When We See Again: In My Daughter’s Name, In My Grandfather’s Memory: Pinchas

לעילוי נשמת מאיר זאב בו מנחם מנדדל הכהן

If you've been in Israel lately—or visited in recent months—you’ll have noticed them: hundreds of stickers plastered across train stations, hiking trails, coffee trucks, and lampposts. Faces of young soldiers—smiling, frozen in time—stare back at you with a few stark words meant to capture an entire life, brutally cut short in a war that refuses to end.

Their names are everywhere, because we understand something deeply human: to remember someone’s name is to see them. When someone knows our name, we feel valued. When they forget, we feel unseen.

---

It’s no wonder, then, that the Torah gives such significance to names and lineages. Entire chapters are dedicated to lists of ancestors, tribes, individuals. Names reflect a society that sees and honours its members. Conversely, the erasure of names—like in the story of the Tower of Babel or the second chapter of Shemot (Exodus), where anonymity reigns—is a symptom of societal breakdown.

The absence of names is not mere omission; it is the deletion of identity, of dignity. It can emerge from two opposite but parallel dysfunctions: either a totalitarian flattening of the individual in service of the collective, or an extreme individualism so self-referential that it can no longer see beyond its own categories.

In his book How to Know a Person, David Brooks describes this phenomenon as “unseeing.” To be moral, he argues, is to actively pay attention to the other—to become a person who sees. His words echo those of dialogical philosophers like Levinas and Buber, who taught that the moral life is born when we acknowledge the presence—and thus the needs—of another.

Jewish tradition is clear: destruction begins when we fail to see. It is no coincidence that during the period of mourning the destruction of the Temple we read about the story of the daughters of Zelofchad. Let's start with understanding the unravelling and then we will be able to fully appreciate the acts that string it back together.

The rabbis famously attribute the destruction of the Second Temple to sinat chinam—baseless hatred. In Brooks’ terms, the sin of unseeing.

The Talmudic story of Kamtza and Bar Kamtza, often cited as the symbolic beginning of our national destruction, illustrates this. A host invites his friend Kamtza to a feast, but Bar Kamtza—his enemy—is mistakenly invited instead. Despite Bar Kamtza’s humiliation and pleas to stay, even offering to pay for the meal, he is thrown out. The sages present say nothing. Names are confused, dignity is denied, and the leaders watch in silence. No one 'sees'. No one speaks. And so, the unraveling begins.

If unseeing led to destruction, then perhaps the first step toward redemption is learning to see again. And who better to learn from than two groups of women—one at the beginning of our national journey, and one at the end?

---

In Shemot, we meet the women of the Exodus—powerful agents of change who are, ironically, nameless. Yet in their anonymity, they see with radical clarity. The root vayar (to see) repeats throughout their stories: the midwives who refuse Pharaoh’s orders, Yocheved who hides her son, Miriam who watches over him, Bat Paraoh who notices the baby in the reeds. In a society that denies identity, these women reintroduce it—ultimately naming the child Moshe. In that act, they not only birth a redeemer, but they restore the sanctity of naming itself: the uniqueness of each soul created in God’s image.

This week’s parsha, Pinchas, closes the narrative loop. The daughters of Zelophehad—Machla, Noa, Hogla, Milcah, and Tirzah—step forward. This time, they are named, and their names are repeated. It’s as if the Torah is saying: those anonymous righteous women whose acts bought the start of redemption, these daughters whose acts deal it, can now be name. They carry in their names the names of all those whose names were erased throughout our national history. Redemption has a name.

And what is their request? Not power, not honour, but to preserve the name of their father. “Why should our father’s name be lost just because he had no sons?” they ask. They want a portion in the land—not for themselves, but as an act of love and loyalty to someone no longer living. Their request is humble, but history-altering.

Like today’s stickers on lampposts and trail markers, the daughters of Zelophehad seek to keep a name alive. And in doing so, they bring not only a name back into being—but an entire dimension of Torah that we call the Oral law. They approach with a rare balance of gentleness and strength: vatikravna...vata’amodna—they draw near, yet stand firm.

As Glendon Doyle might say: “strong opinions loosely held.” They possess the ability to challenge the law respectfully, to balance reverence and autonomy, to teach a nation what moral courage looks like when rooted in legacy, in vision, and in love.

---

This Shabbat also marks the 33rd yahrzeit of my grandfather, Zeev Meir Racker z”l. Like Zelophehad, he fought for the land of Israel. At age 21, having survived the Holocaust and lost his entire family, he journeyed alone by boat to Palestine and fought in the War of Independence. He married my grandmother, a Kindertransport child, and together they built a life of faith and family in London. They raised three daughters, who in turn raised vibrant Jewish families—many of us now living, raising children, and even fighting in the very land he once fought for.

None of his descendants carry his surname. But we, his grandchildren and great-grandchildren, proudly call ourselves the 'Racker clan'. We carry his name—not on official documents, but in our stories, our convictions, our dreams.

We names our second daughter Noa Meira—after Noa, one of the daughters of Zelophehad, and my grandfather, Ze’ev Meir. When she was born, 18 years ago, we prayed that she would embody the same qualities as her biblical and familial namesakes: integrity, purpose, and love. That she would walk in the path of her great-grandfather and the daughters of Zelophehad—with a fierce devotion to her land, a will of iron tempered by deep empathy. That she would be, in the words of modern wisdom, someone with strong opinions, held loosely enough to keep truly seeing the other. And, thank God, she has.

This Shabbat, as I light a candle for my grandfather, I will think of those five women standing before Moshe, refusing silence and yet engaging in acts of radical seeing. I will think of the three daughters he raised, and the four I am raising. I will think of the soldiers whose names now adorn our cities, and the families searching for meaning in their absence.

I will remember that the destruction of the Temple came from not seeing, and that redemption begins when we truly see one another.

Here in Israel, people carry invisible scars. Behind every smile, there are stories we don’t know, pain we cannot see. And so I will try—again and again—to look deeper, to see more clearly, to honour names and lives not just with memory, but with presence.

Because to see is to redeem.