RABBI KOHENET JILL HAMMER
Numbers 12, the incident of Miriam’s rebellion in the wilderness, is also the Torah’s most ringing condemnation of women as ritual leaders. Yet that narrative allows us to hear “Miriam the priestess” into speech.
In Numbers 12, Moses’ sister Miriam joins with her brother Aaron to complain about Moses’ Cushite wife. The two go on to criticize Moses’ failure to share leadership with his two siblings, “for God has also spoken through us.” God chastises Miriam and Aaron for their assumption that they are equal with Moses. Then God turns Miriam’s skin white and scaly with the disease known as tzara’at—often translated as leprosy, though tzara’at is not leprosy but some sort of spiritual impurity that manifests in a physical condition.
Aaron (who is not punished) pleads with Moses to heal Miriam, and Moses prays for her. God contemptuously ordains that Miriam be shut out of camp for seven days— “If her father had spat in her face, would she not hide her face in shame seven days”? Only after this period of seclusion does Miriam return. After this, we never hear from her again—Miriam dies a few chapters later. The girl who watched over Moses in the Nile and danced at the shore of the Sea of Reeds vanishes into ignominy. No mourning rites are recorded for her.
The rabbis and the later commentators say very little about Miriam’s attempt to claim equal power with Moses. They must feel that she is barking up the wrong tree. As God says in the text, “If there is a prophet of God among you, I make myself known to him in a vision or I speak with him in a dream. Not so with my servant Moses; he is trusted in all my house…” (Numbers 12:7). Miriam cannot hope to equal Moses’ power. Rav Kook, in fact, emphasizes this point by stating that Miriam, by criticizing Moses, criticized the uniqueness and truth of the Torah, Moses’ prophecy (Olat Re’iyah, vol. 1, p.334). Thus the Torah commanded her “sin” be specially remembered (Deut. 24:9). No one is allowed to question the veracity of Moses’ word, and in this story, it is the woman who is specially punished for doing so.
Like other feminist readers, I have always felt the story of Miriam’s expulsion to be a massive power grab on the part of the male Israelite leadership. The tale discredits Miriam, the only woman leader we have seen among many male leaders of the Exodus (Moses, Aaron, Joshua, etc.). Miriam is banned from the camp. Psychologically, this banishment echoes the banishment of women from the priesthood. While women all over the ancient Near East and the Mediterranean serve as priestesses, Israelite women do not do so according to any mainstream text. Though there are a variety of possible priestess candidates—prophetesses; the mysterious ministering women (tzovot) who served at the Tent of Meeting; the medium (ba’alat ov) whom King Saul consults; the women who baked cakes for the Queen of Heaven and wove tapestries for Asherah—none of them appear in a way that allows us to perceive an institution or a lineage. The story of Miriam’s exile establishes the Torah’s limits on women’s spiritual leadership.

Five Categories of Lashon Hara

1. Speech that causes disputes due to "he said, she said" talk which can cause confusion
2. Speech that is harmful or derogatory
3. Specifically untrue derogatory speech
4. Speech which causes pain - emotionally, physically, and financially
5. Words that are close to lashon hara

IT IS ALL RECORDED IN THE (DIGITAL) BOOK OF LIFE
By erasing external memories, our society accepts that human beings evolve over time, that we have the capacity to learn from past experiences and adjust our behavior. In traditional societies, where missteps are observed but not necessarily recorded, the limits of human memory ensure that people’s sins are eventually forgotten. By contrast….a society in which everything is recorded will forever tether us to all our past actions, making it impossible, in practice, to escape them. Without some form of forgetting, forgiving becomes a difficult undertaking. (Mayer-Schoenberger, Victor. "Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age.")
Social Networking: The 4 Characteristics of Digital Media

1. It's searchable -- anyone, anytime, anywhere can find it.
2. It's forever -- anyone can find it today, tomorrow, 30 years from now.
3. It's copyable -- once they find it, they can copy it, share it, and change it.
4. It has a global invisible audience -- even if your page is private, you can't tell which friend shares your pages. You have no control over what friends will do with it

It might be helpful for us to explore new ways of living in a world that is slow to forgive. It’s sobering, now that we live in a world misleading called a "global village,” to think about privacy in actual, small villages long ago. In the villages described in the Babylonian Talmud, for example, any kind of gossip or tale-bearing about other people-oral or written, true or false, friendly or mean- was considered a terrible sin because small communities have long memories and every word spoken about other people was thought to ascend to the heavenly cloud. (The digital cloud has made this metaphor literal.) But these…villages were, in fact, far more humane and forgiving than our brutal global village, where much of the content on the internet would meet the Talmudic definition of gossip. Although the Talmudic sages believed that God reads our thoughts and records them in the book of life, they also believed that God erases the book for those who atone for their sins by asking forgiveness of those they have wronged….Unlike God, however, the digital cloud rarely wipes our slate clean, and the keepers of the cloud today are sometimes less forgiving than their all-powerful divine predecessor. (Jeffrey Rosen's article "The End of Forgetting")