Broken Trust: The Aftermath of Trauma (An Exploration of the Lives of Dina, Michal & Tamar)

TRUST & TERROR

Excerpt from 'Beach Music' by Pat Conroy, Page 719

We were like moons that gave off no light, attracted to the same illusory orbit. Shyla could barely recover her self-respect after having slept with Capers and having shared every secret with him for more than a year. It was not that he had lied about the war that most troubled her, it was that he had told her every night about his love for her, his undying admiration for all she stood for, his adoration of her body, and his ardent desire that they spend their entire lives together. That she could not sense such treachery and dissimulation in her own lover disturbed her far more than that he'd been secretly working for the state. It was not any residue of Capers and his bad faith she feared, but she did not know how to ever regain trust in herself and her own judgements again."

Excerpt from 'The Body Keeps the Score,' page 133

Children are also programmed to be fundamentally loyal to their caretakers, even if they are abused by them. Terror increases the need for attachment, even if the source of comfort is also the source of terror. I have never met a child below the age of ten who was tortured at home (and who had broken bones and burned skin to show for it) who, if given the option, would not have chosen to stay with his or her family rather than being placed in a foster home. Of course, clinging to one's abuser is not exclusive to childhood. Hostages have put up bail for their captors, expressed a wish to marry them, or had sexual relations with them; victims of domestic violence often cover up for their abusers.

DINA

Excerpt from transcript of 'Dirty Water,' Season 2, Episode 13 of Ear Hustle

LA [00:12:49.11]: This game is a fast-paced game and it's a serious game. [deep, droning beat] You go to the local high school right now. You got some little girl that's walking around wearing off-brand shoes, wearing off-brand clothing, and they're isolated. Those are the people I preyed upon. I was looking for the little insecure girls that didn't nobody want to be bothered with - maybe have some acne problems, maybe a little overweight. And then, you notice the clothes that she wore. She done wore the same clothes to school twice within that week. Now, you only go to school five days. If you wear the same outfit twice, there's something going on. So, I used to pay attention to that. See, on the spot is where the manipulation starts. What it is is you start spending time with this person. And, say within a couple hours, you've already convinced that person, one - to have sex with you, two - that you gonna change the whole, whole outlook of they life.

Why does she go out? There are several possibilities...

Excerpt from 'The Sexual Abuse of Dina,' published in Tradition Magazine, by Dr. Dan Jacobson, clinical psychologist & coordinator of The Eden Center's hatan training program, pp 147-150

Dina is the youngest of the seven children of Leah, and the only daughter after six sons. She is also the only daughter in a household with twelve boys. In this situation, one of two family dynamics is likely. The family may dote upon the little girl who is the “little princess,” or she can be lost in the shuffle of a busy household. What happened in Jacob’s home? It is possible that in a household with much maternal competition in the building of the family and the nation, the other three mothers might not necessarily fall in love with the sole daughter in the family. And what about Jacob and sons? Although they love her, they are busily occupied with bigger issues than a little girl, who will most likely not take part in the leadership of the great project of inheriting the Land of Canaan.

[...]

Jacob camped near the city of Shekhem, which was also Abraham’s first stop in the Promised Land, and purchased his first plot of land in Canaan. The excitement among the sons surged, while young Dina was alone. She was around the same age as Joseph, who was already interested in spending time with his older brothers. Perhaps, after becoming bored with babysitting Benjamin, Dina sought some female companionship: "And Dina, the daughter of Leah, went out to see the daughters of the

land.”

[...]

Dina had a natural yearning for company. We may also note the choice of the phrase “and Dina went out,” rather than “and Dina went.” The words communicate that Dina felt “imprisoned” inside, and sought exposure to the outside world.

Does taking have to be physical? Let's look at some examples to find out.

EXAMPLE 1

EXAMPLE 2

EXAMPLE 3

Excerpt from 'The Sexual Abuse of Dina' by Dr. Dan Jacobson, Tradition Magazine, pp 150-151

In order to understand the interaction between Shekhem and Dina that ensues during Dina’s excursion, we must better understand the nature of different forms of sexual aggression. I propose that the assault against Dina is not one of violent coercion, but rather one of emotional manipulation. Shekhem is not a rapist, but rather a sexual predator. Dina is not raped, in the conventional sense, but rather sexually abused.

Unlike rape, in sexual abuse the process is generally not violent but rather manipulative. The abuser chooses a child whom he sees as vulnerable, gentle, desiring attention, and poorly protected. He seeks a victim he thinks he can control, and who will not share the abuse with others.

