THE LIGHT OF THE MENORAH AND THE SHADOWS OF CRITICISM

My late sister, Menorah Rotenberg, was born toward the end of June. I often imagine my father sitting in synagogue a week or two before her birth, listening as the Torah portion went on and on about the golden candelabra (menorah). To this day, we don’t know for certain why my parents named her Menorah—but this has always been our best guess for her very unusual name. That portion was Parshat Behaalotcha, which opens with the commandment to kindle the menorah, but quickly descends into the messy, fractured realities of human nature. It is a parsha I find myself returning to every year in the synagogue, thinking deeply about family, legacy, and the voices that shape us.

My mother, Charlotte Lebowitz, (whose yahrzeit is this week) for instance, was a woman of immense drive, but she also possessed a distinctly snobbish streak and a sharp tongue. In her eyes, she was better than many others—the wealthy wives who didn’t work, the nouveau riche, and the poor who frequented my father’s store at the edge of Spanish Harlem. She could be impatient and judgmental, always in motion, and she had very little patience for the elderly. Yet, when she suffered her first heart attack, my energetic mother became dependent and querulous. Having now reached the very age at which my mother had her first heart attack, my uneasiness has given way to a deeper appreciation for what she endured. I inherit her curiosity and engagement with the world, recognizing that human lives, like the biblical narratives we read, are deeply layered.

I see a reflection of this sharp-tongued judgment in Behaalotcha itself, where Miriam and Aaron speak critically of Moses regarding the Cushite woman he married. The rabbis historically framed Miriam’s act of “speaking up” as a specifically female failing: gossip (lashon hara). Her past merits—saving Moses as a child, leading the women in song with her timbrel—seem erased the moment she challenges authority. Stricken with leprosy and shut out of the camp for seven days, her punishment raises painful questions about gender, voice, and selective justice.

As a midrash writer, I have often wondered: how did Miriam experience her isolation? Did she question why Aaron was spared? In a midrash I wrote about “The Discredited Prophetess”........

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