In Parshat Toldot, it says, “וְכָל־הַבְּאֵרֹ֗ת אֲשֶׁ֤ר חָֽפְרוּ֙ עַבְדֵ֣י אָבִ֔יו בִּימֵ֖י אַבְרָהָ֣ם אָבִ֑יו סִתְּמ֣וּם פְּלִשְׁתִּ֔ים וַיְמַלְא֖וּם עָפָֽר”, (Perek כ”ו, Pasuk ט”ו) which means that “All the wells that his (Yitzchak’s) fathers servants dug in Avraham’s time, the Philistines stopped up and filled them with dirt”. The Philistines were able to fill up the wells once Avraham died. This is similar to a time later in history, when Moshe’s sister, Miriam, died. The well that brought the Jewish people water in the desert suddenly stopped appearing. Just as water in the desert is extremely precious, water everywhere is the most important resource needed to survive. Because of this, water may be seen as a blessing, and certainly a necessity. When these righteous people passed away, it affected the entire nation's water supply. Water represents blessings, and the deaths of the righteous strongly affect the blessings of the world around them.
Question: Why do the deaths of the righteous affect the whole nation?
I believe that this shows that every time a righteous person dies, it lowers the merit of the whole nation, because we are all working together, and our nation has many shared merits. When a righteous person dies, we not only lose their merits, we also lose the merits that they help other people to achieve. The nation’s spiritual merits, that were once added to because of their good deeds for the nation, no longer have the righteous to add to their merits.
Lesson: Even if you think of all of the really righteous and pious people, and think, “How can I relate to them? I’m not even on the same scale!”, you must understand that although their personal merits may be greater than yours, you are all on the same team when working together towards the common merit of the Jewish people.