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 realise how much water they had been bringing into the world.

Max, in his D’var 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there, the things we rely on so deeply that we almost stop seeing them, the gifts we only recognise when they are withdrawn. This is an important teaching from this morning’s Torah portion: We are told, almost in passing, that Miriam dies and is buried, and then, in the very next verse, we are told that there was no water for the congregation.

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The Torah does not stop to give Miriam a eulogy. It does not tell us that the people mourned for thirty days, as it will later tell us for Aaron and Moses. It does not pause to honour 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. Miriam dies, and the water ceases.

The rabbis, of course, notice the connection. 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. When Miriam died, the well disappeared. It is 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. For forty years, they had complained about Moses and argued with Aaron, 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.

And maybe that is why the Torah does not give Miriam the eulogy we might expect. Not because she does not deserve one, but because the Torah lets absence itself become the eulogy. The dry ground speaks. The empty vessels speak. The thirst of the people speaks. The loss of water tells us what words have failed to say: that Miriam had been sustaining them all along.

George Eliot’s writing at the end of Middlemarch, in a passage quoted in our siddur, resonates this 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.

And of course, for those of us who read Torah with feminist eyes, Miriam’s story is not only Miriam’s story. It is the story of so many women in Jewish history whose work made Jewish life possible while their names were pushed to the margins, or remembered only briefly, or not remembered at all.

It is the women who kept households and communities alive, who taught children, nursed the sick, raised funds, maintained friendships, preserved recipes and melodies and languages and rituals, organised kitchens and committees and campaigns, opened their homes, challenged injustice, wrote poetry, smuggled learning across boundaries, and carried Judaism forward in ways that were often treated as ordinary precisely because they were indispensable.

This is why the work of organisations like the Jewish Women’s Archive matters so much. They remind us that women’s stories are not footnotes to Jewish history; they are Jewish history. To recover those stories is not to add something fashionable or decorative to the tradition, but to restore water to the well. It is to say that our memory has been too dry, too narrow, too thirsty, when it forgets the women who sustained us.

And there is something especially lovely about hearing this teaching on a Bar Mitzvah morning, because today is also about learning to notice what has sustained us. Max stands before us today with his own words of Torah, but he does not stand here alone. No one ever does.

Behind every Bar Mitzvah is a hidden well: family, teachers and friends, the people who practised with him, encouraged him, reminded him, fed him, drove him places, listened to him, believed in him, and helped him arrive at this day. Some of that work is visible, much of it is not, but all of it is part of the Torah he brings into the world this morning.

And maybe that is one of the gentle lessons of becoming Bar Mitzvah. To become responsible in Jewish life is not only to learn how to lead from the front, but to learn how to notice the wells from which we drink; to become the kind of person who can say thank you before the water disappears, who can honour the hidden labour while it is still sustaining us, who can recognise that the good of the world depends not only on great speeches and dramatic moments, but on faithful acts repeated day after day, often without applause.

Miriam’s well invites us to ask ourselves: whose presence have we mistaken for permanence? Whose labour have we treated as natural? Whose kindness, organisation, wisdom, humour, music, patience, or courage has been carrying us quietly through the wilderness? And perhaps, this Shabbat, before absence has to teach us what presence meant, we might look around our own lives and communities and notice the people who bring water.

So today, as we honour Max and his Torah, we also honour Miriam and her well; we honour the women whose names we know and the women whose names we are still learning; we honour the hidden lives and the unhistoric acts without which none of us would be standing here. And we pray that we may become more attentive, more grateful, more willing to tell the stories that have been neglected, and more ready ourselves to bring water into dry places.

Ken yehi ratzon.

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