Vayishlach

The JC- Portion of the week

8 December 2006

“Now Dinah, the daughter whom Leah had borne to Jacob, went out to visit the daughters of the land” (Genesis 34: 1)

Dinah is one of the saddest figures in the Torah – an innocent girl who is raped and imprisoned by Shechem, a local noble’s son, and whose brothers take a terrible vengeance on her abductor, massacring him and all the men of his town.

She is always the victim of others; she never has an opportunity to express her own wishes, even though her life is shattered by other people’s violent desires. We don’t even know what happened to her, except for a note that she descended to Egypt with the rest of Jacob’s family.

Midrashic expansions of Dinah’s story focus on this unhappy passivity in her life. One notes that, even before her birth, her mother Leah prayed for her baby’s sex to be changed from male to female, since she wanted her sister Rachel to have the privilege of bearing two of Jacob’s sons out of the allotted total of twelve.

Particularly poignant are three midrashic hypotheses about her fate. One suggests that her brother Simeon married her in order to “hide her shame;” the second asserts she married Job, another victim of injustice, whose wife challenges him to “curse God and die” rather than continue to suffer. Are the rabbis imagining what Dinah might have said, had she been allowed to speak?

The last midrashic tradition sees a happier end to Dinah’s story, and a redressing of that first prenatal injustice: her daughter by Shechem, Asenath, is cast out of Jacob’s house when Dinah’s brothers want to kill her. The angel Gabriel takes Asenath to Egypt, where she is brought up by the wife of Potiphar, the man who bought Joseph; she ultimately marries Joseph (Genesis 41: 45) and bears him Ephraim and Manasseh.

Thus Dinah, who “should” have been one of Jacob’s sons and the ancestor of a tribe, sees her two grandsons, adopted by Jacob as his own sons, become two tribal ancestors. If only all victims of violence could find such healing.