Count Me In

By Rabbi Joshua (inclusively known as the Hoffer) Hoffman

At the end of parshas Beha’aloscha we are given an account of the incident in which Aharon and Miriam speak of Moshe in a critical way. God interrupts their conversation to defend Moshe, and Miriam is punished with tzora'as, which is generally understood as being a punishment for leshon hora, or evil speech. The precise nature of Miriam and Aharon’s criticism of Moshe is unclear from Torah’s account of it. The Torah says that they spoke of the Cushite woman that Moshe had taken, and said that God spoke to other prophets as well, and they did not act that way towards their spouses. Some commentators say that the Cushite woman they referred to was Tzipporah, and that they criticized Moshe for having ceased having relations with her after his prophesy at Mount Sinai. Others say that the Cushite was a separate wife, not Tzipporah, and that the criticism was that Moshe would not have relations with her because she was of a lower status.

Interestingly, between Aharon and Miriam’s conversation and God’s intervention in defense of Moshe, there is a verse whose place at that point is uncertain. That verse reads, “Now the man Moshe was exceedingly humble, more than any person on the face of the earth” (Bamidbar 12:3). Why is this quality of Moshe mentioned specifically here, rather than any other place in the Torah? The Ramban explains that, as we find in the Sifre, Aharon and Miriam spoke critically about Moshe in his presence. However, because of his humility, he remained silent, and God intervened to speak in his defense. The statement about Moshe’s humility, then, is actually the Torah’s testimony to him in its explanation of why God himself came and defended him.

Rav Yehuda Aszod, in his commentary to Beha’aloscha, offers another possible way of explaining the verse. He suggests that Aharon and Miriam made this statement about Moshe’s humility as part of their argument that Moshe had erred in separating from his wife. While the Ramban says that God told them that Moshe was on a higher level of prophecy than all other prophets and that this required him to be in a higher state of purity, which necessitated his abstention from marital relations, according to Rav Aszod, Aharon and Miriam said that Moshe abstained from his Cushite wife because he felt that she was inferior. They argued that Moshe could not have thought that he was on a higher level of prophesy than other prophets who did not abstain from marital relations, because, they said, Moshe was too humble to maintain that he was on such a high level. According to Rav Aszod, then, it was Aharon and Miriam who made the statement about Moshe’s humility, as part of their criticism of him. I would like to suggest a different explanation, which connects the statement regarding Moshe’s humility, to what follows, namely, Moshe’s prayer on behalf of Miriam.

The Talmud in Brachos (6b), tells us that whoever sets a fixed place for his prayer will be aided by the God of Avraham, who also set a fixed place for his prayer. When this person dies, says the Talmud, people say of him, “Where is the humble man, where is the pious man?” Rabbeinu Yonah, as quoted by his students, explains that the person is called humble because he takes great care to pray to God with the proper intention, which only a humble person, who subjugates himself to God would do. The Meshech Chochmah, in his commentary to Beha’aloscho, points out that when Aharon asked Moshe to pray for Miriam’s healing, he said, “…for we have been foolish and we have sinned (Bamidbar 12:11). Aharon used the plural, says the Meshech Chochmah, in order to hint to Moshe that he, too, had committed a similar offense when he spoken leshon hora about the Jewish people to God, when G-d told Moshe to lead the Jewish People to freedom, and he responded that they will not listen to him. As a punishment for speaking in this way about the Jewish people God punished him, momentarily, with tzora'as. Moshe accepted Aharon’s reference to his sin without comment, and prayed on behalf of Miriam. Moshe, by accepting this equation of his sin to that of Aharon and Miriam, in effect, was viewing himself as anyone else in the Jewish nation, in that just as he had spoken ill of the Jewish people, so too had Aharon and Miriam spoke ill of a member of the Jewish nation. Out of his humility, he did not view himself as being more special than anyone else in the nation. It was this humility that made his prayer on behalf of Miriam so effective.