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מדרש הגדול על בר’ מה:כו |
Midrash HaGadol on Gen. 45:26 |
”ויגדו לו לאמר ‘עוד יוסף חי'” (בר’ מה:כו) רבנן אמרו אם אנו אומרים לו תחלה יוסף קים שמא תפרח נשמתו. מה עשו? אמרו לשרח בת אשר, “אמרי לאבינו יעקב שיוסף קים והוא במצרים. מה עשתה? המתינה לא עד שהוא עומד בתפלה ואמרה בלשון תימה: יוסף במצרים/ יולדו לו על ברכים/ מנשה ואפרים. פג לבו כשהוא עומד בתפלה. כיון שהשלים ראה העגלות, מיד “ותחי רוח יעקב אבינו” (שם). |
[The brothers said:] If we tell him right away, “Joseph is alive!” perhaps he will have a stroke [lit., his soul will fly away]. What did they do? They said to Seraḥ, daughter of Asher, “Tell our father Jacob that Joseph is alive, and he is in Egypt.” What did she do? She waited till he was standing in prayer, and then said in a tone of wonder, “Joseph is in Egypt/ There have been born on his knees/ Menasseh and Ephraim” [three rhyming lines:Yosef be-mizrayim / Yuldu lo al birkayim / Menasheh ve-Ephrayim]. His heart failed, while he was standing in prayer. When he finished his prayer, he saw the wagons: immediately the spirit of Jacob came back to life. (Translated by Avivah Zornberg in Genesis, the Beginning of Desire, p.281). |
The Midrash on this week’s parsha tells of the brothers’ concern that their father Jacob would die from shock upon hearing the astounding news that his son Joseph was alive and well in Egypt. Their solution – to appoint Seraḥ to the task of sharing the news with him. In one version Seraḥ masterfully waits until Jacob is praying and then relays the news to him through the poetic form of three rhyming lines. In another rendering she sings the news to him gently and wondrously with a harp.
Both versions reveal a girl with psychological insight into just how to approach Jacob with the potentially lethal news. Seraḥ intuits how to tend to Jacob’s emotional wounds with song. Even though she was sharing a truth with him, sometimes the sharing of truth with someone can be even more shattering than a lie. Where the bald facts could have killed Jacob, Seraḥ’s simple almost child-like rhyme and song healed him, opening him to hope and possibility after decades of despair.
So what is it about song and rhyme which is able to impart such promise and soothe such wounds? Voltaire is famous for saying, “Anything too stupid to be spoken in words is sung.” And this might be true enough if one were to survey song lyrics for their intellectual content. But God forbid the purpose of music would be deliver intellectual points. No, the great gift of song rests in its stirring of sentiment, its arousal of spirit, its curative catharsis of emotions. Seraḥ, with her ample emotional intelligence and creativity knew how to utilize song, rhyme & poetry for their subtle therapeutic properties.
May all of our artistic endeavors likewise access healing and inspiration, offering hope and the possibility of betterment in the face of any despair. The poem below is a prayer and request to Seraḥ to instruct us in how to do just that.
| Contribute a translation | Source (English) |
|---|---|
Seraḥ, teach us please your therapy of harmony – that exquisite technique that you work with your speech | |
Reveal to us, ancient sister your mesmeric tincture of lyric and meter | |
And mix us well a word elixir to soothe the wounds of injured listeners | |
Just the way you sung your way and stood in the way of the heart-halting parade of gold-laden wagons sent to stun an old man too fast from his depression | |
For even one’s despair can be a precious thing to those who cling to their misery as if it were a love letter to the ones they’ve lost | |
But you with your harp loosened that knot on the yarn of a lie that had so long bound | |
Jacob’s beguiled mind – as you applied the cautious remedy of a child’s rhyme | |
Plucked hope back into a ruptured heart and strummed him through the sting and stun of loss | |
Suddenly reversed through your verse – with the touch of a song | |
For is not the crowning goal of creative endeavor to heal the bereaved and herald in a better reality? | |
So teach us more-loudly your chemistry of composition to make what’s written glisten from the page to release vast repositories of pain | |
To make space for the joyful reception of miracles of salvation and spiritual accumulation like wagons laden with bread and corn, and a child reborn in the midst of a famine | |
And a lie overturned and a family re-fashioned | |
So teach us Seraḥ your eternal talent of healing hearts with harps and the ancient art of rhyme | |
And let it start with these faltering lines – a prayer for the gentle unraveling of our long-held lies |
We are grateful to Chaya Kaplan-Lester for graciously sharing her prayer to Seraḥ with a CC-BY-SA 3.0 Unported license, along with her d’var torah for the parsha Vayigash, first published in the Jerusalem Post.
“In Search of Seraḥ: A Prayer to Seraḥ by Chaya Kaplan-Lester” is shared through the Open Siddur Project with a Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike 4.0 International copyleft license.
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