In most cases, the abuser is known to the victim beforehand, and is even someone in whom the victim trusts. This facilitates the engineering of the abuse process.

The psychological devastation of sexual abuse is different from rape, but can be just as traumatic and sometimes even more so. Even when the victim does not enjoy the actual sexual intercourse, often the attention and touch that surrounds it is pleasant. On this basis, the abuser deludes the victim, and sometimes himself, that a relationship exists rather than victimization. This confusing dynamic will almost inevitably cause serious psychological damage. Victims can suffer from shame, guilt, depression, anxiety, and sometimes suicidality.

When Shechem speaks to Dina tenderly, does she listen? Let's look at some other examples.

EXAMPLE 1

EXAMPLE 2

Excerpt from 'The Sexual Abuse of Dina' by Dr. Dan Jacobson, Tradition Magazine, pp 152-154

This opens the possibility that Shekhem’s taking of Dina was also done through persuasion rather than coercion. A comparison of the Dina story to the story of Tamar’s rape by her half-brother Amnon is instructive. Despite the great similarities, there are also a number of critical differences in the description of the events: “And she approached him to eat. And he grabbed her and said to her, come lie with me my sister” (II Samuel 13:11)

The description of the taking of Tamar is more aggressive. Amnon does not “take” Tamar, but rather “grabs her.”

In addition, unlike the story of Dina, here we see clear resistance on the part of Tamar: “And she said to him, no my brother do not rape me—because this is not done in Israel. Do not do this abominable act” (13:12). Tamar verbally resists in order to protect her body because she is not strong enough to defend herself physically.

The difference between the stories is more striking in the description of the aftermath of the sexual violation. Shekhem continues to desire Dina.

[...]

These descriptions do not exonerate Shekhem from responsibility; rather, they recast his crime as that of sexual predation instead of rape. While the psychology of the abuser is beyond the scope of this essay, there are several possible explanations of Shekhem’s stance. Some abusers are sociopaths without a sense of empathy. The victim is simply an object to be utilized. Alternatively, the abuser can be a person who exercises intense rationalization, convincing himself that he is the object of the victim’s desire.

Whatever the psychological basis of Shekhem’s evil, he desired Dina, and failed to recognize the psychological damage he had wrought upon her. Unlike Amnon, he did not carry guilt that caused him to project disgust onto his victim.

Does Dina WANT to stay with Shechem?

Excerpt from 'The Body Keeps the Score,' page 128

[Kathy's] self-criticism escalated to the point that, only a few minutes later, she was taking responsibility for her sexual abuse. "I brought it on myself: I was seven years old and I loved my daddy. I wanted him to love me, and I did what he wanted me to do. It was my own fault." When I intervened to reassure her, saying, "Come on, you were just a little girl- it was your father's responsibility to maintain the boundaries," Kathy turned toward me. "You know, Bessel," she said, "I know how important it is for you to be a good therapist, so when you make stupid comments like that I usually thank you profusely. After all, I am an incest survivor- I was trained to take care of the needs of grown-up, insecure men. But after two years I trust you enough to tell you that those comments make me feel terrible. Yes, it's true; I instinctively blame myself for everything bad that happens to the people around me. I know that isn't rational, and I feel really dumb for feeling this way, but I do. When you try to talk me into being more reasonable I only feel even more lonely and isolated- and it confirms the feeling that nobody in the whole world will ever understand what it feels like to be me."

I genuinely thanked her for the feedback, and I've tried ever since not to tell my patients that they should not feel the way they do. Kathy taught me that my responsibility goes much deeper: I have to help them reconstruct their inner map of the world.

Did Dina want to give up this child? We see her brothers making decisions, Jacob making decisions...where is Dina's voice?

Excerpt from 'The Body Keeps the Score,' pages 231-232

Traumatic events are almost impossible to put into words.

[...]

In 'Seven Pillars of Wisdom' T. E. Lawrence wrote of his war experiences, "We. learned that there were pangs too sharp, griefs too deep, ecstasies too high for our finite selves to register. When emotion reached this pitch the mind choked; and memory went white till the circumstances were humdrum once more." While trauma keeps us dumbfounded, the path out of it is paved with words, carefully assembled, piece by piece, until the whole story can be revealed.

[...]

Silence about trauma also leads to death- the death of the soul. Silence reinforces the godforsaken isolation of trauma. Being able to say aloud to another human being, "I was raped," or "I was battered by my husband" or "My parents called it discipline, but it was abuse" or "I'm not making it since I got back from Iraq," is a sign that healing can begin.

