Dvar Torah on Parshat Vayishlach

 In parshat Va'yishlach, Yaakov returns to Israel and settles there. Almost immediately, we read the following hair-raising story: "And Dina, Leah's daughter, whom she had borne to Yaakov, went out to see the women of the land. And Shechem, the son of Chamor, the Hivvite, the prince of the land, saw her, and he took her, and forced her to lay with him." The story then goes from bad to worse. Shechem wants to marry Dina (we are not told what she thought about all this). Dina's brothers trick Shechem, and all his kinsmen, and pretend to go along with the idea, demanding only that they all undergo a circumcision. Then, on the third day after the operation, when all the men of Shechem are really hurting, the brothers kill everyone in the town, returning Dina to her home. Yaakov, their father, takes them to task, pointing out that this action could make trouble for them with the other local Canaanite tribes. The brothers are unrepentant, arguing that they did the right thing to protect the honor of their sister.

This story is often seen by feminist thinkers as an extreme example of the Torah's patriarchal, male-centered point of view. Dina, who is clearly at the center of the action, never once speaks. What happens to her is seen through male eyes, and the Torah focuses completely on the male responses to her being raped and kidnapped. She even seems to be blamed for being raped, after all didn't she "go out to see the women of the land"? She should have stayed home!

It has been pointed out by many - most recently by Dr. Tamar Ross in her much-discussed book "Expanding the Palace of Torah: Orthodoxy and Feminism" - that, in fact, the entire Torah is guilty of speaking with a male voice, to males, while seeing things only from a male perspective. Women are presented by the Torah as the eternal "other"; not a person with a voice, not a person who takes an active role in the Torah and its community of Rabbis and scholars, but, rather, someone about whom the Torah, and the men who run the community of the Torah, talk about, look at, make decisions about, and whose lives they run. Dr. Ross claims that this situation calls into question the very divinity of the Torah: how could God, in His revelation to us, not take into account half of the human race? How can male voices be the only ones that God speaks in, or listens to? How can women be so marginalized in what is meant to be God's word, and God's world?

I would like to address the problem of the Torah's, and the Jewish tradition's, apparent male centeredness by taking a look at a passage from the Guide of the Perplexed by Maimonides, written in the 12th century. In this section (Section III, Chapter 32), Maimonides addresses the question of animal sacrifice as mandated by the Torah. Maimonides, to put it mildly, is not a fan of animal sacrifice, and in this chapter he attempts to explain why God commanded this lowly form of worship. He points out that, at the time of the giving of the Torah, animal sacrifice was universally practiced: "The way of life generally accepted and customary in the whole world, and the universal service upon which we were brought up, consisted of offering various species of living beings in the temples...".

Maimonides goes on to explain that God, realizing this, and wanting to undo this situation and get rid of animal sacrifices, understood that it wouldn't be easy: "...man, according to his nature, is not capable of abandoning suddenly all to which he is accustomed". God, therefore, does something which Maimonides calls "tricky" and "subtle". God did not "...give us a law prescribing the rejection, abandonment, and abolition of all these kinds of worship. For one could not then conceive the acceptance of such a law, considering the nature of man, which always likes that to which it is accustomed". Rather than beat His divine head against the wall of human foolishness, God, in order to encourage the Jewish people to worship him, while, at the same time, weaning us away from animal sacrifice, decided to "... restrict this kind of worship [to only priests, only in one Temple, only at certain times and with certain animals], so that only the part of it whose abolition is not required by His wisdom should still exist." God limited, rather than prohibited, animal sacrifice, in order to start a process of education, progress, and growth, that would lead mankind away from this ritual to a more sophisticated religious life. Maimonides points out that many of the prophets denigrate the Jewish people for misunderstanding this principle, and focusing on the ritual of the sacrifices, rather than on the true worship of God. He quotes Samuel, Isaiah, and Jeremiah, all of whom downplay the importance of the actual sacrifice and urge, instead, that attention be paid to the true service of God. These prophets understood that the Torah only calls for animal sacrifice as a compromise with man's older, baser instincts, instincts which he will hopefully, with the help of the Torah, grow out of.

This is a radical notion. Maimonides is saying that the Torah, in setting up the laws of sacrifices, is, in actual fact, undermining them, subverting them, by limiting and downsizing the universally accepted and popular custom of animal sacrifice. It's a kind of optical illusion: it looks like the Torah is demanding that we do this ritual, it seems that God actually wants these sacrifices, when, in actual fact, the Torah is teaching us to cut down on animal sacrifice, to do less of it, and, hopefully, one day abandon it altogether, in favor of a more mature, sophisticated, and appropriate relationship with God.

According to this notion, the Torah needs to be understood as a book which, on the one hand, makes the compromises necessary in order for it to be understood and accepted by its readers, while, on the other, starting a process of challenging their most cherished and deeply-held beliefs. I would posit that animal sacrifice is only one example of this dynamic; there are many others. In the parshas we have been reading over the last few weeks, from the very beginning of Bereshit, the Torah seems to recognize and accept the laws of primogeniture - the first born is understood to be the one who inherits the estate, blessing, and legacy of the father. However, every single first-born son that the Torah tells us about is, one way or another, deprived of this right by one or more of his younger siblings. Starting with God's choice of the younger Abel's sacrifice over first-born Cain's, through Yitzchak being recognized as Avraham's heir rather than his older brother Yishmael, to Yaakov tricking his older brother Esav out of his birthright, to the story of Joseph and his brothers, all the way to the crowning of Yishai's younger son, King David, the first born always is assumed to have the birthright, but then always loses it to a more worthy younger brother. Here, again, as in the case of animal sacrifice, the Torah does not come right out and challenge the popular practice of primogeniture. Instead, it cleverly subverts it, pointing the way to a more reasonable system of inheritance, based on individual merit and accomplishment.

