Originally published July 11, 2024
Water is a powerful symbol that transcends religions and cultures. In Judaism, we often refer to mayyim hayyim, the living waters that make up the mikveh. As a people whose origins are in the desert, we are acutely attuned to the necessity and power of water for human life. This week, as Ontario is deluged with the remnants of Hurricane Beryl, which has already claimed the lives of 8 people, we are even more cognizant of the power of the delicate interplay between nature and human civilisation.
Our Torah story this week presents the opposite problem: a lack of water. Parshat Chukat tells of the death of Miriam. “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…” (Numbers 20:1-2) The rabbis of the midrash connect these two verses, drawing a direct line between Miriam’s death and the sudden lack of water. In the midrashic imagination, Miriam was the source of water for the Israelites, and now she, and the life-giving water, are gone. What we know of Miriam is intimately connected to the motif of water – from when we first meet her watching her brother in the Nile, to the parting of the sea. The midrash imagines a mythical well, created by the Divine on the final day of creation, in the very last minutes before Shabbat, gifted to the Israelites on Miriam’s merit, following them throughout their desert wanderings – until it dries up. Miriam is the source of vitality, of cool gushing water in the hot desert days.
When the stories of October 7 began to trickle out to the rest of the world in the hours and days that followed, we heard of families who spent endless hours in the ma’amad, the shelter, without food or water, with only their own fear. A story that came out in the weeks that followed, that I continue to carry in my own heart, tells of Major Sagi Golan, a 30 year old tech worker living in Herzliya, who was supposed to marry his partner, Omer Ohana, on October 20, 2023. But on October 7, when he and Omer woke up to the horrifying news of the terror attacks on Israel, he jumped out of bed and into his uniform as a special forces reservist, giving his beloved Omer a quick kiss and promising to be home in less than a week. Major Golan was killed leading his unit that night, in the battle for Kibbutz Be’eri. His partner Omer tells of the lives he rescued in the hours before his death, the families he led out of their hiding spots in shelters, offering water from his own canteen to people who had gone hours without anything to drink. Sagi filled the same need that Miriam the Prophetess did – offering water, offering life, to a people who were terrified, unsure of their own survival. But Sagi’s legacy is more than his brave actions in the Gaza envelope on that black sabbath. In the weeks following his death, his bereaved partner fought for the same rights as any other bereaved partner of a fallen IDF soldier. Although in practice, the IDF offered the same support to same-sex partners upon the death of a loved one, this was not enshrined in law, as Omer learned in the days and weeks following Sagi’s death. The army officer accompanying Sagi’s family through their bereavement told Omer that he could not tear his shirt at his beloved’s funeral – that he was not part of that innermost circle of mourners. Fueled by his grief, Omer lobbied until the Knesset amended the Bereaved Families’ Law to ensure equal financial and emotional support for same sex and common-law partners, and in May, Omer led the subdued Jerusalem Pride Parade, marching in Sagi’s memory.
Dignity and equality are as precious to us as water, as necessary for a vibrant life. May Sagi’s memory always be for a blessing – and may we all find flowing wellsprings of that which gives us life.
Read more of Sagi and Omer’s story here, or listen to Omer speak on the Israel Story podcast.
