Where is Dinah's Voice?

I am going to discuss what is missing: Dinah’s voice. And I am not going to pretend to speak for her or imagine what she would have said or the life she could have led as Anita Diamant so vividly did in the Red Tent (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Red_Tent_(Diamant_novel)). Instead I am going to make us face an incredible discomfort in the reading today: the absent Dinah, whose voice is unheard, whose desires are unknown, and whose own healing is unimportant.

And I want to talk about the echo with Jacob wrestling the man/angel. These are two stories that speak very much to particular groups who are often marginalized and made vulnerable in society. They are ways into the Torah, with messages hidden in plain sight.

I have been fascinated to see how gay men see themselves reflected in the story of Jacob wrestling the angel. It’s a kind of sexual awakening, coming into power story. Wrestling is stylized: a sport even, that involves wit and strength and intimate contact. It isn’t meant to harm. Jacob is changed by the wrestling, a man who has struggled with Gd, demons, etc. and is now different for it – ready to become the father of nations and with yet another blessing.

The story of Dinah is one nearly every woman, every person assigned female at birth, grapples with as well. How being in the position of property, abstraction, is a fact of living in the world for so many of us. Our bodies, desires, and healing are discussed without our consent and without our presence. This is nothing new and nothing old either. It is the way we live in the world. This is why we have such a difficult time approaching this text.

We don’t know what has happened to Dinah. We only know what we are told. Dinah, like many of us, has been an object an abstraction: the keeper of the family virtue with no will of her own. And when we read this, who among us does not rage for her? Does not grieve for her? Does not want to hear her voice?

The verse begins with Dinah’s rape. But who sends word to Jacob that Dinah has been “defiled”, that Shechem raped her? Who knows? Maybe her girlfriends came running back to the camp?

And in this story, Jacob’s sons: the same sons who later plot to kill their own brother and end up selling him into slavery, enact terrible violence against the men. They set them up by making the demand of circumcision, and then they kill them all when they are in too much pain to fight back.

Dinah is nowhere to be found in this.

Oy. The sons of Jacob are truly terrible men.

Finally, as a person born in the US, I cannot read this portion without thinking about how claims of sexual assault were used as excuses for racist violence. There is no way, no how, that I can see in the portion any other reading of the violence, no matter how hard I try. (Note to reader: other people could and did, see below)

So you see, we bring a lot to the table when we read this portion. We bring our own voices, experiences, histories. It’s a lot.

I am truly at a loss about how to discuss this portion and how to come to terms with it. One thing I do know is that I cannot skip this story or shirk my responsibility to discuss it. That would be a further erasure of Dinah, and I am not willing to let her disappear.

QUESTIONS:

Twitter thread of @Klezmerstyle (summarized below)

QUOTE:

[tw: rape and sexual assault]

This week’s parsha includes the Rape of Dinah, which has always stood out to me in Torah as one of the few times where a story isn’t resolved. There is no conclusion. We are left hanging.

To get everyone up to speed, Dinah was daughter of Jacob and sister to his sons, who later became the tribes of Israel. While visiting Shechem, she is taken (assumed to be against her will) and raped, and as revenge for this, the sons of Israel go and murder the men of Shechem

When Jacob finds out what his sons have done, he’s terrified that they’ve made enemies of all their neighbors and begins to scold them, and the sons fire right back at him “well should we have allowed our sister to be raped?”

And… that’s it. There’s no resolution. We never hear who is right and who is wrong.

And we never hear from Dinah.

In my time working in student conduct, I was fortunate enough to only have some marginal contact with Title IX and sexual assault cases, but I did have to act on several occasions as the initial point of report.

Someone would have gotten drunk at a party and was in our office for having gotten busted for underage drinking, and in the middle of what I’d assumed was crying over getting in trouble, they’d start talking about their assault and I had to 100% change gears.

In this story, Jacob doesn’t want to punish sexual assault, because it’s going to upturn the apple cart and make enemies of really important people. His sons are out for blood, and their method is especially cruel...

...they pretend to forgive the men of Shechem and say bygones will be bygones if they all are circumcised, and then a few days later while the men are still recovering from that, they come and murder them all. They see this as justice for what happened to their sister.

But… we never hear from Dinah.

Jacob’s realpolitik is clearly unjust. But are his sons’ actions just? Is there even a way to attain justice after what has happened to Dinah?

Well, we’d need to hear from Dinah to know.

(Read the rest on Twitter)

/END QUOTE

QUOTE

Rabbi Donya Ruttenberg: Dina went out. https://lifeisasacredtext.substack.com/p/towards-a-new-vision-for-dinaShe went out to see the daughters of the land. Was she going to see friends? People she was meeting for the first time? Where was she going? What was she planning do there? Who are these daughters of the land?And then the interruption of her forward motion, abruptly. The action of someone else who saw, who took, who raped. Suddenly Dina is not the actor, the agent, the subject. She is the object, acted upon.This continues throughout the rest of the chapter, throughout her story—we see a story of men, of her brothers plotting and enacting vengeance, but we do not see her agency, her choices, her healing in these subsequent verses.And yet, rabbinic commentators find, of course, ways to blame her for this, for all the reasons that you might imagine men in a patriarchal society do—then, as now.

/END QUOTE

The Red Tent by Anita Diamant

https://anitadiamant.com/books/the-red-tent/

Angels in America by Tony Kushner (Perestroika, Act Five, Scenes 1) In this scene, Prior, who is bedridden with AIDS, dreams of an angel, wrestles with her, and demands a blessing.

(If you have not seen or heard this play, highly recommended)

Bottoming for God by Jay Michaelsonhttps://lilith.org/articles/bottoming-for-god-2/