We may think we can control our grief, our terror or our shame by remaining silent, but naming offers the possibility of a different kind of control.

Excerpt from 'Dina: Yaakov's Tragic Daughter or Iyov's Wicked Wife? Chazal's Reaction to Dina's Rape' by Esther Shulkes

Having thus established a word-link which offers either a vehicle or clue regarding a suggested link in Tanakh, the Gemara has now bolstered its claim that this is a strong interpretation. However, while we have discovered the roots of this idea, we have yet to establish its goal or purpose. Indeed, at first glance this is rather an angering equation. Because the word vile was used to describe what happened to Dina, she should be plugged in to play the part of a vile woman?!

Simply put, Chazal are not merely playing a word recognition game, nor marrying Dina off to a probably imaginary person, and certainly not chas veshalom implying that Dina had turned vile, upon emerging from the Shchem episode. Rather, Chazal are tacitly demonstrating their reaction to the Dina story. The point is not that this conversation is a hint that Dina was married to Iyov. Actually, this lone conversation between Iyov and his wife is the crux of the matter, the very reason Chazal ‘marry Dina off’ to Iyov in the first place. Chazal are purposefully inserting her into this crucial conversation between Iyov and his wife, because Iyov is the ultimate hero of the story in which Bad Things Happen to Good People. By saying the wife talking with him is Dina, Chazal are giving Dina a chance to vent as they feel a person in her place naturally should. Dina, as the wife of Iyov, screams out: ‘curse G-d!’ And then Chazal offer Dina an answer: Iyov’s response. ‘Are we to accept the good from G-d and not the bad?’ Indeed, this implied rabbinic take on how to deal with such horror is not far off from Yaakov’s reaction. He stayed silent. In other words, he accepted the good with the bad. And, while Iyov’s response is not emotionally satisfying, it is comforting to discover that Chazal recognized Dina’s plight, felt her pain and equated it with the ultimate story of unmerited loss, testing and acceptance.

Takeaways:

• The rape of Dina can be understood as the seduction, manipulation and possibly even sexual abuse of Dina
• It exposes issues that apply today (in terms of vulnerable children)
• The lack of Dina's voice could be deliberate (an outcome of trauma and her lack of control over her life)
• Dina has her trust broken by Shechem, and it is possible this is compounded by the decisions made by her brothers (in terms of rescuing her) and her father (who sends Osnat away)
• The line she is given in context of her marriage (via the rabbinic interpretation) to Job speaks volumes

MICHAL

Excerpt from Poetics and Interpretation of Biblical Narrative by Adele Berlin

Michal was the first, and in some ways the most interesting, of David's wives. Robert Alter (116-127) has given a vivid description of this character and the personal tragedy surrounding her, and it need not be repeated here. It is clear that she is a full-fledged character with opinions and emotions of her own. But beyond this, there is an aspect of Michal's characterization that emerges when it is compared with Jonathan's. This comparison cries out to be made; both Michal and Jonathan are the children of Saul who show more love and loyalty to their father's competitor than to their father. The biblical author further invites the comparison by juxtaposing their stories in 1 Sam 18-20. The results are surprising; the characteristics normally associated with males are attached to Michal, and those usually perceived as feminine are linked with Jonathan.

The first of Michal's unfeminine traits is found in the notice that she loved David and made it known. It is recorded twice (1 Sam 18:20, 28), and is the only time in the Bible that a woman seems to have chosen a husband instead of the usual pattern of a husband choosing a wife. (Of course, the marriage could only take place because father Saul approved, for his own ulterior motives.) David, on his part, married Michal not for love but because 'it pleased David well to be the king's son-in-law' (18:26). His relationship to her is always colored by practical considerations. He apparently did not (or could not) object when she was married to someone else during his absence (I Sam 25:44), and his later demand for her return was motivated by political reasons (2 Sam 3:13-15). In this last incident Michal's feelings are not recorded, but her second husband appears somewhat effeminate as he tags along after her crying until Abner commands him to go back home.

The feelings of love and tenderness that David might have expected to have for Michal are all reserved for Jonathan. Jonathan, too, like his sister, made known his warm feelings for David (1 Sam 18:1, 19:1, 20:17), but in his case they were reciprocated. The parting of the friends in the field describes how 'they kissed one another and wept upon each other until David exceeded' (20:41). At their final parting David laments 'I am distressed over you, my brother, Jonathan; you have been very pleasing to me- more wonderful was your love to me than the love of women.' (2 Sam 1:26).

