TORAH PORTION: VAYISHLACH

Parshat Vayishlach

10 December 2022 / 16 Kislev 5783

Torah: Genesis 32:4-36:43 Triennial: 32:4-33:20

Haftarah: Obadiah 1:1-21

In this week's Torah Sparks, you'll find a D'var Torah on the Parashah by Bex Stern-Rosenblatt called "Going Out with Dina", Vered Hollander-Goldfarb poses questions in her D'var Haftarah titled "You Too, Esau?!", and Joshua Kulp offers a piece called "The First Tombstone".

Going Out with Dina

Bex Stern-Rosenblatt

Parashah

We read this week of the disappearance of Dinah. This story exposes the very worst in us as humans - our capacity for rape, murder, and deceit. The story begins, “And she went out, Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had born to Jacob, to look at the daughters of the land.” After this first verse, Dinah is taken, misused sexually, and held in the house of her abuser until her brothers murder her abuser, his family, and his town. We read, “they took Dinah from the house of Shechem and they went out.” Later, they explain to their father that they had to do this lest their sister be made to be like a whore. With that, Dinah disappears from the story. She never speaks. Her life, which started so boldly, seems to end with less than a whimper. 

We could read the story as a morality tale - a precursor to Little Red Riding Hood. They both go out, stray from the path, consort with strangers, are physically abused by a stranger, and eventually saved through a violent act. The moral, read like this, is not to leave the house. Be wary of strangers. The world is dangerous and most paths lead to mixed dancing. 

Bereshit Rabbah reads Dinah in this way. The subsequent bad actions of Jacob’s family are explained as necessary consequences of Dinah’s poor decision. Dinah’s poor decision is blamed on her mother, Leah. Bereshit Rabbah explains that the saying, “like mother, like daughter,” comes from this story. In Genesis 30, Leah “went out” to tell Jacob that he had to sleep with her because she had bought him for the night with her son’s mandrakes. Going out leads to sexual encounter, but in Leah’s case, it is desired and leads to a divinely sanctioned child. But Bereshit Rabbah, uncomfortable with Leah’s behavior, reads that she “went out” dressed as a whore, just as her daughter, Dinah, will later “go out” and be made “like a whore.” 

One problem with this reading, this blaming of Dinah, is just how often characters “go out” in the Tanakh. Looking at only female characters, we see a pattern of female characters going out confidently, taking advantage of men’s discomfort with female leadership and sexuality in order to get what they want. As discussed, we have Leah buying Jacob for the night. In the Book of Judges, Yael goes out twice - first to trick the enemy general, Sisera, into coming into her tent to kill him, and then to show the Israelite general what she had done. Michal, a passed-over wife of David, goes out to mock him for exposing himself to female servants. The Shunamite woman, described as a woman of great stature, goes out to cry out against the king. Last, Naomi goes out of Moab with Ruth and Orpah after her men have died and before she helps Ruth to use her sexuality to bring in a new man. 

Can we read Dinah like this? She does go out confidently and she does have a sexual encounter. But unlike these other women, we lose her perspective. We know she is abused sexually. We do not know what her thoughts are about any of this. We never hear her speak. 

The twentieth century poet, Shaul Tchernichovsky, lends a voice to Dinah. He imagines her speaking on her deathbed, giving blessings to her eleven brothers, using the same language and style that Jacob does on his deathbed. But Dinah inverts Jacob’s blessings. She praises the two brothers who avenged her, saying, as translated by Athalya Brenner, “Blessed be their anger, for it was fierce. And their wrath, for it is hard.” 

In this reimagining, Dinah stands in place of Jacob. She is the one with the power to transmit God’s blessing to the next generation. Her going out is no longer something to be condemned, but rather something that confers power and status. Dinah goes out just as Israel will go out during the exodus, the going of Egypt. It is a reading supported by the powerful goings out of other biblical women. Sometimes, you have to leave the house. 

HAFTARA

You Too, Esau?!

Vered Hollander-Goldfarb

Haftarah

The book of Bereshit opens with Cain and Abel, brothers whose relationship is murderous. It ends with Joseph and his brothers who learn to live together. Halfway through the book of Bereshit, the place of Jacob and Esau on this spectrum is ambiguous.

In the Haftarah, however, Ovadia is very clear, presenting the historic story as a zero -sum game. Esau-Edom aided in the destruction of Jacob-Israel. The redemption of Jacob will coincide with the complete destruction of Esau.

Harmonious coexistence with the Edomites (living in southern Jordan of today) was rarely a reality. Things seem to have reached a breaking point during the destruction of Jerusalem by the Babylonians in the 6th century BCE.. Ovadia, who gives no indication of when he lived, seems to describe some of the atrocities of the Edomites at that time. 

These crimes are the reason for the complete destruction that Ovadia prophesies will befall the Edomites. He describes the Edomites’ treatment of “your brother Jacob” (v.10): 

11 On the day that you stood by the side—

On the day that strangers carried captive his forces,

When foreigners entered his gates, and for Jerusalem cast lots—

Even you were as one of them….

14 You should not have stood at the crossroads to cut off his refugees;

And you should not have delivered [to the enemy] his remnants on the day of distress.

