Would you allow Judah's wife on the bimah? Netivoteha Shalom on Vayeshev

What are the the patriarchal stories all about? In classical terms, how are מעשי אבות סימן לבנים (maasey avot siman l'vanim)? For starters, these stories establish our faith in the one God, who will be known to their descendants as the God of our forefathers. The first act of faith in these stories is Abraham's receiving and obeying God's call to leave his homeland and "go to the land which I will show you". The Torah, which devotes its first 11 chapters to the story of mankind, will focus for the remaining 176 chapters on coming to, leaving and preparing to return to the Land. In fact, 17 out of the remaining 38 chapters of Genesis which comprise the stories of our founding family take place outside of the land and cover the two major segments of Jacob's life.

The promise of the Land lies ahead, in the future; in the present, the Land is hospitable only to a degree. Famines plague the Land, one of which is so severe that it brings the entire family back together again in Egypt, and will result in Israel's longest absence from the Land until the Roman exile during Late Antiquity. The Land is also lacking in suitable spouses for Abraham's descendants: Aram is where Abraham's servant has to go to fetch a wife for Isaac, and Jacob, who goes there seeking refuge, finds his spouses there as well. In both cases, their parents cast aspersions on the indigenous women -- Canaanite, Hivite or simply b'not ha'aretz.

Inexplicably, without any notice, this concern ends with Jacob; the issue is never mentioned again in the Biblical narrative, but when Judah marries the daughter of Shua the Canaanite (38: 2), the traditional commentators try to hold the line. Aside from Ibn Ezra and Rashbam, who insist on the literal meaning, everyone else I've read quotes verses to prove that Canaanite can mean a traveling salesman (of some other ethnicity, of course). Quoting the Talmud (Pesahim 50a), Ramban says: Jacob's sons married Egyptians, Moabites, Ammonites, and descendants of Ishmael and of K'turah; only with Simeon's son Sha'ul the son of the Canaanite is it really so, but the Rabbis taught that his mother was Dinah, who slept with a (real) Canaanite.

Similarly, when it comes to Tamar, who saves the day and keeps Judah's lineage alive, Ramban says:

וכן תמר היתה בת אחת מן הגרים בארץ, לא בת איש כנעני ביחוסו, כי חלילה שיהיה אדוננו דוד ומשיח צדקנו שיגלה לנו במהרה מזרע כנען העבד המקולל ורבותינו אמרו (ב"ר פה י) בתמר שהיתה בתו של שם, והוא כהן לאל עליון:

Tamar was also the daughter of a foreigner, and not of Canaanite descent, for how could our Lord David, our righteous messiah, may he speedily be revealed, derive from the seed of Canaan, the cursed slave? The rabbis claim (Gen. Rabba 85,10) that she was the daughter of Shem, El Elyon's priest.

The aversion to Canaan, based, as Ramban reminds us, on Noah's curse (Gen. 9: 25-27), is a tenet of biblical theology: the Land will be purged of the Canaanites because of their abominable acts, which Israel must not repeat lest they suffer a similar fate (Lev. 18). But the texts are not consistent, indicating a range of attitudes to the indigenous people. Alongside legislation calling for the annihilation of the indigenous Canaanites are historical passages that indicate there was co-existence and intermarriage.

The bigger picture, ideological as opposed to anecdotal, is that these stories indicate a grappling with the definition of the distinction of Israel: is it biological, i.e., one of geneology and descent, or does it have to do with values and behavior. Does Genesis portray the indigenous peoples of Canaan as abominable, and therefore to be kept apart from? In his JPS commentary on Genesis 34, upon which the relevant sections of Etz Hayim are based, מורנו ורבנו Nahum Sarna writes: This narrative exemplifies, once again, a major theme of the patriarchal stories: the sexual depravity of the inhabitants of the land. This has been illustrated by the accounts of Lot and the men of Sodom and by the repeated threats to the matriarchs Sarah and Rebekah. The “Helen of Troy” motif, discussed above (12:11) is here vividly represented.

The Sodomites indeed are seen as evil enough to justify their destruction (chapters 18-19), and retrospectively, to explain why Abraham declined that portion (chapter 13). However, in the episode concerning Sarah, Avimelech claims his innocence (20:4-5), which God acknowledges (20:6). In
chapter 26, when Isaac announces that Rebekah is his sister, she remains with him in his home; Avimelech reproaches Isaac for the immorality that could have resulted from his people thinking that she was available, and both Isaac and Rebekah are protected by royal decree. We are left with the story of Dinah (chapter 34), in which the text shows more sympathy to the people of Shechem than to Jacob's sons; even while it presents the feelings of outrage that her brothers feel, it does not endorse them. Was Dinah raped? Vaya'aneha does not necessarily mean by force. Was she kidnapped by Shechem and liberated by her brothers? It depends on one's point of view, and the text never gives us Dinah's perspective, let alone let her speak (as it does with Shechem, whose love is described more romantically -- vatidbak nafsho b'dinah bat yaakov vaye'ehav et hana'ara vayidaber el lev hana'ara -- than even Jacob's for Rachel); the text does not say that Dinah was kept against her will. If there is sexual depravity here, is it not in how the sons of Jacob bring about the wounding of the sexual organs of the Shechemites which allows them to possess (I'm trying to keep it clean...) the women of Shechem?