Another example of this kind of dynamic is slavery. The Torah accepts the popular institution of slavery, and legislates all sorts of laws pertaining to it. However, the Rabbis, in their understanding of these laws, and in the way these laws evolved under Rabbinic decision-making, turned slavery into an unworkable system. Because of the weight of legal obligations to the slave which are placed on the owner by the Torah and the Rabbinic interpretation of the Torah, the Rabbis end up telling us that he who acquires a slave in fact acquires a master, so bound is the master by the laws of the Torah to care for and accommodate the needs of his slave.

There are other examples: capital punishment is demanded by the Torah for a fairly long list of crimes. However, the way in which the Rabbis understand and interpret the Torah's own laws of evidence is so strict that, as the Rabbis say, a court which executes someone once in seven years, and some say once in seventy years, is a murderous, bloodthirsty court. Polygamy is understood as the norm in the Torah, and yet the Torah is full of people who were monogamous, and replete with horror stories of polygamous family life. Halachically, demand were made on husbands which made polygamy difficult. Ultimately, the Rabbis took this to its obvious conclusion when, over 1000 years ago, under Rabbenu Gershom, Ashkenazi communities stopped permitting polygamy. In all of these cases, the Torah accepts and works within the societal norms which governed the known world at the time it was given, and which would continue to do so for generations to come, while, at the same time, sowing the seeds of change by subverting these values, showing them in a negative light, minimizing their application, with the goal of retaining what about them may be positive, while limiting their most offensive aspects, or, in some cases, completely undoing them, and substituting them with a more desirable set of values.

I would suggest that the Torah's attitude towards women falls into this category. For almost all of human history, in almost all of the societies we know anything about, the world was patriarchal. I do not believe that we should blame our forefathers and mothers for this situation - in a world with no electricity, no modern technology, no antibiotics, a traditional patriarchal society is probably the best way to run things, while guaranteeing successful reproduction of the species. It can not be an accident that patriarchy was so universally the norm - it answered the very real challenges presented by pre-modern pregnancy, childbirth, and child care. The Torah, therefore, could not have originally presented itself as fully feminist, or egalitarian; this would have been as incomprehensible and unworkable to the societies of antiquity as if the Torah had been written in Shakespearean English, or presented as a hip-hop album.

However - and this is crucial - the Torah, as it did with animal sacrifices, primogeniture, slavery, capital punishment, and other subjects, undercut the patriarchal system, thereby laying the groundwork for a feminist revolution. By telling us that Adam was originally created male and female - "And God created man in His image, in the image of God He created him, male and female He created them" - and that Eve's curse is just that - a curse - and not the natural, intended order of things; by giving loud and clear voices, and central roles, to many of the women in the stories of Genesis, Exodus, and other parts of the Bible - even while presenting more 'normal' pre-feminist stories, such as Dina's in our parsha - by allowing women to inherit and own property - a right which women in England gained only in the twentieth century; by arranging for a pre-nuptial agreement which took care of widows' and divorcees' financial needs, through all of this and more, the Torah, and the Rabbis in subsequent generations, made it possible for us to understand the apparent patriarchalism and chauvinism of parts of the Torah as necessary evils - like animal sacrifice or slavery.

In order to be understood in a world which knew no better, the Torah needed to present itself as male-centered, while at the same time cleverly and subtly implanting a number of messages which serve to subvert and ultimately undo this position. Today, given the technological, cultural, and societal changes which make feminism and gender equality possible, and even desirable, we can certainly see these aspects of the Torah more clearly than our ancestors could. We can embrace the notions of equality which are there in the Torah, giving voice and status to the women in our community, just as the Torah, at times, does for the women in the Biblical narrative, and reject the negative elements which are also there, much as Maimonides rejected animal sacrifice, or the Jewish community rejected polygamy.

Unlike some of the problematic and primitive values and practices we have discussed above, male chauvinism is not yet universally recognized as an undesirable or unacceptable position. There are many in the Jewish community who believe that the male-centered voice of the Torah, and the concomitant marginal role of women, is an absolute value, and that it should not give way to a more egalitarian approach. I can understand this approach. When looking at the way the Torah and subsequent Jewish tradition deal with the interaction between men and women, it is not at all easy to determine what we need to jettison as undesirable and regressive (the equivalent of animal sacrifices, or polygamy), and what we need to retain as the Torah's true message about the way men and women should be. We are clearly lacking a Jeremiah or Isaiah who could tell us, when it comes to issues of gender, what the Torah included as a sop to ancient and backward sensibilities, and should therefore be left behind, and what it sees as real wisdom and insight in these difficult and important matters. Figuring this out, in the text and in our lives, is the challenge we now face.

Shabbat Shalom,

Rabbi Shimon Felix