At last, the sojourn in the wilderness is ending. The time has come to plan for the future and to apportion the Promised Land. A census is taken: "These are the families..." the text continues for more than fifty verses, "the sons of...the families of...." Of all those who came out of Egypt, only Joshua and Caleb have survived. Only the two courageous spies, and...Serah.
Who’s Serah?
Amid all those lists of male scions, there is one brief phrase: "And the name of the daughter of Asher was Serah" (Bamidbar 26:46). Why is the pattern of naming only the sons interrupted, and this one daughter named?
The medieval commentator Rashi tells us that the Torah makes an exception of Serah because, despite the long years in the desert, she remained alive. But perhaps we can think of Serah as symbolizing all the women of that older generation, for the text alsoclaims that among the survivors of the desert ordeal there "was not a man" who had left Egypt, to which the Midrash adds, "but the women were alive and reached the Land of Israel." They endured because, while the men frenziedly demanded a Golden Calf, the women refused to toss in their jewelry, and when the spies falsely reported conditions in Canaan, the women refused to believe them.
A story evolves...
As moonlight glistens on the desert after an arduous day of census-taking, the now aged Serah invites five young women, the orphaned daughters of Zelophehad, to sit with her in the opening of her small tent. They all munch on manna as Serah, unbidden, unweaves her tales. The young women sit rapt as Serah tells them of how the Hebrew midwives, Shifra and Puah, subverted the edict of Pharoah and saved the Israelite babies; how the skin of Yocheved, as the Midrashic tradition will later convey, softened, and her wrinkles disappeared, when she was joyously pregnant with Mose. Then Serah’s voice is also infused wit joy as she recalls the women dancing, cymbals in hand, with the prophet Miryam atthe Red Sea.
As Serah fingers the glinting gold bracelets on her wrists, she reounts the ploys that the women devised to hide their told from the frantic mob of men, intent on demanding that Aaron built them an idol to worship when Moses disappeared. She whispers her secret dream of one day sailing on the seas that gush forth from Miryam’s well, reaching the great plains where every kind of fragrant herb and fruit tree grows.
Only when the sky grows viiolet with the coming of the dawn, do the tales of Serah cease. The young daughters of Zelophedad kiss her, bid her "Shalom," and go straight from her tent to see Moses.
He’s distracted. There’s a heavy day ahead, but they insist that he listen to what they have to say.
"Our father died in the wilderness in his own time; he wasn’t one of the rebels of Korah," they declare. "Now, just because he had no sons, should he have no inheritance? Why shouldn’t we, his daughters, inherit the land due him?"
As the arbiter of the thorniest legal issues (Devarim 1:17), Moses is at a loss for words. So concerned has he been with the sons of Israel, he never considered the daughters. He turns for an answer to God.
And the Holy One tells him that the daughters are right; on High, the Law was already written that way. Rashi teaches us that the daughters had perceived more acutely than Moses what would be just in the laws of inheritance. They "saw what Moses’s eye did not see."
Thanks to the ancient woman Serah who passed on the stories of the women of the past, the Daughters of Zelophedad were able to see the herstory in history. May women today continue the tradition.