Kolot: Voices from The Ark Synagogue
Jun 20, 2026 · 9 min · 5 segments
This sermon by Rabbi Lea Mühlstein invites listeners to reflect on the often-overlooked contributions of individuals who sustain communities and make a difference in quiet, unassuming ways. Using the…
Lea MühlsteinHost
There are some people whose presence we only fully understand when they are no longer there.
While they are with us, they become part of the landscape of our lives, the steady voice, the practical hand, the person who notices what needs doing before anyone else has noticed that anything needs to be done.
They are so faithful, so constant, so woven into the daily fabric of community that we can almost mistake their presence for something natural, something automatic, something that would simply always have been there.
And then one day, they are gone, and only then do we realize how much water they had been bringing into the world.
Max, in his Dvar Torah this morning, invited us to pay attention to precisely that, to the things that are always there, the things we rely on so deeply that we almost stop seeing them, the gifts we only recognize when they are withdrawn.
We are told almost in passing that Miriam dies and is buried, and then in the next, very next verse, we are told that there was no water for the congregation.
It does not tell us that the people mourned for 30 days, as it will later tell us for Aaron and Moses.
It does not pause to honor the prophet who stood beside Moses and Aaron, who watched over her baby brother at the river, who led the women in song at the sea, who carried courage, music, and memory through the wilderness.
In the Talmud, they teach that three good gifts sustained the Israelites in the wilderness, the manna in the merit of Moses, the clouds of glory in the merit of Aaron, and the well in the merit of Miriam.
It's such a beautiful and painful midrash because it tells us that the people had been drinking from Miriam's merit all along, whether or not they knew it.
They had looked upwards for manna and sideways for leadership, but beneath it all, there was water because Miriam was there.
Her gift was not always the most visible, but it was the one without which they could not live.
The loss of water tells us what words have failed to say, that Miriam had been sustaining them all along.
George Eliot, writing at the end of Middlemarch, in a passage quoted in our siddur, resonates this from, moment from Torah, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." As the story of Miriam illustrates, so much of the good of the world does depend on lives that are faithful rather than famous, on acts that are sustaining rather than spectacular, on people whose names do not always become chapter headings in history, but whose absence leaves the world suddenly thirsty.
There are some people whose presence we only fully understand when they are no longer there.
While they are with us, they become part of the landscape of our lives, the steady voice, the practical hand, the person who notices what needs doing before anyone else has noticed that anything needs to be done.
They are so faithful, so constant, so woven into the daily fabric of community that we can almost mistake their presence for something natural, something automatic, something that would simply always have been there.
And then one day, they are gone, and only then do we realize how much water they had been bringing into the world.
Max, in his Dvar Torah this morning, invited us to pay attention to precisely that, to the things that are always there, the things we rely on so deeply that we almost stop seeing them, the gifts we only recognize when they are withdrawn.
We are told almost in passing that Miriam dies and is buried, and then in the next, very next verse, we are told that there was no water for the congregation.
It does not tell us that the people mourned for 30 days, as it will later tell us for Aaron and Moses.
It does not pause to honor the prophet who stood beside Moses and Aaron, who watched over her baby brother at the river, who led the women in song at the sea, who carried courage, music, and memory through the wilderness.
In the Talmud, they teach that three good gifts sustained the Israelites in the wilderness, the manna in the merit of Moses, the clouds of glory in the merit of Aaron, and the well in the merit of Miriam.
It's such a beautiful and painful midrash because it tells us that the people had been drinking from Miriam's merit all along, whether or not they knew it.
They had looked upwards for manna and sideways for leadership, but beneath it all, there was water because Miriam was there.
Her gift was not always the most visible, but it was the one without which they could not live.
The loss of water tells us what words have failed to say, that Miriam had been sustaining them all along.
George Eliot, writing at the end of Middlemarch, in a passage quoted in our siddur, resonates this from, moment from Torah, "The growing good of the world is partly dependent on unhistoric acts; and that things are not so ill with you and me as they might have been, is half owing to the number who lived faithfully a hidden life, and rest in unvisited tombs." As the story of Miriam illustrates, so much of the good of the world does depend on lives that are faithful rather than famous, on acts that are sustaining rather than spectacular, on people whose names do not always become chapter headings in history, but whose absence leaves the world suddenly thirsty.
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