A harsh picture emerges of Edom, the local brother, who eagerly aids the invading foreign power. While Edomites might have been eager for the spoils of war, they had no reason to harm the fleeing refugees and turn them over to the enemy. R. Joseph Kara stresses the choice made by the Edomites: the conquering enemy did not know the local roads, but the local Edomites did.  Instead of a humane gesture towards refugees escaping the destroyed city, the Edomites displayed morally decrepit behavior, reminiscent of Amalek that trailed the weak ones in the back. As it turns out in this parashah, Amalek is a grandson of Esau (Gen. 36:12.) 

The struggle with the Edomites on the eve of destruction is echoed in extra-biblical sources as well. Among the ostraca found at Arad, a southern fortress of the kingdom of Judah, J. Aharoni discovered a letter (#24) urging Eliashiv (the commander?) to send men to Ramat Negev “lest Edom should come there”. 

And apparently Edom came, and conquered and destroyed. Ovadia gives explicit examples of the evils of Edom, prophesying future doom. Jeremiah, who lived through the destruction of Jerusalem, did the same. In Psalms 137, on the rivers of Babylon, the exiled Jews called for revenge against the Edomites, as did the lamenter in Eicha (4:21-22). The choice of the book of Ovadia as the haftarah removed any ambiguity from the relationship of these two nations in the hindsight of history: “The house of Jacob shall be a fire… and the house of Esau shall be straw…”(v.18). The conflagration was inevitable. 

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The First Tombstone

Joshua Kulp

The Halakah in the Parashah

At 52 years old, I, unfortunately, attend a lot more funerals than I used to. I am at the age when many of my friends’ parents are passing away, and even more sadly, my peers are at the age when death is more present. It’s sad, but that is the nature of the world. We’ve known this since parashat Bereshit–death is a part of life. We all know that we are  here in this world only for a relatively short time, and while none of us know how long that will be, we know our time will come. 

One of the most human of impulses is to hope that after our death, we will be remembered. Perhaps more than death itself, we fear that we did not do enough in this world for the living to remember us. And this translates, of course, into a mandate upon the living–we are directed to remember our family and loved ones when they die. In our parashah, we encounter the most concrete way of doing so when Jacob erects the first tombstone, matzevah, (at least in Jewish history) upon the death of his wife, Rachel (Genesis 35:20). While Abraham bought a cave in which to bury his wife, and in which he, Isaac and Jacob will later be buried (and according to tradition, Leah and Rebekah), these stories do not tell of any tombstone. Only Rachel, not buried in the family cave, gets a tombstone. 

Truth be told, Jacob’s matzevah is almost certainly not a tombstone such as we are familiar with today. Jacob erected a few other matzevot (some sort of stone memorial) but these are to remember important events, particularly meetings with God (see Genesis 28:18, 22; 31:13, 45; 35:14). And nowhere else in the Torah do we read of a matzevah being erected for the dead. Nor is the practice found explicitly in the Talmud. Graves are marked so that priests can avoid being defiled (see Mishnah Maaser Sheni 5:1) but the practice of erecting a tombstone is not found. The Bible mentions noting graves (see II Kings 23:17; Ezekiel 39:15). Mishnah Shekalim 2:5 mentions building a “nefesh” over a grave, where the word probably means monument. But tombstones as we know them do not yet exist. However, by the medieval period we begin to find rabbis discussing laws related to stones, which they call matzevot, after the word used in our parashah, over people’s graves. Rabbis ask halakhic questions about these stones, wanting to know if one can sit on such stones (it's debated), sell or use them for other purposes (not allowed). 

In the 13-14th century R. Asher is asked whether or not the family of the deceased is required to make a stone for the grave and he answers in the affirmative. The Rashba, writing at a similar time, seems to believe that this is dependent on custom. He writes that if a wife dies and it is the custom of the family to place a stone on the graveyard, then the husband must erect one for his wife. Today, since it is the universal custom to mark graves with stones, the family is financially responsible to ensure that this is done. 

The custom to write the name and the date of death on the tombstone seems to be of more recent origin. According to historians, engraved tombstones became more popular in the 1600’s and today are, of course, common in all cemeteries. While it is a near universal Jewish custom to write something on the stone, the Jews in Hebron, at least until 1929, maintained the ancient custom to leave the gravestone blank. Traditionally, only the Hebrew date is written, somewhat ironic considering the custom was almost certainly borrowed from the Christians. 

Finally, due to the late origins of this practice, there developed varying customs as to when to erect this engraved tombstone. Some held that at least a rudimentary stone should be put up immediately after the shivah. In Israel the practice is for the stone to be put up by the end of shloshim (the thirty day period of mourning) and outside of Israel (at least in the US and England) the stone is not erected until after twelve months, the time when all mourning practices are ceased. 

I will close with a personal note. Over the past month or so I have been to two funerals in my hometown of Modiin. Modiin is a new city, and our cemetery is only about twenty years old. Nevertheless, it is filling up quite quickly. One of the most striking features of this cemetery is the differently shaped, colored and worded tombstones. Musical instruments, sporting goods (particularly bicycles) and other such individualized features are etched into the stone and some stones are even shaped to look like items particular to the deceased’s life. There are photographs embedded in some of the stones. In our modern world, we tend more to individualism, to wanting to differentiate ourselves from other people, and it seems that this desire to stand out as an individual is now carrying on into the way in which we want to be buried.