Vayishlakh / וישלח

This is a weekly series of frum, trans, anarchist parsha dvarim [commentaries]. It's crucial in these times that we resist the narrative that Zionism owns or, worse, is Judaism. Our texts are rich—sometimes opaque, but absolutely teeming with wisdom and fierce debate. It's the work of each generation to extricate meaning from our cultural and religious inheritance. I aim to offer comment which is true to the source material (i.e. doesn't invert or invent meaning to make it more comfortable for us) and uses Torah like a light to reflect on our modern times.

Content note: Lengthy discussion of rape (no graphic descriptions), misogyny, revenge, and responding to violence in leftist spaces

"The Rape of Dinoh"

I'm resisting the gay urge to ignore women's suffering in order to enjoy some homoerotic wrestling, but I have more important things to say about sexual violence than I do about the earlier part of the parsha with Yakov/Yisroel and the thigh-wrenching angel, which mostly amounts to "Yeah, nice".

In the (cis, heterosexual) male imagination, rape is the worst and most unforgivable crime, and any response to redress it is justified regardless of what the survivor wants. As leftists we tend to do better than implementing such crude solutions as slaughtering an entire city, but we struggle with our own collective punishments for sexual violence.

Dinoh is not given any words in this parsha or any other; she is reduced almost entirely to a victim. Aside from one line where she "went out" to meet the daughters of the land, all of the action regarding her is passive. After going into Kanaan, Shekhem is given all of the agency: he saw her, he took her, he lay with her, he defiled her.

"Defiled" is also translated as "violated", "abused", "forced", "mistreated", "disgraced", "afflicted", and (my least favorite) "humbled". Humility is a virtue, and women are supposed to be humble.

Dinoh was not humble. She "went out". The Haamek Davar reading feels like a grotesque justification of sexual violence, preempting the question, "How could Hashem let this happen?" with a terrible answer: she was asking for it.

Ramban has a better commentary, dismissing Rashi and Ibn Ezra's distinctions between "natural" and "unnatural" sexual violence:

There is debate about whether or not Dinoh was raped, or "disgraced", i.e. her social status lowered because she had sex out of wedlock. Dinoh doesn't tell us. Her maybe-rapist loves her. Maybe it wasn't rape. We could generously interpret a moral in this ambiguity, like, "Outcome is more important than intention". It doesn't matter that he loved her; he hurt her (at least socially/economically if nothing else), and his punishment is generally regarded as appropriate.

Dinoh's name means "her judgement" or "her vindication". Unlike her brothers, we are not given explicit reasoning for her name, but her story is clearly about revenge—not for her, but for the honor of the men in her family. After she is raped (or seduced), her brothers Shimon and Levi exact revenge by killing all the men in city and taking all the women and children captive. It's a collective punishment, and more violence against people who did nothing wrong. We can only speculate as to how Dinoh might have felt about the outcome. Was she glad that Shekhem and all those other people were killed? Was her honor restored? Did she need saving at all? Her lack of agency in the narrative is itself an additional violence.

The language around sexual violence on the left is interesting. Lots of leftists use the phrase "kill your local rapist". This is less a literal incitement for murder than a revenge fantasy of the oppressed—a familiar idea in Yiddishkeyt. The dramatic language is cathartic, and serves as a community warning to abusers who have no rational reason to fear legal repercussions. The only leverage we have is social pressure.

There is, often deliberately, a lack of clarity with the word "abuse" compared to "rape". By any reasonable definition, rape is sex without consent: sex through force, coercion, or incapacitation, regardless of the particular sex acts involved, the genders, or the body parts of the rapist and survivor. It's a very serious form of physical and psychological violence, and it is fairly specific.

Abuse is a much broader category, and it holds a lot of weight in queer spaces; by that I mean, it carries a lot of water and does a lot of work. "Abuser" can mean anything from "they're a rapist" to "they hurt my feelings". In my experience, this flattening comes from a noble desire to minimize gossip and violent details for the sake of protecting the privacy of the survivor; and a less noble desire to be taken seriously. Using strong language to condemn each other is a way to make other people listen, and ideally, to inculcate the speaker against accusations in the future, because Look! They just condemned this bad behavior in the strongest terms, so we can assume that they are safe. People are cast into the roles of "Bad (forever)" and "Good (for now)".

This is not to say that whisper networks are loshn-hora; on the contrary, they're a survival mechanism. But/and, when we flatten the distinction between types and scales of harm, we do a disservice to survivors of serious violence (by equating it with less serious violence or social inconveniences), and we treat everyone who's ever made a mistake as a disposable monster.

I regularly come across this in my work as an organizer: "Don't work with this person or let them into the space because they're an abuser." My position is to take these claims seriously, and to ask noninvasive follow-up questions. Broadly what type of abuse are we talking about? Roughly when did this happen? Has there been any accountability already? And crucially, what does the survivor(s) want to happen now? Often, the person bringing forward the claim doesn't know the even the minimal details and has simply heard that someone is "harmful". Sometimes, people ask for someone to be banned just because they associate with someone who is "harmful".

We do have an obligation to protect each other if someone is known to be dangerous. Is the solution of ostracization proportional to the threat they pose? Are there less severe solutions which prioritize community safety—and especially the safety of survivors—without banishing the abuser? Often the answer is "no" simply because we lack community resources to facilitate accountability or create mirror services so the survivor and abuser don't need to interact.

Other times, a survivor discloses but does not want any consequences for the abuser, even at the expense of broader community safety, because they understand that the claim could be traced back to them and they might face further violence as a result. This exposes an uncomfortable tension between listening to the survivor and putting other people at risk, or ignoring (and potentially endangering) the survivor for the sake of the group.

Are survivors always right? (I stress that it is not incumbent on survivors to be "proportional" regarding their own abusers; that responsibility lies with the community, especially those in positions of power.) Some people want to see their rapist killed, or thrown in jail, or completely cut off from their community. What is justice? Brash punishments—without consulting and centering the survivor—only reifies the violence by removing the survivor's agency.

How do we genuinely restore dignity to survivors? In my work supporting survivors of sexual violence and my experiences as a survivor myself, the answer I've come to is this: dignity is restored when survivors are safe, taken seriously, and given control over their narrative and (as much as possible) the consequences. This is an imperfect answer and is often impossible to fully implement. Taking people seriously is straightfoward, but how do we make sure people are safe? How do we restore their sense of control? What little control do any of us have in this world?

Further reading:

"What About The Rapists? An anarchist approaches to crime and justice"

An appeal: I'm still raising money for my friend Areej in Nuseirat, Gaza so that she can buy food for her mother and young siblings. Please contribute if you can. Thank you.