Serach HaTzadikah: An Alternative/Addition to “Eliyahu HaNavi”

At the end of havdalah and at a seder we sing “Eliyahu HaNavi,” about Elijah the prophet. I was moved the first time I heard Rabbi Leila Gal Berner’s alternative “Miriam HaNeviya” and added it to my practice. Then a few years later I read about Serach and thought – Miriam is the analogue to Moses, and Serach is the analog to Elijah – and I wrote the verses below, which you can sing to the melody you use for Eliyahu and Miriam. But – who is Serach?

Serach was the daughter of Asher, one of the twelve sons of the patriarch Jacob. Her name is only mentioned twice in the Torah, first in a list of people who went down to Egypt with Jacob, and then in a list of the clans that came out of Egypt 400 years later, which led to the teaching that she’s immortal.

There are many stories about her in Jewish folklore. Here are a few: When Jacob’s sons came back from Egypt they were afraid to tell their father that their brother Joseph was alive and asked his granddaughter Serach to tell him. A talented musician, she wove that message into a song she sang to Jacob, who said to her, “If what you’re telling me is true, may you live forever.”

Jacob knew that his descendants would become slaves in Egypt and told his sons how they would recognize their future redeemer. They told it to their children, who all died, until only Serach remembered it, and when Moses appeared she said, “This is the one.” Just before they left Egypt Moses remembered that Joseph asked to have his bones brought back to Canaan, but only Serach remembered where they were.

Two hundred years later, when King David brought the ark to Jerusalem, Serach showed him the stone where Abraham nearly sacrificed Isaac, and that’s where David’s son Solomon placed the altar to God in the temple he built around that stone.

Some time later there was a revolt against David, led by a man named Sheba. David’s troops went after Sheba, who took refuge in the town of Abel. A wise woman preserved the city, which would have been destroyed in order to capture Sheba. The rabbis of old tell us that she was Serach.

Hundreds of years later, when Solomon’s temple was about to be destroyed, Serach helped the prophet Jeremiah hide the ark and sacred vessels from the temple. Hundreds of years later, when the second temple was destroyed, the surviving rabbis gathered in a town called Yavneh. One day Serach was walking by the house of study and heard Rabbi Yohanan describing what the parting of the sea looked like. She stuck her head in the window and told him he was wrong – the only woman in Talmud to correct a rabbi in public.

Serach has followed our people down through time. When the Jews were expelled from Spain in 1492 one of our people had a vision of Serach and Elijah hand in hand guiding everyone to safety. Some say that Serach never died, but in the city of Isfahan in Iran there’s a synagogue named for her. People there say that a fiery chariot descended from the sky and carried her up to heaven in the ninth century, which is just what happened to Elijah the prophet. Another story says that she presides over a palace in heaven where women live who’ve taken care of people during their lives the way that Serach took care of her grandfather. And in my little verse, echoing the words of “Eliyahu HaNavi,” it’s Serach who will come to us with the messiah – a woman!

Some years later I wrote a book about Serach: Deathless: The Complete, Uncensored, Heartbreaking, and Amazing Autobiography of Serach bat Asher, the Oldest Woman in the World. (In my account, she now lives two blocks from the beach in Los Angeles.)

Serach Ha’tzadikah