Serach – The Keeper of Israel’s Collective Memory

There is one figure who embodies this idea more than any other. Her name is Serach Bat Asher. She enters Egypt with Jacob’s family, and somehow, centuries later, she helps Moses find Joseph’s bones. She remembers what no one else could. She bridges generations. She transcends time. The Torah lists 53 grandsons and only one granddaughter of Jacob. Why?

According to the rabbis, Serach doesn’t just belong to her own generation; she belongs to all of them. This is the story of Judaism’s first real daughter, a woman who survived slavery, spans centuries, and becomes a living link between the Exodus and our eternal story. Welcome to Madlik. My name is Geoffrey Stern, and at Madlik, we light a spark or shed some light on a Jewish text or tradition. Along with Rabbi Adam Mintz, we host Madlik Disruptive Torah on your favorite podcast platform and now on YouTube. We also publish a source sheet on Sephardim, and a link is included in the show notes.

This week’s Parasha is Pinchas. There is an innocuous reference to Serach, the daughter of Asher, and the only granddaughter amongst Jacob’s 53 reverent grandsons. This enigma gives the rabbis license to ascribe to this woman immortality and make of her an example of a critical source of cultural history, the living legend. We explore this undervalued social institution in Judaism and other cultures and wonder what we are missing.

Well, Rabbi, another week. You know, I think a year ago we did the whole thing of Pinchas and vigilantism. And I probably should put a link to that in the show notes because that’s very timely. But sometimes you just gotta drill down into something that’s totally innocuous. I had not really ever focused on Serach before and found the preparation and information just fascinating.

Adam Mintz [2:48 – 3:16]: Well, it’s great, I mean, because, you know, this Parasha is so full of exciting things. We have the stories of the daughters of Tzlafchad, we have the transition from Moses to Joshua. But you actually have gone through the census and picked out the most interesting, maybe the only interesting piece of the census, and that’s verse 46: the name of Asher’s daughter was Serach.

Geoffrey Stern [3:17 – 5:09]: And as you say, we have another group of mind-numbing statistics where each tribe is divided into the particular clans, and they’re all males. And at the end, they all give a total of how many they were, and they all add up to 600-odd thousand soldiers, men of military age. But here in Numbers 26, Verse 46, it says the name of Asher’s daughter was Serach out of nowhere.

Rashi picks up on this immediately, and he says because she still remained alive after all these long years. He quotes the Talmud, which especially mentions her here. So it’s like special notice of special note. We have—I don’t know how old you have to be, Rabbi, to literally go down into Egypt. You pointed out one episode that she might have been in her mother’s tummy when they crossed the border. She made the number 70, the 70 souls that went down into Egypt. And here she is in the count. I think we’re going to see. According to some authorities, she actually crossed into the land of Israel. So talk about a “Real Daughter”.

And I found that Civil War—I always knew there was this thing, but that there’s a term for “Real Sons” and “Real Daughters”. I think we’re going to get into it. This becomes an archetype of someone you go to, someone you have who actually was there. And I think that I said is a piece of social history that maybe we don’t focus on enough today.

So in Ramban, I’ll just say before—

Adam Mintz [5:09 – 5:36]: We get to Ramban, we don’t have this phenomenon anymore. But my grandfather was born in 1898, and I always thought as a child that that was the coolest thing in the world: that my grandfather was alive in the 19th century. You know, that’s kind of a Serach Bat Asher moment, that we’re connected to a past that’s so far away we can’t even imagine it.

Geoffrey Stern [5:37 – 6:03]: And my grandmother, who died at 103, was born in 1899. So she lived in the 1800s, 1900s, and she made it past the year 2000. And not only did she survive, but she literally is that archetype in our family. People quote her today. It’s amazing when you have those types of people.

Adam Mintz [6:04 – 6:11]: So hey, that’s—so I hit it on the head. That’s why you’re interested in this woman, because you have such a woman. Your grandmother was such a woman.

Geoffrey Stern [6:12 – 8:06]: Absolutely. So in Ramban, he’s kind of interested in the terminology, and the name of the daughter of Asher’s wife was Serach. By this, he intended to say—and this he’s referring now back to Onkelos and Rashi—that they intended to say that she was a daughter that possessed an inheritance.

Getting back to your question about Tzlafchad, the only reason why the daughters of Tzlafchad had an inheritance is they didn’t have any brothers. Well, if Serach had real brothers, she would not have had an inheritance. But Rashi, Onkelos, and Ramban are saying, what’s unique here is she was adopted. So here we have this real daughter, and the real daughter isn’t even quote-unquote real. Or I should say that the commentaries the Torah is saying that that real daughter is very real because the realness comes from the experience.

