Miriam’s Cup is a long overdue recognition of a woman whose contributions, like many Jewish daughters, have been overlooked.

Miriam, sister of Moses and Aaron, has always been associated with water.  It was Miriam who defied the Pharaoh’s death sentence for male Hebrew infants, who placed baby Moses in the basket in the River Nile, a kind of birth canal that delivered him to the Pharaoh’s daughter who found and adopted him, assuring his survival. 

It was Miriam who, at the shore of the Red Sea, “took a timbrel in her hand and all the women followed her, with timbrels and with dancing.” And who “sang to them,” leading them through the parted waters, not with hesitation and fear but with music and dancing.   It was our foremother Miriam who introduced the notion of radical change as worthy of celebration.

It was because of the merit of Miriam that a miraculous well traveled with the Israelites, slaking their thirst during forty years in the desert. Miriam is powerfully linked to all three water sources – river, sea, and well — for good reason. Just as without water there would be no life on earth, without Miriam's Well, we would not have lived through our wanderings. 

The wine with which we fill Elijah’s Cup anticipates the bliss of a future messianic age.  The water we place in Miriam’s Cup celebrates life itself, the miracle of joy in the present, and the basic fact of Jewish survival.  A people needs both, but water comes before wine. Without water, there can be no wine.  Without Miriam, we would have had no future.


haggadah Section: -- Cup #2 & Dayenu