We gathered in a bittersweet and joyful closing homecoming session to hold and honor Bilhah and Zilpah. Over our month together, we shared the story of Bilhah and Zilpah; a narrative of being born into a system of enslavement, navigating life’s realities, finding identity in a sea of change, and creating better opportunities for our children.
In our first session, we read the lines of Vayeitzei that introduce Zilpah and Bilhah, foreshadow their marriage to Yaakov as they’re given to Leah and Rachel, and reveal how they are used to create children intended to be claimed by other women. We journaled about how/why Bilhah and Zilpah are meaningful in our lives and considered the meaning and actions of homecoming. We closed with a collectively created welcome home prayer:
Welcome home Zilpah & Bilhah! May we learn to listen for and hear your wisdom and wrap it around us in comfort that teaches us to value and nurture our daughters from birth to death. שְׁמַ֣ע בְּ֭נִי מוּסַ֣ר אָבִ֑יךָ וְאַל־תִּ֝טֹּ֗שׁ תּוֹרַ֥ת אִמֶּֽךָ׃ Listen, my son, to your father’s instruction and do not forsake your mother’s teaching. You have arrived! Welcome Zilpah! Welcome Bilhah! All of you is welcome here. This is a space of collaboration.
Our second session looked at the other women of Bilhah’s and Zilpah’s story in parashat Vayishlakh and considered their relationships. The possibility for understanding and care born from kindred experiences. We noted Dinah’s experience with rape and her marriage being determined by her brothers and her rapist. We noted the women of Shekhem’s experience of witnessing their men be executed followed by their enslavement along with their children. We noted the mention of another woman (Devora) who had given her life to serve the family featured in the narrative. We started to excavate ritual imagery.
During our third session we continued looking for women in the story. Parashat Vayeshev, when we did not meet, mentions Tamar’s experiences surviving a husband’s death and control over her ability to procreate by her father-in-law, Yaakov’s unnamed daughters, and Timna as the mother of someone named an enemy. Parashat Miketz added only one woman, Asenat who was given to marry Yosef. We considered archetypes as a framework to understand the messages embedded within the story and connected the experiences, wisdom, and legacies of modern matriarchs to biblical matriarchs.
Today’s gathering opened with Esther Rabbah 1:12, a source that acknowledges six matriarchs instead of four. We are dropped into a discussion about a royal throne which turns to a query of how many steps led up to it. Like all rabbinic debates there was contestation and clarification. Are there seven instead of six? This is a classic case of tread versus riser. An additional riser goes up to a floor level, which is not a step, culminating in one additional riser than tread, the standing surface of a step, in any stair. The bulk of the source lands on six stairs (treads) and then likens it to a list of groupings of six: lands, orders of Mishnah, days of creation, matriarchs, and mitzvot.
Then, we invoked the Amidah line of the matriarchs, itself an augmentation to the prayer service in the history of prayer evolution. We played on the personal meditation invitation of the Amidah to reflect on the Esther Rabbah source and how it felt to step into prayer development space. We reflected on how ritual relates to legacy.
Throughout the readings, Bilhah and Zilpah remain in the story, always attributed as the birth parents of their children. That continues in parahsat Vayigash which holds the first accounting of the descendants of Zilpah and Bilhah. As we have welcomed Bilhah and Zilpah into the space, we have brought along ancestors and personal and biblical figures who have been meaningful in our life. Attendees shared recent yartzeits, honoring the memory of a loved one who had died, recently observed or coming up. Father’s, mother’s, a brother, a grandfather, a sister-in-law, an aunt, and a grandma named Hannah, who died during Chanuka, whose yartzeit starts this evening soon filled the room with us. Some had experienced a lot of loss this year. Everyone named someone. This set the stage for reading Zilpah’s and Bilhah’s lineages, first in Vayigash, culminating in Numbers.
We lit a yizkor candle and read the accounting of the families growth as they traveled to Canaan and later to Egypt. We focused on Zilpah and Bilhah, and then Gad, Dan, Asher, and Naphtali. We looked at options that can be found in traditional yizkor memorializations as we considered borrowing from this ritual as a way to honor Bilhah and Zilpah. As Chag haBanot and Rosh Chodesh approach, celebrating Serakh, Zilpah’s granddaughter and an immortal Talmudic elder, emerged as a calendar time to anchor possible communal commemoration. We returned to previous ritual elements explored in session two as ways to anchor memory to source material. Yartzeit and yizkor both are times when donations are often made in the name of a person being remembered. This idea wove into supporting organizations who support women who have been silenced after sexualized violence, bridging biblical matriarchs into the continuing realities of our world today.
We closed with storytime of Serakh midrashic tales of singing secrets, clarifying the texture of the Sea of Reeds, revealing where Yosef was buried, and vouching for Moshe from her first-hand knowledge, as the elder of elders who left Egypt and returned. This rolled into a midrash of ברזל barzel (iron) being an acronym for Bilhah-Rachel-Zilpah-Leah, Yaakov’s four wives representing the sefira malchut. We parted to a recording of Lucille Clifton reciting “won’t you celebrate with me”.
This is the final weekly email that runs during the annual Bilhah Zilpah Homecoming. Stay connected with the Bilhah Zilpah Project throughout the rest of the year with monthly emails sharing insights from weekly study. You can sign up for email through the homecoming registration form or reply to this email.
Joyful wishes for a continuing Chanukah and Kwanzaa and a meaningful Chag haBanot and Rosh Chodesh Tevet. May our actions bring us closer to the world to come.
Jews of Color Sanctuary 