A Sermon by the Reverend Ellen Rowse Spero
First Parish Unitarian Universalist Church,
Chelmsford, Massachusetts
April 17, 2005
For All Ages:
Next Saturday evening is the beginning of Passover, an eight-day Jewish festival that celebrates and remembers the liberation of the ancient Israelites from slavery under the harsh rule of the Egyptian Pharaoh. Several families in our congregation, including mine, have Judaism as part of our family tradition. On Saturday, my family will be holding a Seder, the traditional opening dinner of Passover, where everyone at the table listens to and relives the story of how God led the Israelites to freedom.
According to the Book of Exodus in the Bible, the person God appointed to confront the powerful Pharaoh and lead the Israelites out of slavery to freedom was a man named Moses. You may have heard about him. But Moses could not have succeeded without the help of his older sister Miriam. She watched over her baby brother from the day he was born.
At the time of his birth, the Pharaoh had decreed that all the male children of the Israelite slaves should be killed. According to legend, before her brother was born, Miriam had a dream that he would be the one to lead her people to freedom. So, Miriam convinced her parents to hide their new baby son. When it became too hard to hide him, Yokheved, Moses’ mother, put him in a basket and hid him among the reeds in the Nile River and instructed Miriam to keep an eye on her baby brother. Miriam hid herself and watched and waited. And watched and waited. Then, Princess Batyah, the daughter of the Pharaoh himself sees the baby in the basket. She calls upon her attendants to pull the baby out. She tells them she would like to adopt this little boy, even though she knows he is the child of a slave. Miriam comes out of hiding and offers to find a nursemaid for him. She runs home and gets her mother. The Princess hires Yokheved, and so Moses’ mother and sister are able to stay with him while he grows up in the palace.
When you think about it, Miriam was very brave. She helped her parents overcome their fear about disobeying the Pharaoh. She watched over her brother and went up the princess, a slave girl daring to talk to a princess, to make sure her mother could be with her child. Without his big sister to watch over him, Moses would not have been able to ensure the safety and liberation of his own people when he grew up.
Ancient Reading: Exodus 15:20-21
Modern Reading: Excerpt from "Miriam’s Psalm" from WomanWisdom by Miriam Therese Winter
Copyright 2005, Ellen Rowse Spero. All rights reserved.
The Biblical account speaks of Miriam, only briefly, seeming to move as quickly as possible away from her back to her brothers, Moses and Aaron. It feels as if the patriarchal authors of the Torah wanted to erase her from the story but they knew that she is so important in the memories of the people that they couldn’t get away with it. Perhaps they hoped that over time, she would be reduced in memory to those few lines in the Books of Exodus and Numbers. But instead, readers and listeners, particularly women, used their imaginations to fill in between the lines, creating a whole tradition of "midrash" or commentaries and legends on Miriam. And in the last thirty years, as women have entered the fields of rabbi, ministry, and religious scholarship and given voice to their history, a whole new generation of Midrash about Miriam has arisen. This seems very appropriate to the Passover season, a time of remembering voices from a past of struggle and hardship and survival so as to live more generously, compassionately and justly in the present. The Passover Hagaddah, the Seder liturgy, joins the past and the present by having the participants say "Once we were slaves in Egypt, now we are free." Not "they were slaves" but "we". In Miriam’s case, it is "once we were denied our story, now we can speak."
Miriam makes four brief appearances in the account in the story of the Exodus and the forty years in the Wilderness, each progressively distancing her from the center of the story and the center of importance. In between the lines, one can read the tension between the authority of the Temple priests and rabbis and the allegiance and memory of the people. Her disparate appearances in the story are connected by the imagery of water, a powerful metaphor in the Jewish tradition for the divine source of life. In fact her name contains the Hebrew word, "yam" for waters. The "mir" part of her name could be from the Egyptian word, "mer" which means "beloved" or the Hebrew word "mar" which means "bitter." Given her story, both are appropriate.
We are introduced to Miriam in the story I told during the "For All Ages", the big sister who ensures her baby brother’s survival. In the actual biblical text, neither Miriam nor her mother, Yokheved, nor the Princess Batyah are given a name. After his mother places the baby in the basket, we only told that "His sister stood at a distance to see what would happen to him." Upon seeing the princess pull her brother from the water, she asked the Pharaoh’s daughter, "Shall I go and get you a nurse from the Hebrew women to nurse the child for you?" The legends associated with this story, that it was Miriam who dreamed of her brother’s leadership and who confronted her father and mother to prevent them from killing him at birth are characteristic of "origin myths" where the hero is born into danger and saved by the intervention of others. In any case, these stories serve as a commentary, a reinforcement of the biblical account, of Miriam’s courage from the time she was a girl.