The Dinah story presents the option of a merger between the people of Shechem and the family of Jacob, for whose purpose the marriage of Dinah and Shechem would be instrumental; the circumcision of the male population of Shechem would seem to be at least on the way towards fulfilment of the religious requirements of the book of Genesis. Simeon and Levi use the impropriety of Shechem's violation of a taboo to thwart this objective; it's not clear what Jacob thought about the merger, but his initial reaction to the massacre, akhartem oti l'hav'isheni b'yoshev ha'aretz, bak'na'ani uvap'rizi you have made me stink among the indigenous, among the Canaanites and the Perizites [i.e., we are even lower than those scum], which focuses on his reputation among the indigenous people, indicates that he may have been favoring it. Still, when it is all over, Jacob purges his family of their household gods and pledges loyalty to God, as if to symbolically bury the merger option.

Ibn Ezra's comment on the purging of the foreign gods, albeit cryptic, is pregnant with meaning:

הסירו את אלהי הנכר - חלילה חלילה שישכב הנביא עם עובדת אלהי נכר . ופירושו תמצאנו בפרשת וילך משה How could the prophet sleep with a worshipper of foreign gods? Look for the answer in parashat Vayelech. Jacob is sent to Aram to avoid marrying an abominable Canaanite, but he ends up living with and marrying into a family of idolators. The untenable absurdity of the situation is never clearer than after the Dinah story, when Jacob's sons have wreaked that which he had feared from Esau, and his pariah status in the Land will force him now to live on the sword (the blessing that Isaac was able to scrounge up for Esau after Jacob stole the blessing that should have been Esau's). As the ritual of circumcision has become a weapon of deceit and an accessory to murder, pillage and perversion, Jacob realizes that his beloved wife has not only stolen her father's household gods, but worships them instead of his God, who is not answering her prayer for a second son; perhaps we now have now found a deeper meaning for the placing of the story of Dinah between the stealing of Laban's gods and their removal. The tragedy, of course, is that after being purged of these gods, Rachel dies -- God does not protect those that do not truly believe in God (an echo of the story of Haran in the furnace).

Is Ibn Ezra, sure of Jacob's status as prophet but troubled by the religious failings of Jacob's surroundings, not also grappling with the definition of the distinction of Israel?

posted for Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom

Netivoteha Shalom on Vayishlakh

I so looked forward to writing on Vayishlah. What could be more appropriate for today than the message of reconciliation embodied in the embrace of Esau and Jacob (chapter 33)? From its rocky start in Rebecca's womb (chapter 25), their relationship reaches the pits of the desperate sale of the birthright (ibid), Jacob's stealing of the blessing (chapter 27), and Esau's double death wish (ibid, for Isaac as well as for Jacob), but finds a dramatic breakthrough after 20 years of separation; and, towards the end of the parashah (chapter 35) , the brothers reunite to bury their father.

With such a past as Jacob's, it's hard to see him as an ideal role model, but I had high hopes of tracing an unambivalent refinement of his character as he grows older. I've always celebrated his clear stance against the violence wreaked by Simeon and Levi against the people of Shechem (chapter 34). Sadly, this week I came to realize that the text won't yield such a simple reading.

Shall I share my recent journey? I obviously thought I knew the route, but, for additional inspiration, I scanned the weekly email I get from MyJewishLearning to see what others had written. Almost all the vorts were upbeat, as expected, but I found myself flabbergasted reading...the summary of the parashah! I had not learned chapter 35 that way, so I went back and read it with the traditional commentaries, and took a closer look at chapter 34 as well. I had somehow forgotten that after killing all the circumcised males, Jacob's sons looted the city, "taking their sheep, their cattle, their donkeys, whatever was in town and in the field, their possessions, all their children and their women, everything in their homes (34: 28-29)." Could Simeon and Levi have done this on their own?

The summary, renders the beginning of chapter 35 thus:

Later, God said to Jacob, “Go to Beth-el and live there and make an altar to God.” Therein, Jacob had all the captives purify themselves, change their clothes and bring him their foreign gods. Jacob buried these gods under the oak tree...

Seems like Jacob was rather complicit! Well...with a quick phone call (last week, when I was visiting my parents, all I had to do was holler), I was shown that this passage finds a parallel in chapter 17; in both cases, in order to engage the Divine, the entire household undergoes a drastic purge: there, it was the removal of the foreskins, here, it is the removal of the family idols (e.g., what Rachel took from Laban). My hunch is that the description of the looting of Shechem, resembling as it does other parts of the Bible, is an editorial gloss; I believe the reference to the captives in chapter 35 in the traditional commentaries, and therefore in the summary on the website, is inferred by language similar to the rule of the captive woman (eshet y'fat to'ar) of Deut. 21.

However, even if Jacob comes out "clean" in this parashah, by the end of Genesis he has made his peace with the aggression, and even takes ownership of it: on his deathbed, he gives Joseph "an additional portion (shechem), which I took from the Amorites with my sword and my bow (Gen. 48:22)." I am only consoled by the tradition (Rashi, Midrash Rabba) that spiritualized this violence, and reads "mitzvot" for "sword" and "prayer" for "bow" (the latter works better in English than in Hebrew!).

What did Jacob actually bury under the oak tree? Back then, people worshipped idols. And today? There's still a lot to bury.

posted for Rabbi Jeremy Milgrom