Vayishlaḥ, Safety, and Revenge / וישלח, זיכערקייט, און נקמה

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.