“Do you want to know what goes into making your chocolate milk?” asked the very wise, dedicated man across the screen from me. I was coaching him for several months in 2015 as part of ELI Talks for The AVI CHAI Foundation. Every time I showed up on my little computer screen with him, I brought my life’s blood with me, Nesquik chocolate milk. He worked in the anti-slavery field. I knew his question portended bad news for my relationship with this chocolate milk. I told him I wasn’t ready.
I had my daily indulgence until we met again. “Ok, I am ready; tell me.” And this was how I was introduced to the seedy world of major chocolate purveyors, and my whole life changed. I couldn’t drink a product that I now had journalistic evidence was being sourced by children who were kidnapped and enslaved to bring cheap chocolate to the world. To me.
In a world that calls for our attention in hundreds of ways each week, how do we choose where to place our focus? Most people I meet in formal or informal activist spaces show up for the things that most directly affect us or those we love. Even Miriam the prophetess—yes, Moses’s sister—was no different.
According to a Womanist Midrash transmitted to me from Dr. Wil Gafney, via my friends and teachers Rev. Dionne Boisserie and Rev. Nicole Duncan-Smith, Miriam became a rabbi to the people at the margins of Israelite society. Miriam had been sent to the margins due to a divine skin affliction known as tzaraat. It wasn’t that Miriam was new to life on the margins; she had saved her baby brother as an enslaved little girl and then joined him in leading their people to freedom. In the Torah’s narrative, the Israelites were on the margins of society in Egypt for hundreds of years and multiple generations.
But in the desert, Moses shared God’s plans for rearranging Israelite society. God would be at the center, made physically more palpable via the movable sanctuary of the Mishkan, served by Kohens and Levites. The margins of Israelite society, however, would never be as intergenerationally chronic as enslavement had been. The margins would be temporary or, at worse, a single generation, something far more palatable to the generation raised in perpetual captivity. The folks sent to the margins of this new, purposeful, and freer Israelite society were accidental murderers and folks with tzaraat or similar afflictions that for many would fade in a week, like Miriam’s did. For some, the marginality would end in a month; some would remain at the margin for the rest of their lives.
Womanist Midrash sees a divine gap in the text, a lack of narrative for Miriam’s actual return from her sequestering. In Numbers 12:15-16, the Torah says,
“So Miriam was shut out of camp seven days; and the people did not march on until Miriam was readmitted. After that the people set out from Hazeroth and encamped in the wilderness of Paran.”
There’s no further mention of Miriam until her death in later chapters. This is an opening to realize that Miriam might never have returned to the central Israelite community. Having lived at the edges, her eyes were opened to those who had been invisible; she found a place for her leadership skills, honed in her hut in Egypt, at the banks of the Nile, and in the narrow, miraculously dry path of the Reed Sea, to be applied to those she could now deeply identify with.
This image of Miriam the rabbi was gifted to me from Rev. Dr. Wil Gafney’s work, via my biblical women studies with my friends and colleagues in our Bring Back Our Girls interfaith work. Reverend Dionne Boisserie and Rev. Nikki Duncan-Smith and I, along with many others, had been fighting for women’s and girls’ freedom for several months when they introduced me to this Midrash. This week, April 14, will mark 12 years since the “Chibok Girls” of Nigeria were stolen from their school by Boko Haram militants and 12 years of too many of them still being trapped in the margins, while 90 families still await the fate of their daughters.
Back in 2015, when the speaker I was coaching brought up values I was already deeply involved in—the horror of children being stolen and turned into objects—I could not look away. I had already heard too many accounts from mothers of missing girls and escapees themselves about what it means to have your children, your freedom, snatched away. A cause, a million miles away in Nigeria and similarly remote in the fields of cocoa beans, suddenly was literally in my hands.
This week, shortly after over a week of reliving the foundational Jewish story of enslavement and freedom, the Jewish lectionary cycle brings us face-to-face with the Torah portions of Tazria-Metozra. These texts about body differences, ailments, and secretions can feel remote, frustrating, and ableist. They can also be a reminder that, like Miriam, when we find ourselves loosened from being relegated to the margins, we might choose to recognize a calling to focus on the one thing in this ailing world that we are in a better position to fight for.