In Wikipedia, it says Megillah learns from here, the Talmud Megillah, that adopted daughters are daughters in full. I couldn’t find the source in Megillah. I’m going to have to trust Wikipedia for now. But it just adds a little spice to this. We’re talking about authenticity. And the authenticity is not genetic. The authenticity has us at a higher and deeper level. And so Ramban continues to say, and therefore, it says the name of the daughter of Asher was Serach. It does not say, and Asher’s daughter was Serach because the intention of the verse is to say that her name was, or she was known as, Asher’s daughter, even though she wasn’t maybe genetically Asher’s daughter.

I just find that’s a fascinating twist to this fascinating personality.

Adam Mintz [8:06 – 8:27]: That is great. Obviously, that’s not in the Torah itself. But you see how the rabbis use these things to teach us things that obviously affect us to this day, right? Adopted daughters are really daughters. That has to do with whether or not they sit shiva for their parents, whether they’re obligated to honor their parents. That is really a broad and fascinating topic.

Geoffrey Stern [8:27 – 10:01]: And I will say that today, what we are discussing is, as I said in the intro, what the rabbis were given license to project. But it’s fascinating that they projected this woman who spanned the ages from slavery to redemption, and that they found it was important. So here they start fleshing out stories—and one of the stories that we all know is that Joseph made his descendants promise that they would not leave Egypt without taking up his bones.

Moses, who did not know Joseph, I would think, didn’t know where they were. So how did he find out where the bones were? It says in the Talmud of Sotah, he said, Serach, the daughter of Asher, remained from that generation. And she told Moses that Joseph was buried in a casket of metal and buried in the Nile in order to give strength, that the Nile would be blessed. She knew ethnic nuances, archaeological nuances, and rituals of the host country of her own people in a way that nobody else did.

And so what I think the rabbis are doing is they’re making this prototype, this prototype of people that we can go to that go beyond books and go beyond movies and are living legends, roots if you will.

Adam Mintz [10:02 – 10:16]: Right. Well, I mean, obviously she knew where Joseph was buried because she was alive then. That’s the idea of being alive in the 1800s and 1900s and the 2000s. You’re going to know things that by definition no one else could possibly know.

Geoffrey Stern [10:17 – 11:06]: Yes. And I think what’s as important is not only that the rabbis believe from this innocuous verse, or maybe one other, that she lived that long, but they felt the need to create the impact that someone who lived that long can have on us. Sometimes you have to be able to go to someone who was there, on someone who grew up with someone, or was born to someone, or married someone who was there.

So getting back to how impactful this is, we all are told that no one from the generation of the Exodus actually made it into the land of Israel. I had never really focused on the word that it said there was no man among them left. Rabbi, no man.

Adam Mintz [11:06 – 11:08]: Only men. Right. Only men.

Geoffrey Stern [11:09 – 12:05]: So according to Seder Olam Rabba, it says, and Serach, their sister. This is a reference to Genesis 46, the other time that she is mentioned. And she was from those who came to the land of Israel as it was a daughter of Asher, Serach. So according to this tradition, it was, as I said before, Serach who made up the 70 souls that went down into Egypt. And unlike the men, where no man actually made the complete journey from refugee, from slave to Exodus, to entering the Promised Land, this woman actually made that journey. So she became iconic if whether she ever really existed or in the imagination of our people. And I find that to be profound.

Adam Mintz [12:05 – 12:21]: That is profound. Now, let’s take a minute to talk about why it has to be a woman. Right. Why couldn’t the same thing, why couldn’t it be your grandfather? Why is it somehow that we associate that ability to span the generation to women?

Geoffrey Stern [12:22 – 12:40]: So, I mean, I think it’s a good question. I think that there are traditions, if I was to ask the typical man on the street, who was that biblical person who lived forever? I think the typical answer would be, I want to pronounce his name.

Adam Mintz [12:40 – 12:40]: Elijah.

Geoffrey Stern [12:41 – 12:49]: Well, Elijah never died. I get that. But then in terms of longevity, there’s Methuselah, right? He.

Adam Mintz [12:51 – 12:52]: Methuselah. Methuselah.

Geoffrey Stern [12:53 – 12:54]: Methuselah. There you go.

