The Genesis of Justice (20 page)

A contemporary commentator sees a more powerful moral in the Jacob narrative: “God’s memory is just; the punishment of evil
is not escaped. Sooner or later we all eat at the table of consequence.”
¹⁵
In support of this long-term view of symmetrical justice, he cites a traditional rabbinic interpretation of the Jacob story:
“Whoever maintains that the Holy One is lax in dispensing justice is grievously mistaken. God is long suffering but ultimately
collects His due. Jacob made Esau break out into a cry only once, but . . . the descendants of Jacob were punished” both in
the near term and throughout Jewish history.
¹⁶

As with Jacob, we do sometimes see long-term, symmetrical justice. When such justice occurs, it becomes a first-page news
item, as with the case of Lamija Jaha, an Albanian Muslim whose parents had sheltered Jews during the Holocaust and whose
family was rescued by Israel nearly sixty years later.
¹⁷
More often, life confirms the maudlin observation of Ecclesiastes:

I have seen wrong-doers being carried with pomp to their graves, and, as men return from the sacred ground, the evil-doers
are praised in the city where they had acted thus. Indeed, this is vanity!

Because judgment upon an evil deed is not executed speedily, men’s hearts are encouraged to do wrong, for a sinner commits
a hundred crimes and God is patient with him, though I know the answer that “it will be well in the end with those who revere
God because they fear Him and it will be far from well with the sinner, who, like a shadow, will not long endure, because
he does not fear God.”

Here is a vanity that takes place on the earth—there are righteous men who receive the recompense due to the wicked, and wicked
men who receive the recompense due to the righteous. I say, this is indeed vanity.

If the intended message of the Jacob narrative is that you (and your descendants) inevitably reap what you sow, it is a false
and dangerous message. All too often the wages of sin are prosperity and happiness. It is precisely because justice is not
the natural condition of mankind—or the inevitable workings of God—that we are obliged to pursue it actively and not take
it for granted. As the subsequent Book of Deuteronomy will mandate: Justice, justice shall you
pursue
—actively. Nor will it be simple. As Abraham taught us, some guilty must go free to assure that the innocent are not wrongly
convicted. For those who now believe in a hereafter, those guilty will eventually receive their just deserts. For those who
believe that the only justice is here on earth, the occasional freeing of the guilty will be seen as a necessary cost of every
fair process of justice. Perhaps the freed guilty person will suffer in his life as Jacob did. Perhaps not. The story of a
Jacob is a lesson about the symmetry of justice even in the absence of formal law. Yet even the presence of formal law does
not always assure perfect justice in the real world. However, as we will see in the next chapter, the absence of formal law
often leads to vigilantism.

1.
Soncino Chumash at p. 141, n. 26.

2.
Midrash Rabbah
, vol. 2, p. 563.

3.
Genesis 25: 23.

4.
See Plant, W. Gunther, ed.,
The Torah: A Modern Commentary
(New York: Union of American Hebrew Congregations, 1981), p. 190.

5.
Some rewards and punishments are, however, postponed to future generations. This is similar, in some respects, to the hereafter. See
Chapter 13
infra.

6.
See Kass, Leon,
Commentary
, March 1999, p. 48.

7.
Ibid. at p. 49.

8.
Ginzberg at p. 361.

9.
Midrash Rabbah
, vol. 2, p. 650.

10.
Genesis 31: 17-21.

11.
See Kass at p. 52.

12.
Ginzberg at p. 371.

13.
In the words of one contemporary commentator, he relies “on craftiness to outwit superior force” (Kass at p. 52).

14.
Genesis 47: 9.

15.
Schulweis, p. 72.

16.
Schulweis, p. 72, quoting Genesis Rabbah 67: 4.

17.
See
New York Times
, May 2, 1999, p. 1.

Now Dina, Lea’s daughter, whom she had borne to Yaakov, went out to see the women of the land.

And, Shekhem son of Hamor the Hivvite, the prince of the land, saw her:

he took her and lay with her, forcing her.

But his emotions clung to Dina, Yaakov’s daughter—he loved the girl
,

and he spoke to the heart of the girl.

So Shekhem said to Hamor his father, saying:

Take me this girl as a wife! …

Hamor spoke with [Jacob and his sons], saying:

My son Shekhem—

his emotions are so attached to your daughter
,

[so] pray give her to him as a wife!

And make marriage-alliances with us:

give us your daughters, and our daughters take for yourselves, and settle among us
! …

Now Yaakov’s sons answered Shekhem and Hamor his father with deceit
,

speaking [thus] because he had defiled Dina their sister
,

they said to them:

We cannot do this thing
,

give our sister to a man who has a foreskin
,

for that would be a reproach for us!

Only on this [condition] will we comply with you:

if you become like us, by having every male among you circumcised
.

Then we will give you our daughters, and your daughters we will take for ourselves
,

and we will settle among you, so that we become a single people …

Their words seemed good in the eyes of Hamor and in the eyes

of Shekhem son of Hamor, …

[A]ll the males were circumcised, all who go out [to war] from the gate of his city
.

