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Serah was tired, so much more so than it seemed she should be for her apparent age. She did age, so perhaps one day Ya’akov’s blessing would wear off and she would finally die and rejoin her family. But she aged slowly, and only more so over time. She had aged a decade in the first few centuries, had gone from barely more than a girl to a woman of near thirty by the time she had gone out from Egypt. When she had been forced back out of the Land she had seemed somewhere in the middle of her thirties.
She had a new name now for each generation. She found she received only strange looks if she declared herself to be Serah bat Asher. Her name, unlike those of so many she had known in her youth, had not lasted. She still privately called herself Serah, a single name. Patronymics fell out of common use except in the synagogue, and her father had been gone now for more generations than the number of years he had lived.
For a while she had alternated, Serah for one generation, than another name, then Serah again. People got uncomfortable, and only more so over time, with the notion that she was that she did not die. It was one of the things she missed most from her youth. People used to be comfortable with the strange, the abnormal, the unnatural. Moshe had not been concerned that she was hundreds of years old. He had understood the blessing her grandfather had given her. Blessings were still respected then. Effective too, she thought. She wondered whether they had lost their power when people stopped believing in them, or whether they stopped believing in them because they lost their power. The Divine was still there, of course, but more distant from the people, just as she was.
She used Serah as her name for the final time in Pir Bakran in 4893. When the people erroneously thought her dead in a fire and erected a grave for her, she let her name at least be buried there. Perhaps it would be good to be anonymous, to try to blend in.
She couldn’t forget though, not really. And she couldn’t let go of her people either. She thought sometimes of retreating, of living alone in some distant cave where she would not have to watch yet another person she loved grow old and fade away and then be put into the ground where she could never follow. That was why she had stopped marrying early in her life. There were only so many times one could promise a life together and then watch and mourn as her young lover grew old and died in her arms yet again. Only so many times one could outlive her children.
She had left a few times. Thought that perhaps if she was not among her own people it would hurt less. But they had found their way nearly everywhere now, exiled to the four corners of the earth. She would turn a corner in a new town and see someone with Ya’akov’s forehead wrinkle or hear Miriam’s laugh from inside a nearby building and know that she had found her family again.
So she stays with them. Sometimes she wanders from place to place and sometimes she picks a family and follows them a while, living where they live until they too die and she sets off again for somewhere new.
She has ceased to be shocked, when yet again the extended family she has adopted in place of her long dead family is pushed from their homes. She wonders how long they must wander, how many homes will be taken away. She has made her way to and from the holy land more times than should be possible. She has dwelt in lands that those around her called home, that they loved and defended and that ultimately turned on them. She has, in occasional moments stayed for a century or two or three, watched a community grow around her. But more often it has been a matter of years, of a new home with each new generation, learning yet again a new language, new customs, new ways. Serah is no stranger to learning, to starting again.
She thinks often of Moshe, of how he had named his son Gershom. a stranger in a strange land. She wonders if there is a land that could be a home for Serah bat Asher. Perhaps it is her alone, not the lands that is the stranger. She has made her home in so many lands, wandering endlessly, that nothing and nowhere is ever home, but they have ceased to be fully strange.
But this morning, Serah is not thinking of the past, but the future, and the thin thread that ties her still to her family. The boy is named Jacob. He does not remind her of her grandfather, and the new pronunciation still sounds foreign to her, but she sees Ephraim in his eyes, Ishvah in his tiny waving hands, and hears Aaron in the sound of his voice when he cries out before he is pressed back into his mother’s arms. She is not sure what it is about him that draws her to this tiny new scrap of humanity, but she knows without a doubt that he is family. It’ll do well enough to follow him for a while. She fumbles the phone out of her pocket, still getting used to a computer at all, let alone one she can carry, and begins the process of building a new life again.