David, then, seems to have related to Michal as to a man and to Jonathan as to a woman. It is not a question of sexual perversion here, but a subtle suggestion that this reflects something of the essence of these two characters. Michal is the aggressive and physical one. She saves David by physically lowering him out of a window, and arranging the bed so as to appear that he is in it. She lies to the messengers, telling them that David is sick in bed, and then after the ruse is discovered and Saul himself questions her, she brazenly fabricates the story that David threatened to kill her if she did not aid in his escape (1 Sam 19:12-17). Jonathan, too, saves the life of his friend, but it is never by physical means; it is through words (talking Saul out of killing him in 1 Sam 19:4-5), and words with a coded meaning (the episode of the arrows in 1 Sam 20:20 ff.). Jonathan's most physical action is the shooting of the arrows for the prearranged signal- hardly a show of strength. The 'little white lie' that he told to his father to explain David's absence from the new moon feast (20:28-29) had actually been concocted by David himself (20:6). Jonathan is just the messenger boy. His words and deeds are certainly much less daring than Michal's.

The last bit of information we have about Michal is that she never bore a child (2 Sam 6:23). Not only is this the culmination of the disappointment in her life, and a hint that the husband who never loved her now stopped having marital relations with her, but, in light of the foregoing discussion, it suggests that Michal never filled a female role, or at least the role that the Bible views as the primary female role. Significant, too, may be the fact that Michal, unlike many women in biblical narrative, is never described as beautiful. Far from being a typical woman, Michal has been cast in a most unfeminine role.

-pages 24-25

Excerpt from 'The Four Horsemen: Criticism, Contempt, Defensiveness and Stonewalling' from The Gottman Institute

The second horseman is contempt. When we communicate in this state, we are truly mean—we treat others with disrespect, mock them with sarcasm, ridicule, call them names, and mimic or use body language such as eye-rolling or scoffing. The target of contempt is made to feel despised and worthless.

Contempt goes far beyond criticism. While criticism attacks your partner’s character, contempt assumes a position of moral superiority over them:

“You’re ‘tired?’ Cry me a river. I’ve been with the kids all day, running around like mad to keep this house going and all you do when you come home from work is flop down on that sofa like a child and play those idiotic video games. I don’t have time to deal with another kid. Could you be any more pathetic?”

Research even shows that couples that are contemptuous of each other are more likely to suffer from infectious illness (colds, the flu, etc.) than others due to weakened immune systems! Contempt is fueled by long-simmering negative thoughts about the partner—which come to a head when the perpetrator attacks the accused from a position of relative superiority.

Most importantly, contempt is the single greatest predictor of divorce. It must be eliminated.

TAMAR

Excerpt from 'The Body Keeps the Score' by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D., pp. 89-90

When our senses become muffled, we no longer feel fully alive. In an article called "What is an Emotion?" (1884), William James, the father of American psychology, reported a striking case of "sensory insensibility" in a woman he interviewed: "I have...no human sensations," she told him. "[I am] surrounded by all that can render life happy and agreeable, still to me the faculty of enjoyment and of feeling is wanting...Each of my senses, each part of my proper self, is as it were separated from me and can no longer afford me any feeling; this impossibility seems to depend upon a void which I feel in the front of my head, and to be due to the diminution of the sensibility over the whole surface of my body, for it seems to me that I never actually reach the objects which I touch. All this would be a small matter enough, but for its frightful result, which is that of the impossibility of any other kind of feeling and of any sort of enjoyment, although I experience a need and desire of them that render my life an incomprehensible torture."

This response to trauma raises an important question: How can traumatized people learn to integrate ordinary sensory experiences so that they can live with the natural flow of feeling and feel secure and complete in their bodies?

Excerpt from 'The Body Keeps the Score' by Bessel Van Der Kolk, M.D, pp. 96-97

[T]raumatized people chronically feel unsafe inside their bodies: The past is alive in the form of gnawing interior discomfort. Their bodies are constantly bombarded by visceral warning signs, and in an attempt to control these processes, they often become expert at ignoring their gut feelings and in numbing awareness of what is played out inside. They learn to hide from their selves.

TAKEAWAYS:

-Rape, sexual abuse and domestic violence are all real problems within the Jewish community.

-All three of these women put their trust in the wrong person.

-All three of these women have caregivers (their fathers in particular) who are also not optimal.

-The ruptures and losses these women face are instructive and meaningful for us today.

-The fact that these women existed and that their stories are still told and studied today may be comforting for some.

-It is important for us to understand how deeply trauma can impact others and what we can do to help create a better world.