Adam Mintz [12:54 – 13:09]: Is how you say it in English. He lived to be 969 years old. He was the oldest human being ever. But, you know, because we have no idea what happened then, living to be a thousand wasn’t so exciting, because I don’t know how exciting what went on in those days was.

Geoffrey Stern [13:09 – 13:40]: So I think. But you are right that there is another tradition that Elijah went up to heaven in a chariot and never died. So I think here, I think it’s for others to decide why it had to be a woman. Certainly, I think the fact that it said there was no man left among them left the window open for a woman to, I would say, transcend men and to be able to be that bridge.

I think that there are so many wonderful stories about how the women were so critical and seminal in sending us out of Egypt. We could spend a whole episode on that. But I think it’s an interesting question and maybe the answer is an open answer. But the fact that there were 53 grandsons to Jacob and only one granddaughter is amazing.

I think as long as we’re on the subject of women, the fact that in this Parasha we have the daughters of Tzelophehad, as you mentioned, and these were daughters who had no brothers, and they went to Moses and they said, what is going to happen to our Father’s portion in the land?

The fact that there are singular cases where Moses is posed with a question and then has to consult with God, I think gives women a lot of credit. And I would go out on a limb here, and I would say thinking outside of the box, questioning outside of the box, living outside of the box.

Be that as it may, this is the history, the tradition, the midrash that we have in Sefer Hayashar, it continues fleshing out what was unique about this. Serach, what happens, if you remember, is the tribes, the brothers go down to Egypt multiple times. Finally, Joseph unveils himself, and they realize that Joseph is. Is alive. And Joseph, of course, says,

Od Avinu Chai?, is my father still alive? And then the brothers are confronted with a challenge. How are they going to break this news to their father without giving him a shock? And as they’re coming home, it says they met Serach coming towards them. And the damsel was exceedingly beautiful and wise, and a skilled player on the harp. And they called her. And she came unto them, and she kissed them, and they took her and gave her a harp, saying unto her, go,

We pray thee, before our Father, and sit down before him and strike this harp and speak unto him according to these words. And they instructed her concerning what she had to say. She hastened unto Jacob, and she sat down before him, and she sang, and she played beautifully upon the harp. And she sang in the sweetness of her voice, Joseph, my uncle is alive. And he reigned over all the land of Egypt. He is not dead. And she often repeated these words. And Jacob heard her words, and it pleased him greatly.

Sometimes we listen to the lyrics of a song. It’s gotta be repeated a few times till it sinks in. It was an amazing strategy that they used. But clearly, whether they took credit it for giving her this idea or this was her literary idea, here again, it was the genius of this particular woman who was picked to deliver this message.

And the punchline is that Jacob blessed Serach for singing these words before him. And he said, my daughter, may death never prevail against thee forever. And if you read the story into context, at this point, he wasn’t even convinced that. That Joseph was alive. I think he was just thankful for the dream that she had given him. And then he looks up and he sees all of his sons coming dressed like royalty. And he’s prepared. She gave him the hope. She gave him the material to make transitions,

to make paradigm shifts, I find this to be a beautiful midrash as well.

Adam Mintz [17:21 – 17:56]: Well, so let’s talk about the word transition. That’s what someone who lives in the 1800s and 1900s and 2000s, she gives hope to the younger generation that they can make difficult transitions. If you live through the First World War and the Second World War and Watergate and all the other things that happen, and that gives me hope that I can handle whatever challenges there are going forward. That’s what Serach represents. You can do it because I represent that continuity, that transition.

Geoffrey Stern [17:57 – 19:31]: It’s context. It’s, you know, we live from headline to headline. And you have people that have lived through real cataclysmic changes in history, and they definitely give us context, I think. And I think that’s what this is about. They give us songs and foods and poems. All of these are tools that I think we don’t value enough. But certainly in the story of Serach and the way the rabbis used her, they certainly were giving value to this social institution, this what I call living legacy. So in the Kitzer BAAL Haturim, it adds a little bit more nuance to the story. And it says, blessed is Asher, her father, above sons.

Therefore, Moses blessed him with these words, because when the tribes sold Joseph, they swore each other to secrecy on pain of excommunication. And Serach, the daughter of Asher, knew about the sale through prophecy. So now we have a situation where the rabbis are attributing to Serach this intuition that she knew from the beginning. And that’s maybe why, in the rabbinic mind, she was picked to give Jacob hope and then to help him transition because she knew from intuition what the brothers had done to Joseph. They’re giving her, again, this great wisdom in addition to her beauty.

