Serach

Moses dies, in the company of a 400-year old harpist, and liberates the souls of the Israelites who have died in the desert.

Context

• Reference: Numbers 26:46

• Serach, the daughter of Jacob's son Asher, appears in the book of Genesis as one of the Israelites who went down to Egypt, and then, in the book of Numbers, as one of the Israelites in the desert centuries later.

• The Israelites remained in the desert for 40 years, until all the people who had experienced and remembered the slavery in Egypt had died.

• God told Moses that he would not get to enter the promised land.

• Moses gave a farewell speech to the Israelites (consisting of most of the Book of Deuteronomy).

• He then went up a mountain from which he got to see the promised land, and on which he knew that he would die.

Aftermath

• Moses was said to have died on the mountain, but his burial place was never found.

Notes

The legend of the Israelites dying each year on the 9th day of the month of Av, and of their discovering that the pattern had broken on the 15th of Av is quite old. I first heard of it from the rabbi at the Chabad House in Austin, Texas, in August 1989.

I came across the legend of Serah for the first time in 2008 in an article about performance artist Etta Abramson from the Drisha Institute who did a piece, The Consistency of Flour, about her.

Further research led to the story of Serah's having played the harp for Jacob to let him know that his son Joseph had not died. This idea led to the threads of music within the story.

I modeled the character of Serah in this story after my teacher Pauline Oliveros and her Deep Listening work.

An article by Rabbi Yakov Travis contained the legend of Rabbi Nachman of Bratzlav's work with the souls of the dead. I transferred the image of this work onto Moses. The rays of light coming from Moses's face are mentioned in his descent from Sinai.(though unfortunate mistranslations led to artwork portraying Moses with horns). And his singing the pure tone of his true name links back to his story in The Book of Voices where he spoke of his well-known name not being his own.And the Asherah tree once more makes an appearance.