This week’s Torah commentary, originally published by Hebrew Seminary rabbinical student Dr. Cécile Bruriah Gonçalves, has been sponsored by Elliot Eisenberg.
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The verb that titles our parashah—vayyiggash (וַיִּגַּשׁ), “and he approached”—describes Judah stepping forward towards Joseph to plead the case of his brother Benjamin and his father Jacob. While the narrative seems dominated by the figures of Judah and Joseph, our text, in a very discreet gesture, names two women: Serach bat Asher (Genesis 46:17) and Asenat bat Potifera (41:45 and 46:20). In biblical genealogies, where women are often anonymous, these mentions are anything but accidental. The midrash, and later rabbinic tradition, reflected at length on their role. Consequently, an attentive feminist reading adds nothing to the text; it simply takes seriously what the Torah chooses not to erase: the two women who worked toward the spectacular reconciliation of these brothers.
Serach bat Asher: The Forgotten Mediator
The Masoretic text mentions Serach only three times, always in dry genealogical lists (Genesis 46:17, Numbers 26:46, and I Chronicles 7:30). No narrative, no words, no actions. Yet, the midrashic commentary Sefer HaYashar (composed circa 1300 C.E.), elaborating on this week’s Torah reading, preserves an extraordinary tradition: when the brothers returned from Egypt with the news “Joseph is alive,” they feared that the brutal announcement might kill Jacob from shock. They therefore turned to Serach bat Asher, Jacob’s granddaughter renowned for her musical wisdom, asking her to reveal the news delicately, through song, so as not to shatter his spirit. Serach took her harp and sang these words:
יוסף דודי חי הוא. וכי הוא מושל בכל ארץ מצרים. ולא מת.
My dear Joseph is alive! In fact, he governs all of the land of Egypt! He has not died!
Initially incredulous, Jacob listened to the song repeat itself, gradually accepted the impossible truth, and blessed Serach:
בתי, אל ימשול מות בך עד עולם כי החיית את רוחי. אך דברי נא עוד לפניי כאשר דיברת, כי שמחתני בכל דברייך.
My daughter, may death never have power over you—for you have given life to my soul. Indeed, orate please further just as you have orated—for you, through all of your words, have made me joyous.
Serach’s method reveals an alternative epistemology. Where the brothers use direct assertive language—which fails since, as Genesis 45:26 tells us, “Jacob did not believe them”—Serach uses song, which wraps truth in beauty and allows its gradual acceptance. Rabbi Ovadyah Sforno of 16th century Italy explicitly notes in his commentary here that the brothers’ direct masculine approach fails; it is the oblique feminine way that succeeds. This distinction is not essentialist but strategic. In a patriarchal economy where women lack the authority of direct proclamation, they develop alternative modes of transmitting truths. Serach’s song is not a weakness but a sophisticated mode of communication—a form of relational tikkun (תִּקּוּן, “repair”) more honest than whatever fraternal instincts underlie Joseph’s own words to his brothers:
אַל־תֵּעָ֣צְב֗וּ… כִּֽי־מְכַרְתֶּ֥ם אֹתִ֖י הֵ֑נָּה כִּ֣י לְמִֽחְיָ֔ה שְׁלָחַ֥נִי אֱלֹהִ֖ים לִפְנֵיכֶֽם׃
Do not be distressed… beacuse you had sold me into this place; indeed, God sent me to you in order to preserve life!
Unlike Serach’s commitment to conveying the full truth even in song, Joseph’s prosaic attempt at revising the past unfairly absolves his brothers of their real moral responsibility and instead attributes their crime to divine providence.
Our midrashic tradition intuitively recognizes what the biblical text mentions in passing: without Serach, the reconciliation of Vayyigash would never have taken place. Jacob would have died upon hearing the truth, rendering impossible both the descent into Egypt and, therefore, the history of Israel itself. Serach embodies thus an essential agent of national continuity—but this agency is encrypted in the textual margins. Yet, rabbinic tradition occasionally rescued her from the sidelines of our national history, believing that Serach remained alive from Jacob’s lifetime through the exodus from Egypt. The Babylonian Talmud, Sotah 13a, thus asserts that Serach showed Moses the site of Joseph’s coffin when the nation was about to escape Egypt. This longevity is not a gratuitous miracle. It signifies that certain forms of authority rest not on strength or domination, but on faithful memory.
