Shabbat Shalom. This
week’s Torah portion is Parashat Vayishlach. In it, Jacob and Esau are
reunited. The night before, Jacob wrestles with an angel, earns a blessing and
a new name – Israel – and in the morning, his reunion with Esau is better than
he could have possibly expected. The brothers embrace and make up for their
past discrepancies, their families are introduced to one another, and then they
part ways again. Esau takes his family back to Edom, and Jacob takes his to
Shechem. In Shechem, the prince of the city, who is also named Shechem, comes
upon Dinah and forces himself onto her. After that, we never hear from or about
Dinah again. Her brothers avenge her by massacring the entire city, but we
don’t know where she is when this is happening or what happens next for her.
You may recall
that a few weeks ago, I came back from my weekend in Philadelphia with some new
insights into how internalized antisemitism has simultaneously fed and served
to hide toxic masculinity in the Jewish community, and how we often overlook
violence within our communities in favor of promoting the narrative of “The
Nice Jewish Boy.” Since then, I have seen many friends speak publicly about
their own assaults at the hands of Jewish men, including one who said she was prompted
to start talking about this issue publicly specifically because of the
conversation I had brought up while I was staying with her in Philly, as I was
trying to process the insights I was just beginning to develop on this topic.
Now, Shechem
wasn’t Jewish, but he was willing to be. The Torah tells us that after he raped
Dinah, his soul cleaved to her and he loved her deeply. He speaks to her heart,
and asks her family for her hand in proper marriage, promising an extravagant
bride-price. Her brothers, Simeon and Levi, demand that Shechem, both the
prince and the whole city, become a part of their family’s covenant with God
before they can allow their sister to join their clans. So Shechem, the prince
along with all the men of the city, get themselves circumcised, and are
slaughtered in their healing beds. Bibllical scholar Yael Shemesh, in her paper
“Rape is Rape is Rape: The Story of Dinah and Shechem (Genesis 34),” discusses
modern day research on sexual violence and applies it to the Torah text. She
says that “injuring another person may violate the moral code of fairness and
lead to self-concept distress” and that often times perpetuators of abuse or
sexual violence will do mental gymnastics to convince themselves they haven’t
really done anything wrong and/or that their actions were justified. In the
case of Shechem, Shemesh points out that the Torah only speaks of his love to
her, his whispering sweet nothings to her, after he has lain with her. He is
now trying to make it all right and legal and family-approved, but that doesn’t
mean the initial act, described in a sequence of verbs before these more fully
described actions that followed, wasn’t an act of violence.
I read The Red
Tent as an adolescent and was greatly influenced by it. It’s a very
well-written novel by Anita Diament, who is an important voice in modern
Progressive Judaism. However, as I’ve grown as a person, as a Jewishly-educated
woman, and as a feminist, I can no longer accept her midrash as a fair and
realistic reading of the text, and I can no longer find feminist empowerment in
this romantic re-writing that imagines Dinah loved Shechem back, consented, and
ran away from her family after they murdered him. Alice A. Keefe, another
feminist Biblical scholar, writes in her paper “Rapes of Women/Wars of Men,”
that those who use Dinah’s silence as consent “reveal only their participation
in the old masculine fantasy that women enjoy rape.” I’m uncomfortable saying
that Diament is actively participating in such a grotesque thing, so I have
started re-reading The Red Tent to more fully assess her midrash with
adult eyes. Whether or not Diament is perpetuating rape apologia, though,
Keefe’s statement that it is dangerous to read consent into Dinah’s silence
rings true. The same friend that hosted me in Philadelpia and was willing to
talk about her personal experiences with sexual assault within the Jewish
community, invoked the famous quote by author Zora Neale Hurston: "If you
are silent about your pain, they will kill you and say you enjoyed it."
If we read
complacency into Dinah’s silence, we are doing the same thing to her. We are
silencing all the women who had faced this kind of violence and subsequent
disbelief. We are perpetuating rape apologia and continue to make it difficult
for women to report, for prosecutors to effectively press charges, for justice
to be found. And we are better than that. We, as a Jewish community can do
better, and I believe that we will only affect change by talking more openly
about this problem. We must be willing to confront violence within our sacred
texts and within our beloved Jewish community. It can be so uncomfortable and
difficult, but I believe it is the only way to make our communities safer for
survivors and potential future victims. May there come a time when there is
simply no more sexual violence, and may it start with us. Amen and Shabbat
Shalom.
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