ESSAY: Standing Strong Like The Daughters of Tzelafchad (Parashat Pinchas)

I want to look at the daughters of Tzelafchad as models of empowerment and agency.  

Decisions are being made about who will inherit land in Israel and how it will be divided up.  The five daughters of Tzelafchad take the bold move of going to Moshe to request and eventually receive a land inheritance alongside their male counterparts because their father had no sons to get his share.   Tenah lanu ahuzah (Numbers 27:4), they say.  Give us a holding, a share, a space, a room of our own. 

Their Naming

The Torah tells us the names of these five daughters – Mahlah, Noah, Haglah, Milkah and Tirzah.  They are in fact named in our parsha twice, once during the preceding genealogical listing, and once at the start of this story of their petition (Numbers 26:36 and 27:1).  

I want to start by taking in the full import of their naming in the Torah.  They are women and they are a full seven generations – a long way away – from Yosef, their tribal ancestor.  Only two other, more prominent, women (Serach and Yocheved) are named in the entire genealogy, and even the men’s names are generally not included past the second or third generation, so this naming of five women of the seventh generation, not once, but twice, is indeed remarkable.   Whatever land holding they received pales in comparison to this inheritance of space in the Torah narrative, which we still read today.  

It seems that they did something here to earn their own names, to truly come into their own identity, to inhabit their fullest selves. How do we do that – fully claim our own selves, our names, our right to exist and take up space?  This is a feminist issue, but not only a feminist issue.  It is applicable to anyone who, for whatever reason, has not felt fully entitled to be themselves among the rest of creation.  

These women – let’s name them again: Mahlah, Noah, Haglah, Milkah and Tirzah –  show us how to do this work of empowerment and self reclamation.  

Step 1: Vatikravnah: Coming Close to Yourself

The first step is in the first word of the narrative, vatikravnah, they come close (Numbers 27:1).   The Torah doesn’t say who or what they come close to, just that these five women begin the process by coming close.  I understand this as the inner activity of coming close to yourself.  The first step is internal, an inner circling around yourself, a turning towards, an inner attentiveness that first of all redeems yourself, a reclaiming of your own mattering, of your own centeredness as worthy of your attention and closeness.   And right alongside that closeness to self is a kirvah, a closeness to God in you, a coming into alignment and acknowledgement of the divine spark that has always resided in you.   It is this initial inner work of self reclamation as part of the divine that eventually allows an outer expression.   

I imagine this vatikravnah work, this coming close work, as a circle, encircling yourself, coming closer and closer to the center of the circle where your essence is and where God is waiting for you, centering yourself and zeroing in, focusing and listening, giving yourself this attention and closeness and presence.  Redemption begins inside.

Step 2: Vata’amodnah, Standing Up For Yourself

The next step is vata’amodnah.  They stood (Numbers 27:2).  They stood before Moshe and all of the other important leaders and the whole community in the doorway to the tent of meeting.  They stood on the precipice of entering the sacred, of belonging to the sacred.   The way to enter and truly belong is first to stand up for yourself.  Vata’amodnah.  To stand tall and firm, with integrity and confidence and wholeness inside yourself.  

What does this physical stance feel like in your body?  Not slumped over or collapsing or sinking into the ground, not a beggar with hands outstretched, not small, hiding and crouching in a corner in the back, but standing up straight and tall, to your full height, taking up space, perhaps a power stance with your feet spread and your arms reaching up and out over your head, filling up the full space of the doorway.   You are here.  You are strong and confident in yourself.  You are claiming this space, your right to be here.  

Enlarged Nun, Outsized Self

There is an enlarged final nun letter [ן] here in the Torah, emphasizing the unusual feminine ending of the word mishpatan – משפטן –  their, these women’s, case (Numbers 27:5).  This nun, a long straight line, is how they stood and how you and I stand now – taking up more space than you might have expected, standing tall, to your full height, beyond your full height even, like a tree reaching up to the sky, solid and strong in your roots and stately in your full stature, rising up tall and proud.  It isn’t enough to just be normal in this situation.  We need to be like the nun, enlarged.  When we have been denied our right to take space, it needs to be shouted out from the rooftops; we need to now be 150% of our size, an outsized stance, an outsized version of ourselves.   Perhaps the nun was originally enlarged as a way to remind scribes that this letter is a nun, not the expected mem of the masculine form.  And that is what we need to do for ourselves, too, to shout it out and say – look at me, I am me, not who you thought or expected me to be, I am woman, hear me roar!  There is a need to be over the top in our fierceness, in our allegiance to ourselves and our assertion of our right to be here and take space.   It is so easily lost and overlooked – we have been so easily lost and overlooked – that when we reclaim the space, it is loud and large, as if in all caps, like that extra large nun. 

Becoming the Agent

Earlier in the Torah, in the case of sotah, the suspected adultress, when the verb amad, “to stand,” was used with reference to a woman, she was not the cause of her own standing, but was made to stand by someone else: vehe’emidah, “ he made her stand” (Numbers 5:16). This is a robbing of agency; we were not even the subject of that verb, not actors in our own story, but now we reclaim our power – vata’amodnah, they themselves stood – and we stand tall in ourselves, acting on our own volition, becoming the agents of our own destiny.  

God’s Yes!

And God stands with us.  Here is the remarkable thing about this story.  In the human world, things are complicated and not always just.  The leadership team was primarily male and probably resistant to this feminine claim for participation and belonging.   But God is on our side.   In no uncertain terms.  God declares ken, “yes!” in response to these women (Numbers 27:6).  No other person in the Torah has God affirmed in this way   But to these women, God shouts it out with enthusiasm.  Yes.  You are right.  Your claim is correct.  Keep going.  You have a right to exist and take up space and be yourself.  I want you to do this. I support your journey.   

Maybe you can sense that divine support for your own journey of self reclamation, as if God is shouting down from the heavens or from beneath you in the earth or from inside you and all around you, God is shouting out – ken! yes!  – to you.  Though the powers that be, both internal and external, may object for a thousand reasons, God wants you to stand strong in yourself, to stand up for yourself.  You are a piece of the divine and when you claim yourself, you partner with God.  Let the full impact of that divine yes reverberate inside you – ken –  a yes to you in your wholeness, to your right to exist, to take up space, to reclaim your full place in this world.  

The Yes Spreads to Others

We are not there yet, not just for ourselves, but for so many others.  The daughters of Tzelafchad argue that to deny them an inheritance is to deny their father a place as well.  When women don’t matter, men don’t really either. When some of us don’t fully matter, then none of us matter because it means that our mattering is conditional, shaky, ungrounded. Our fates are intertwined. The true basis for all of our mattering is not society, but God’s eternal yes, said to each and every individual each day we are alive, the divine yes of – I want you here.  And so our standing tall is never just for ourselves, though it would be enough if it were.   But it never is.   Each flower is meant to bloom proudly.  The more we stand tall in our own right to bloom in the garden, the more we make room for each other flower as well, as if we are nodding our own divine assent to one another as well, like a flower nodding to all the other flowers in a vast field.  Yes to myself and yes to you and to you and to you.  Grow.  Be beautiful.  Be yourself.  

Messianic Process

This is a slow, redemptive messianic process.  Perhaps the enlarged long final nun at the end of the word is also a kind of pointer, an arrow towards the future.  This is the way, it says.   The way forward involves lifting up the nun, the feminine, lifting up those who have been lost, unheard and undervalued – and we all have such parts of ourselves – helping each of us and all of us to stand strong in ourselves and to hear the divine yes that is always calling to us and supporting us on our journey.   

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