Asenat: Negotiating Hybrid Identity
Our parashah briefly mentions that Asenat–Joseph’s Egyptian wife and the daughter of Potifera, the priest of On—gave birth to Ephraim and Manasseh (Genesis 46:20). This laconic notation conceals a figure of extraordinary complexity. Asenat stands at the crossroads of multiple identities: Egyptian by birth but daughter-in-law of the Hebrew patriarch, raised in polytheism but educating her sons in monotheism, a woman of power (wife of the vizier) but a foreigner in Jacob’s family.
The early medieval rabbinic collection Pirkei Rabbi Eli’ezer, chapter 37, develops a tradition according to which Asenat had beem the daughter of Jacob’s daughter Dinah. According to this legend, Asenat resulted from Dinah’s rape by Shechem but was expelled by her grandfather Jacob, who wrapped around her neck an amulet bearing God’s name; only later did an Egyptian childless couple—Potifera and his wife—adopt Asenat. Whether or not one accepts the veracity of this midrash, its existence is significant: the Sages refuse to think of Israel’s continuity without reinscribing Asenat into a feminine lineage. This alternative genealogy, though late, recognizes the necessity of a figure who “bridges” identities. Asenat then becomes doubly liminal: Hebrew by blood but Egyptian by culture, a victim (daughter of rape) becoming the mother of our tribes. This means that the people’s survival depends on a foreign woman, or at least one external to the initial group. The text affirms that the future passes through a non-idealized, non-endogamous maternity, not centered on the patriarchs.
Dr. Gloria Anzaldúa (1942–2004), in her 1987 book Borderlands/La Frontera: The New Mestiza, develops the concept of “mestiza consciousness”—the capacity of those who live between two cultures to develop complex, non-binary thinking that refuses false dichotomies. Asenat embodies this ‘mestiza consciousness:’ she does not have to ‘choose’ between being Egyptian or Hebrew, but she inhabits the in-between, allowing her sons to become tribes of Israel while retaining their Egyptian names—Manasseh being מְנַשֶּׁה (menasheh, “[God] has made [me] forget”) and Ephraim (efrayim, “[God] has made [me] doubly fruitful”). Asenat makes the future in exile possible.
Just after our parashah—in Genesis, chapter 48—Jacob will bless Ephraim and Manasseh by granting them the status of full tribes, equal to Reuben and Simeon. This is a revolutionary moment: the sons of the Egyptian woman becoming fully Israelite. This gesture implicitly recognizes that Asenat succeeded where so many others would have failed: maintaining the Hebrew identity of her children while raising them at the heart of Egyptian power. She daily negotiates the tensions between family loyalties, cultural obligations, and political survival—a colossal emotional and identity work, totally invisible in the text.
Toward a Hermeneutics of Presence-Absence
The figures of Serach and Asenat embody what Dr. Tikva Frymer-Kensky (1943–2006) calls “structural erasure:” women appearing in moments of crisis as essential agents, then being evacuated from the Masoretic narrative. Their work of mediation—emotional for Serach, identity-based for Asenat—makes collective survival possible, but this work is coded as ‘natural,’ ‘private,’ therefore non-narratable. Our hermeneutical responsibility is to cross this textual distance. Vayyigash not only invites us not only to observe Judah’s titular approach towards Joseph; rather, Vayyiggash also invites us to approach these erased presences and restore their place in our foundational narrative. The Hebrew grammatical root of the verb Vayyiggash, nagash (נ־ג־שׁ, “approaching”), shares much of its root with naga (נ־ג־ע, “touching” or “affecting”). To truly approach is to accept being transformed by the encounter. A feminist reading of Vayyigash invites us to let ourselves be touched by these marginalized voices, and to recognize that true reconciliation can only occur by including all voices, all stories.
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