Community Blog

Shabbat Shalom!  This week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayigash, in which Joseph reveals himself to his brothers and has his whole family moved to the choicest land in Egypt, where they prosper and multiply while the rest of the Egyptians starve and sell themselves into servitude at the height of the famine. 

Toward the middle of the parasha, there's a genealogy enumerating the male heirs of Jacob who resettle in Egypt. There is one granddaughter of Jacob thrown in amongst her 70 uncles, brothers, and cousins. There are two other places in the Tanakh where Serach bat Asher is the lone daughter named among male heirs, which has made her the stuff of legends. 

Many of the midrashim posit that Serach is immortal and has a great skill for music. Sefer HaYashar, a medieval book of Midrash, states:

“When Jacob’s sons returned from Egypt with the news that Joseph is alive, they said: If we tell him straightaway, his soul will fly from his body. So they told Serach to play on her harp and sing, ‘Joseph lives, Joseph lives, and he is the ruler of Egypt,’ so that he should absorb the message slowly.

Said Jacob to her: ‘The mouth that informed me that Joseph lives shall not taste death.’ Serach was among those who came out of Egypt, and among those who entered the Land. In the end, she entered paradise alive.” 

An earlier midrash on Exodus shares a fascinating story in which Serach bat Asher leads Moses through secret tunnels throughout Egypt to uncover Joseph's bones so that they can be brought back to the Holy Land with the Israelites. 

More legends arose out of the midrashim. We at the Ner Shalom Book Club even read a modern novel about Serach called Deathless by Andrew Ramer. She is for sure an interesting character. Yet, her use as Midrash fuel also underscores the lack of interest the Biblical authors had in women's stories. Surely Jacob had more than one granddaughter. Surely the wives of his 12 sons had names and lives and contributed to our survival as a people as much as the brothers themselves did. But none of them are mentioned in the canon, nor do I know of any midrash about them.

It makes more sense to give more airtime or news coverage or write more books about interesting people who did interesting things. People who live an unusually long time, people who create new technologies or ways of life, people who really actively improve the lives of others, surely have earned their places in history. But how many have quietly done these things: assisted the great inventors without the credit, organized their small communities for the better, carried their families through hard times. Let us uplift their stories as well. Let us remember their names and tell them to our children. And may we honor the legacies of all those who have gone before us.