What motivated Miriam to speak disparagingly of her brother, the one for whom he had sacrificed her life many years earlier? Based on her experience as a young girl, Miriam sensed the possibility of a new threat to the cause to which her life was dedicated – the growth and perpetuation of her nation. What would happen if every prophet were to follow her brother’s lead and separate from his spouse? Her concern sent her to discuss the issue with Aharon.
However, in this case, her love for Moshe and the Jewish people had led her astray. In her role of older sister, she meddled excessively in the life of someone who was as close to God as anyone had ever been. Despite her great love and concern, her negative speech was disrespectful to Moshe and thus disrespectful to her Maker.
Miriam’s life is a model of hope in the most dire of circumstances. She understood that the harshest suffering precedes the redemption; that the darkest hour is just before the dawn. She is also remembered as someone who was prepared to challenge the status quo – even one established by the mightiest of men – in order to ensure that her vision came to fruition.
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This last lesson Miriam taught so well has resonated throughout Jewish history. Many individuals, women as well as men, have stepped up over the centuries and changed our communal and even national modus operandi because they recognized a need for change and were prepared to step forward to actualize their vision. This is true on the political landscape (including the many men and women who fought to establish the state of Israel) as well as a wide range of other platforms, such as the educational frontier. One such individual was Sarah Schenirer, founder of the Bais Yaakov movement.
Schenirer was born to a prominent chassidic (Belz) family in late 19th-century Krakow. She attended a Polish public school while studying Jewish texts (with Yiddish translations) on her own at night and on Shabbos. Her education (often sans the Torah component) was similar to that of many Jewish girls at the time. Sadly, for many such girls the combination of public school attendance and the lack of a robust Jewish education caused them to find meaning elsewhere, particularly in the many prevalent social and religious ideologies of the time – communism, feminism, secularism, etc.
Schenirer wrote about this dilemma in her memoirs:
With our husbands and brothers away for the holidays at the court of the Rebbe, our homes are bare of Jewish intellectual content. The women have never learned anything about the spiritual meaning that is concentrated within a Jewish festival. The mother goes to the synagogue, but the services echo faintly into the fenced and boarded-off women’s galleries. There is much crying by elderly women. The young girls look at them as though they belong to a different century. Youth and the desire to live a full life shoot up violently in the strong-willed young personalities. Outside the synagogues, the young girls stay chattering; they walk away from the synagogue where their mothers pour out their vague and heavy feelings. They leave behind them the wailing of the older generation and follow the urgefor freedom and self-expression. Further and further from the synagogue they go, further away, to the dancing, tempting light of a fleeting joy.
A seamstress by trade, Schenirer committed herself to girls’ education during World War I after attending a lecture of the Venetian Rabbi Dr. Flesch about Judith and the power of Jewish women to continue her legacy. After the war she returned to Krakow, ready to do the unthinkable. She would establish a private school for Jewish girls.