Adam Mintz [19:32 – 19:36]: Yeah, no question about it. Right. Okay. That’s what you say. That’s context. That’s great.

Geoffrey Stern [19:37 – 19:46]: So the Bereshit Rabbah says as follows. It was learned there were 13 that never tasted the taste of death.

Adam Mintz [19:46 – 19:47]: Death.

Geoffrey Stern [19:47 – 20:57]: And these were the Milham, the phoenix bird. That’s another tradition. We could talk about the phoenix, the rising of the phoenix and its species. Enoch, the son of Jared, Serach, the daughter of Asher. And it goes on. It says, Serach, the daughter of Asher. Why did she never taste death? Because she had always been righteous.

When the sons of Jacob went up from Egypt and found Joseph alive, the Holy Spirit disappeared from Jacob until the day he was told Joseph is still alive. At that time, he said to her, you should likewise live forever. And it clung to her since she had always been righteous. So she is still sheltered in the Garden of Eden. Rabbi, what this is saying is that she was the one who gave the spirit of life back to Jacob. And as a result, Midah k’neged Midah, she got to keep that spirit forever. It’s a twist on that other Midrash that we learned before. She retained it and she gave it back to Jacob.

Adam Mintz [20:58 – 21:38]: Absolutely. Right. Of course. I like the first line, that she had always been righteous. Right. It’s important that these characters are not just that they live a long time, but that they’re good people. Now, sometimes that’s just a matter of kind of a tradition, of legacy, of nostalgia. You remember them well, but it’s important that they be good people, not that they’re, you know, that they’re either negative or even neutral. I think that first line is an important part of what you are describing here. These people not only live a long time, they’re also righteous.

Geoffrey Stern [21:39 – 23:46]: And I like this version better than the previous version because the previous version feels kind of compelled to say that she was a prophetess, that she was able through prophetic knowledge to know that Joseph was still alive. Here she’s just a person. She’s just a human being who gave Jacob hope and a future and his soul back.

And I am going to make the argument that unlike Elijah the Prophet, unlike other great Tzadikim, righteous people and even Roshoim, you could make the case like the Rolling Stones did about Satan (“guess my name.”) . He always is there. He’s always showing up. These bad people and good people. Here was a pashut, I’d say, a simple Jewish woman who saw it all and was there and survived. And she had these amazing traits.

So in Pesikta de-Rav Kahana, as if we don’t have enough stories about this woman, Rabbi Yohanan sat and expounded. How did the water become for the Jews like a wall at the splitting of the sea? He asked. Rabbi Yohanan expounded, it was like lattice work. Serach Bat Asher looked out and said, I was there. And it wasn’t like that. It was like a glass window.

So now we have a situation where Serach Bat Asher not only came into Egypt as a refugee, was a slave, went into the land of Israel, but she’s alive in the Beit Midrash of Rabbi Yohanan. And she just shows up kind of like you would expect Elijah to in many other Midrashim. And she says, no, it was like a glass window actually, just fascinating. What they made of her.

And it’s amazing to me that I had not heard of her before and that she doesn’t have the renown of the Elijah’s and the other figures, those mythical figures that show up and become mystically into discussions and set the record straight.

Adam Mintz [23:46 – 24:15]: So let me just say about Elijah for a minute, because we’re talking about these kind of figures. You know, for some reason, I agree with you. I don’t know why there’s a difference. Elijah pops up all over the place. Elijah’s at the bris, Elijah’s at Havdalah, Elijah’s at the Seder. He’s all over the place. Why isn’t Serach Bat Asher, you know, why doesn’t she come to Havdalah? So that’s an interesting question, just on how these traditions evolved over time.

Geoffrey Stern [24:15 – 27:12]: I think at my Seder I’m going to find a nice kosher Syrah wine and serve it. But we’re discovering it and the Madlik listener now knows about Serach. So here we are. It’s just fascinating. As I said before, everybody always thinks of this Methuselah. Methuselah, I guess, is the way that you should pronounce him. I think he even made it into the musical Cats. But he’s become a synonym for longevity. As old as Methuselah is an expression. Serach did not get any great expressions.

So now I want to leave Serach for a second and I want to explore this, I would say this social institution of a living legacy. And to me, I didn’t have time to find 5, 10, 20. But I think the one that I think of is the most profound. In Ezra 3:12, we have the second temple being rebuilt. Seventy years after the first temple was destroyed, the second temple was rebuilt, built. And it says many of the priests and Levites and the chiefs of the clans, the old men who had seen the first house wept loudly at the sight of the founding of this house. Many others shouted joyously at the tops of their voices. Rashi says this temple. When they would see the building of this temple, they would weep because they remembered the large building of the first temple.