But on the third day it was, when they were still hurting
,

that two of Yaakov’s sons, Shim’on and Levi, Dina’s full-brothers
,

took each man his sword
,

they came upon the city [feeling] secure, and killed all the males
,

and Hamor and Shekhem his son they killed by the sword.

Then they took Dina from Shekhem’s house and went off
.

Yaakov’s [other] sons came up upon the corpses and plundered the city
,

because they had defiled their sister
.

Their sheep, their oxen, their donkeys—whatever was inside the
,

city and out in the field, they took

all their riches, all their little-ones and their wives they captured and plundered
,

as well as all that was in the houses
.

But Yaakov said to Shim’on and to Levi:

You have stirred-up trouble for me
,

making me reek among the settled-folk of the land, the Canaanites and the Perizzites!

For I have menfolk few in number;

they will band together against me and strike me
,

and I will be destroyed, I and my household!

But they said:

Should our sister then be treated like a whore?

G
ENESIS
34

T
he vigilante punishment meted out to Dina’s rapist and his entire clan crystallizes a fundamental issue that pervades the
Bible and has confronted every system of justice: individual versus collective responsibility and punishment.

Even before the Dina narrative, this issue had been foreshadowed: the collective punishment of all men and women for the sin
of Adam and Eve, the flood, the destruction of Sodom. These were all inflicted directly by God. The vigilante punishment inflicted
by Dina’s brothers on “all the males” in the clan of Dina’s rapist raises the issue in the starkest of human terms. The brothers
trick the men into undergoing circumcision and then take advantage of their weakness, murder them in cold blood, and take
their children, wives, and wealth.
¹
As mentioned in the previous chapter, Jacob rebukes his sons for what they did, but not in moral terms. He is troubled because
their actions will make him look bad in the eyes of his neighbors and perhaps subject him to retaliation. His sons have violated
his prudential rule of winning against more powerful adversaries by deception alone and not force.
²

The story of Dina is unrelated to the continuing narrative of the Book of Genesis. Dina never reappears.
³
We never learn what happened to her: A Midrash has her becoming pregnant and giving birth to Joseph’s wife, but there is
no textual support for this speculation. Nor does the narrative reveal whether she approved of her brothers’ actions. The
retaliation that Jacob feared never materializes. The only subsequent allusion to the Dina story occurs during Jacob’s deathbed
testament, wherein he recalls the lawlessness and anger of his sons Simeon and Levi.
⁴
Why then is this isolated vignette included in the Bible? What lessons about justice are we supposed to learn from the brothers’
murderous vengeance and Jacob’s tactical reproach?

Several of the “defense lawyers” are quick to justify the actions of the patriarch and his children. They point to the words
of the text that say that the brothers destroyed “the city which had defiled their sister,” thus suggesting that all the residents
of the city are in some way guilty.
⁵
Even Maimonides, who often questions the actions of biblical heroes, argues that all the men who were killed were guilty
because they did not bring the rapist to trial for his crime. Maimonides points to the Noachide laws that govern non-Jews
and, according to the commentators, prohibit seven specific acts. There are several problems with this argument. First, rape
is not among the seven prohibitions, so Maimonides is forced to define Shechem’s act as “robbery”—an insult to women, since
it analogizes them to property. Second, the Noachide laws do not prescribe capital punishment for inaction or even for accessories.
Third, even the more stringent Jewish law does not punish rape of an unbetrothed maiden by death.
⁶
Fourth, even if the men deserved to be executed, surely they were entitled to some legal process. Nachmonides disagrees with
Maimonides’s justification but claims that the men deserved to die because they “were wicked” and had “thereby forfeited their
lives.”

As a final irony, the victims here were Jewish when they were killed, since they had been circumcised. This led one cynical
rabbi to conclude that Shim’on and Levi had them circumcise themselves because no one cares if Jews are killed!

Many traditional commentators seem to presume guilt on the part of anyone who incurs the wrath of God, a patriarch, or even
the son of a patriarch. If a man was punished, he must be guilty of something! If he was punished severely, he must be guilty
of something quite serious. I am reminded of the joke that went around the Soviet Gulag during the time I was representing
Jewish refuseniks. One prisoner asks another prisoner what he had done to warrant his ten-year sentence. “I did absolutely
nothing,” the second prisoner responds. “You are a liar,” the first one shoots back. “For absolutely nothing, they only give
you five years!”

If a commentator begins with the premise that certain biblical heroes can do no wrong, he must necessarily find fault with
those who have been killed or otherwise punished by the hero. This variation on the “blame the victim” defense recurs in the
story of Job and among some traditional commentaries. Job’s friends are certain he must have sinned to have been punished
so harshly. Traditional commentators argue that even Bathsheba’s husband—who was sent to the front to die so David could marry
Bathsheba—must have done something quite awful to deserve the horrible treatment he received at the hands of the hero David.
This sort of backward thinking leads to the belief that all disasters are the fault of the victims. Patrick Buchanan once
said that AIDS is God’s revenge on homosexuals, while an ultra-Orthodox rabbi insisted that the Holocaust was God’s way of
punishing pork eaters.