Page 108 - Dark Matter:Women Witnessing Issue #3 - December 2015

Note: Serach bat Asher, in Jewish tradition, becomes a woman of memory and wisdom,

traveling through the centuries and the many Jewish Diasporae to help her people in need. Her

name “bat Asher” means daughter of the tribe of Asher, but it can also be understood as

“daughter of a tree.” In the Torah, Joseph dies and is buried in Egypt, and just before his death

he demands that his descendants remember him by bringing his bones with them into the new

Land. According to the rabbis, it is Serach bat Asher alone several centuries later who

remembers the place in the river Nile where Joseph’s bones have been buried. The rabbis note

that she is listed at the end of Genesis among the family accompanying Jacob in Egypt, and

listed again in Numbers among the people entering Zion. Serach bat Asher remembers, they

conclude, because she has been alive all this time, blessed with eternal life by Jacob for being

the one to tell him that Joseph was still alive. She arrives in times of difficulty, unrecognized. In

many ways she is like Elijah, but her gifts are specifically knowledge, sense, wisdom and most

of all memory.

Mei Mei Sanford is a writer, storyteller, teacher and woodcarver. She

was ordained as a Kohenet by the Hebrew Priestess Institute in the

particular roles of story teller and shapeshifter. She is also the Iyalode

Osun of Iragbiji, Nigeria. She teaches in the Africana Studies program at

the College of William and Mary. She co-edited with Joseph Murphy

Osun Across the Waters: a Yoruba Goddess in Africa and the Americas.

She is currently completing a young adult, Jewish mystical, queer, historical novel tentatively titled

Lioness on the Ark.

She writes: "As I worked on this piece, I read research somewhere about mother elephants' language

including ‘nineteen words for our daughters for every 3 we have for our sons.'"!