And many who had not seen the building of the first temple were rejoicing and shouting for joy with a loud voice out of their great joy that they had emerged from exile. Rabbi, two groups of people are seeing the same situation totally differently. But what we have here is one of those iconic figures. It’s targeting. It’s identifying people that saw the first temple destroyed and saw the second temple rebuilt. And whether it was the stones were not as large or I suspect something much more profound. They looked at it like all of us do. You know, it’s not quite like Sinatra. It’s not like the Beatles. It’s this saying that what’s great today doesn’t stand up to what was great. Days of old. Or I would say, even deeper. There were those who never believed that the Shechina came down into the second temple. There are people that make the argument that the Essenes went into the desert because they didn’t think God was in this temple. This was a serious difference of opinion. And here we have what I would argue is real sons of the first temple who were there, and you looked at their face and you saw that something was amiss.

Adam Mintz [27:13 – 27:47]: So, of course, that’s right. But remember nostalgia. Nostalgia always tells us that the ways of our youth are better than the way that things are now. It’s not like the Beatles, because when I was young, it was about me. I’m not like I was then. So you have to. I think that’s important too, that the first Temple, they had a sense of energy and a sense of pride that somehow the second temple didn’t have because the Jews didn’t have their own king and all those things. Anyway, these are great verses, but I think there’s another piece of it also.

Geoffrey Stern [27:48 – 28:19]: I agree. The thing that I wanna say is in the Talmud, we don’t necessarily have an analog for real sons and real daughters, those people that were there. I have a chiddush and my chiddush is that when in the Haggadah it says Amar Rabbi Eliezer ben Azariah. I am like seventy years old.

I would like to argue that when he says, “I am like a 70 year old,” he might have been referring to the experience that we’re talking about right now. That he was like one of those people who straddled the generations, who saw things differently. And that’s why he understood that you have to talk about Yetziat Mitzrayim, going out of Egypt, even in the night, even in the dark times. I don’t know. But I do believe that when you look at Ezra, it was a thing. These were a special group of people.

So I want to finish up. I said we were going to look at other cultures. You know, in Hinduism, there is this concept of an eternal witness primarily associated with Vishnu, representing an omnipresent observer of all universal phenomena. In Christianity, it’s Enoch and Elijah. I wonder where they got that from. So I would say in Judeo-Christianity, and this comes from Wikipedia, there was Enoch and Elijah. Believe it or not, they also have the concept of an eternal witness in Christianity, which also signifies God’s unwavering commitment to Israel and His glory, with Israel itself serving as an ever-lasting witness of God’s holiness.

So the Israelites themselves become this living engine, this living legend. That’s the good. On the bad side, the legend of the wandering Jew tells the tale of a man cursed with immortality to wander the earth until the second coming. So like in last week’s Bilaam, we get it coming and going. But again, the Jewish people themselves become that living legend.

And in getting back to the children of Civil War veterans, there was an article published as recently as 2012 and republished in 2024 that argues that there are people that are real sons and real daughters. And how do you do the math? Well, you have somebody who fought, who maybe got remarried, who had children very, very late in his life. Maybe there was adoption involved.

It is fascinating that now that we are seeing images of Normandy, where there are just a few soldiers left, and we are confronted with Yetzolei Shoah survivors of the Holocaust, and there are just a few left, we are at a pivotal moment in history where we’re experiencing real sons and real daughters. There is a website called Living Links, and it is all about children of Holocaust survivors. These are people that are going to be working and talking in the Dalet Amos, the cubics of our earth, who have touched, who have bathed with, who have eaten with people that had experienced this iconic experience of the Holocaust.

I think this is something that if Serach helps us focus on this social institution and make us question whether we value enough institutions like this, I think it’s Dayenu; it would be enough. And thank you, Serach, for that.

Speaker B: Thank you. This was really an amazing topic. What a good way to introduce a great parasha, Parashat Pinchas. Everybody should enjoy this parasha. There’s a special Haftorah. As we lead up the three weeks to Tisha B’Av, we talked about those who remembered the first Temple. These are the weeks that we also remember the temple. So a perfect segue and a perfect topic. Shabbat Shalom, everybody. We look forward to seeing you next week.

Speaker A: Shabbat Shalom. See you all next week.