֽל׃

This is the ritual law that GOD has commanded: Instruct the Israelite people to bring you a red cow without blemish, in which there is no defect and on which no yoke has been laid.

— Bamidbar 19:2

A chok — a statute — is a law you follow without fully understanding the reason. The rabbis said that even Solomon, the wisest man who ever lived, couldn't crack the logic of the red heifer. You do it because it's the law. That's the whole explanation.

But the red heifer is just the opening.

Chukat races through forty years of wilderness in a few dozen verses. Miriam dies. The well disappears. Moses strikes the rock when he was told to speak to it. Aaron dies on Mount Hor. Poisonous serpents attack the camp. Wars are fought and won. Two of the three leaders who brought the people out of Egypt are gone by the end.

And in the middle of all of it — crammed between the serpent bites and the military victories — the people sing.

Miriam's death arrives in two sentences:

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.

— Bamidbar 20:1

Two sentences. Arrived. Died. Buried. The Torah does not pause. The very next verse: the community was without water.

Rashi catches the juxtaposition. From the loss of water immediately following Miriam's death, we learn that all forty years in the wilderness, the people had their well — a miraculous, traveling source of water — in Miriam's merit. They didn't know it while she was alive. They found out the moment she was gone.

The Talmud names three gifts that sustained the people in the desert: the manna in the merit of Moses, the clouds of glory in the merit of Aaron, and the well in the merit of Miriam.

When Miriam dies, the water stops. When Aaron dies later, the protective clouds vanish. The gifts were tied to the people who carried them.

Here's where Chukat turns. After the serpents, after the losses, the text arrives at a place called Be'er — literally "well" — and something unexpected happens:

אָ֚ז יָשִׁ֣יר יִשְׂרָאֵ֔ל אֶת־הַשִּׁירָ֖ה הַזֹּ֑את עֲלִ֥י בְאֵ֖ר עֱנוּ־לָֽהּ׃

Then Israel sang this song: Spring up, O well—sing to it—

בְּאֵ֞ר חֲפָר֣וּהָ שָׂרִ֗ים כָּר֙וּהָ֙ נְדִיבֵ֣י הָעָ֔ם בִּמְחֹקֵ֖ק בְּמִשְׁעֲנֹתָ֑ם וּמִמִּדְבָּ֖ר מַתָּנָֽה׃

The well that the chieftains dug, That the nobles of the people started With maces, with their own staffs. And from Midbar to Mattanah,

— Bamidbar 21:17–18

They sang to a well. After everything — after Miriam's death and Aaron's death and the snakes and the thirst — they found water, and they sang to it. Not a hymn to God. Not a song of military triumph. A song to water.

The rabbis noticed that God's name doesn't appear in the Song of the Well. At the Sea, Moses and the people sang to God. Here, they sang to the well itself. Some commentators read this as a sign of the people's growth — they'd learned to dig for water, to participate in the miracle instead of waiting for it to arrive. Others connect the song back to Miriam, whose name is absent but whose well has returned.

Either way, it's a song about the ordinary sustenance that keeps you alive. Spring up. We see you. We're grateful.

This week, as ceasefire negotiations crept forward in Doha, Hamas submitted what mediators described as a "positive response" to the framework for a sixty-day truce and the release of hostages. The realist in me lacks optimism. I still want to hope, however.

Fifty people are still in Gaza. Their families have been counting days for far, far, far too long. The response is not a deal. It is a step — a murmur in the rock, maybe, before the water comes.

Nobody is singing yet. But the well is being dug. Maybe water will be found.

I keep thinking about the structure of the Song of the Well. It credits chieftains and nobles — the leaders who dug. The water didn't just appear. People worked for it. The miracle was real, but so was the labor.

The first Shabbat back after our long trip — last week, Korach — was reunion. Walking into shul, seeing familiar faces, hearing the rabbi's voice in person rather than over Zoom. This Shabbat is different. This one is routine. The study group. Shabbat prep today.

The rhythm that was always here, waiting for us to come back to it.

Miriam carried the well for forty years and nobody thanked her until it was gone.

The rabbis say the people didn't mourn her properly — they buried her and moved on, and only noticed what they'd lost when they were thirsty. There's something in that failure of attention that stings. The things that sustain you most quietly are the things you forget to name.

A midweek parsha class on Zoom. A rabbi who keeps the schedule whether you show up from Atlanta or from a hotel room an ocean away.

In nine days, a group of us from this city, carrying duffel bags stuffed with first-aid kits and coloring books, paying our own way, because the well doesn't fill itself. You dig it with your own staffs. You show up, and then you sing.

Spring up, O well. Sing to it.

Shabbat shalom.

— Uriel ben Avraham