Temple Adat Torah blog

Now is a good time to introduce you to one of my favorite unknown characters in the Torah - Serah bat Asher. That’s Serah, not Sarah.

So this Serah was the daughter of Asher, one of the sons of Jacob. What is noteworthy is that she is one of the very few women
mentioned in any of the biblical genealogies or censuses. Oddly, nothing more than her name appears in the text, but it appears
twice, once as part of the 70 people who went down to Egypt with Jacob and his family and then again, in Bamidbar (Numbers), where she is mentioned in the census of those who entered Canaan after
the Exodus. What is remarkable about these two references to Serah is that they occur more than 400 years apart! Although other
biblical characters are purported to have lived for centuries, Serah, alone among her peers, outlived her generation.

Serah’s longevity became the inspiration for much rabbinical commentary and midrash. (The rabbis never needed much of an excuse to embark on flights of midrashic fancy!) One such midrash attributes Serah's long life to her gentle kindness when she told her
grandfather, Jacob, that his son Joseph, was still alive and was a powerful man in Egypt.  As the story goes, Serah’s help is enlisted by
her father and uncles to sing, rather than tell the news about Joseph to Jacob so as to soften the shock of the news. When Jacob realizes that his beloved son was still alive, he bestows immortality on Serah by declaring that “death shall never touch her”.

Her involvement in the unfolding of the Israelite family history continues, according to subsequent legends, when she recognizes
Moses as the one who would redeem the Israelites from Egypt and reassures them that the time of their liberation by Moses had
come. Furthermore, as the Israelites ready themselves for the Exodus, Moses endeavors to fulfill the oath that Joseph made his brothers swear, that when God “remembers” the Israelites and brings them
out of their bondage, they would brings his bones out of Egypt as well.

Serah, having been alive when Joseph died, is able to reveal to Moses that, according to yet another midrash, Joseph had been buried in
a metal casket and sunk in the Nile River.  (Joseph’s burial in the river was not a sign of disrespect or disdain, but rather, it is said to have been a nod to his greatness and goodness, that the river would be “sweetened” by the presence of his bones.)

According to the Midrash, did Serah ever die or is she still in existence? Many sources report that she entered Paradise alive, and thus transcended mortality. In medieval Jewish mysticism, Serah has a place of honor in Gan Eden. The Persian Jews of the city of Isfahan believed that Serah bat Asher actually lived among them until she died in a
great fire in their synagogue in the twelfth century CE. This synagogue was subsequently known as the Synagogue of Serah Bat Asher. In the Jewish cemetery of Isfahan, there was to be found, at least until
the end of the nineteenth century, Heder Sarah bat Asher, a mausoleum that was believed to have been her final resting place.

Serah was an inspirational figure, a bridge between the patriarchal period, the time of the Exodus, the early monarchical period and the rabbinic period. Her name, spelled with the letter “ שׁ” in the Torah, is, in the rabbinic literature, spelled with a “ ,”ס rendering the meaning of her name as “overlapping”, that is to say, she overlapped many historical periods and was the bearer of lost or hidden knowledge. She  epitomized the proverbial “wise, old woman” who would serve as an example of quiet, female resolve and endurance. Like Miriam,
Yocheved, the midwives in the beginning of Shmot, and even Pharaoh’s daughter, Sarah was a quiet mover of history.