“We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness,” says the United States Declaration of Independence. Today, in the year 2012, Baruch Hashem, women’s rights have been continually advancing due to hard work and immense effort from a very small percentage of the population. Looking back in American history, women only received some rights to own land about 150 years ago. When we’re talking about America, how is it that the country that is giving everyone these rights only figured out that women deserve an increasingly more amount of rights 150 to 200 years ago?
In this week’s Parasha, Parashat Pinchas, five daughters, whose father passed a holy death never having any sons, come to Moshe Rabeinu, pleading and asking for rights to his land. The daughters didn’t want the land to be “recycled back into the system,” or the name of his father to be lost forever. Moshe Rabeinu takes this new dilemma to Hashem, this was something that has never come up before, and he had no idea how to handle it. Hashem decrees that not only are the daughters right and they deserve the rights to the land, but all women deserve the rights to their deceased spouses land, if there were no sons.
What made these daughters worthy of changing the divine word forever, either way, somehow Hashem would have made this new found law a reality. The five daughters saw something they really wanted. They realized concept of women’s equal rights were how unheard of at the time, they fought for what they thought was right. When we think about it, there were no women’s rights in America, how would it have been for women over 2500 hundred years ago? these women deserve to be put on a pedestal. We have a holy book, the Torah; all of human history is in it. If we just open our eyes for at least one hour a day and see what the Torah is trying to teach us we might have been able to realize our fault in American history a long time ago, and have the merit to be great like the five daughters.