The next time we hear about Miriam is right after God has parted the Sea of Reeds (mistranslated as the Red Sea) to allow the Israelites to cross into the wilderness and then closed the waters so as to drown the pursuing Egyptian army. It is at this moment that we are introduced to Miriam by name, and by title: "Then the prophet Miriam, Aaron’s sister, took a tambourine in her hand; and all the women went out after her with tambourines and with dancing. And Miriam sang to them: "Sing to the LORD, for he has triumphed gloriously; horse and rider he has thrown into the sea." It is interesting, first that Miriam is named as the sister of her other, less famous brother Aaron rather than Moses. And that she is named as a prophet, the first woman in the Bible to be given that important title. In the Bible, a prophet, a "nabi", is a leader who speaks to the people on behalf of God. So, we get our first glimpse of the Biblical editors’ ambivalence toward Miriam. They are willing to name her as a prophet but in how and where they name her, they make clear her lesser status. Miriam’s brief "Song of the Sea" is preceded by her brother Moses’ "Song of the Sea" which is eighteen lines long. Miriam’s one line song is actually a direct quote from Moses’ longer one. Or is it? Feminist scholars argue that Miriam’s song is the original, and date it as one of the oldest texts in the Bible. They point out that her song is characteristics of songs sung by women in ancient Goddess worship. Ellen Frankel, in her commentary on the Torah, The Five Books of Miriam, notes: "In ancient Near Eastern culture, women frequently sang battle songs. Goddesses such as the Canaanite Anat or the Babylonian Ishtar were often depicted as female warriors" (p. 110). That Miriam is the keeper of a tradition of women’s leadership in worship is further reinforced by the fact that her song is the basis for the other women’s songs in the Bible, including the annunciation songs of Hannah for her son Samuel and Mary for her son Jesus.
I recognize that praising a warrior God, whether male or female, who just drowned a group of Egyptians sounds jarring and primitive to our modern, liberal religious ears. But in the context, Miriam’s leading the women in singing and dancing speaks to her prophetic status. The group she and Moses were leading was a ragtag band of refugees who had to flee in the night with only what they could carry on their backs into a wilderness where they did not know if they could survive. They were pursued by an army riding chariots, bearing spears, and bows and arrows, against whom they had no chance. This image is as real today as then. Think of Darfur. In her book, Sarah Laughed, Vanessa Ochs re-imagines the scene: "There were mothers carrying heavy toddlers too tired to walk, granddaughters supporting the elderly. The first image they beheld as free women was Miriam dancing. They watched as she held her timbrel to her heart, reached it up to the heavens, and then stretched it outward to welcome this people streaming out from the turquoise sea that had grown quiet…If the timbrel signified hopefulness for Miriam, perhaps it could do the same for them. From her own experience, Miriam knew it was harder to imagine freedom than to sink into despair. She knew that sustaining hope was a most valuable gift she had, one she was able to share" (pp. 27-29).
The next story of Miriam speaks to the trust placed in her leadership by the Israelites, even as she loses favor with God, or at least the hierarchy that claims to speak for God. According to the story, Miriam and Aaron confront Moses on his leadership. She asks her brother, "Has the LORD spoken only through Moses? Has He not spoken through us also?" (Num 12:2). God punishes her for speaking out against Moses’ leadership by afflicting her with a case of leprosy, thus making her an outcast. Moses asks that God heal his sister, while Aaron backs down and apologizes for challenging Moses, thus escaping the same punishment. God tells them that Miriam suffer her exile for seven days. Then the text notes "So Miriam was shut out of camp seven days; and the people did not march on until Miriam was readmitted." (Num 12:15). This simple sentence speaks volumes about the Israelites’ loyalty to Miriam. In defiance of God and Moses, they refused to move on until Miriam could join them again. But this event does change things. Miriam’s voice is no longer heard in the Bible. Whatever the power struggle, the voices that Miriam represented lost out. As feminist scholar Phyllis Trible notes, her detractors "…tabooed her to her death." (p. 75 in Winter)
Indeed, it is not until her death that Miriam is mentioned again, and then only in passing: "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. The community was without water, and they joined against Moses and Aaron" (Num 20:1-2). But Miriam’s importance to the community as source of sustenance and courage, made itself felt through the midrash that arose out the two seemingly disconnected sentences announcing Miriam’s death and the fact that the community was without water. Miriam, whose significant moments of courage and vision came at the banks of rivers, became equated with that most important source of life. Legend has it that while Miriam lived and traveled with the Israelites, they were accompanied by a miraculous well. But when she died, the well disappeared. Through the generations, Jews told of Miriam’s well reappearing when the people were in need of courage and sustenance in times of trouble and persecution. Miriam’s well was said to fill all the village wells while everyone is worshipping together in the synagogue on the Sabbath. As women have reclaimed their voices in Judaism, many include a cup of water on the Passover seder plate as a symbol of Miriam and her well. So Miriam lived up to her complicated name: of waters both beloved and bitter.
Why does Miriam’s story matter? To me: the Passover and the connection to my family story. Miriam is a woman of strength and courage, not always careful with her words, willing to put herself on the line, take risks. She is one of my spiritual ancestors. For all of us, Miriam is part of women’s memories and experiences of the divine. The women’s traditional spheres have been keeping the home, and caring for the most vulnerable: the children, the sick and the wounded, and the elderly. The feminist perspective does not simply try to open the traditional male spheres to women, to but to grant equal significance to home and family, to invite men to value them as well, to be part of them. Miriam is a reminder of the importance of the prophetic voice, the one who risks living fully in the world as it is so as to help people see how it could be. or as it is more famously written, "Where there is no vision, the people perish." She reminds us that it is important to speak your truth even when it gets you in trouble. We can draw courage from her example as one who inspired hope when despair was easier. She reminds that it right and good to sing and to dance with joy, especially when we are uncertain, tired, and afraid.
Resources:
WomanWisdom by Miriam Therese Winter, Crossroad.
The Five Books of Miriam by Ellen Frankel, G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1996.
Sarah Laughed by Vanessa L. Ochs, McGraw-Hill, 2005.
"Miriam" by Phyllis Trible, in Women in Scripture, Carol Meyers, ed. Houghton Mifflin, 2000.