The Harlot by The Side of The Road: Forbidden Tales of The Bible (16 page)

The clash between Jacob and his sons—a clash between generations, values, philosophies, and strategies—is expressed in the bitter words that Simeon and Levi speak to Jacob after he rebukes them for the massacre of Shechem. To the patriarch Jacob, the betrothal of
Dinah to the man who “defiled” her is an honorable compromise that will bring the blessings of peace and prosperity. To his sons, it is a peace without honor, a disgraceful sellout, and they utter an accusation that seems to apply even more to Jacob himself than to Shechem or Hamor: “Is our sister to be treated as a whore?”

The “Bible’s court of conscience,” as one scholar puts it,
²⁷
has weighed the deeds of Simeon and Levi and found them wanting. Jacob himself delivers the verdict on his deathbed, withholding his blessing from Simeon and Levi, declaring them to be unworthy sons and successors precisely because they acted so rashly and so excessively, and denying them any portion of the Promised Land.

Tradition has approved and embraced Jacob’s example. His is the “[s]easoned voice of maturity,” and he sagely puts statesmanship above all: “[H]e rebukes such a childish religion which will endanger its own life rather than face realities.”
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Indeed, Jacob’s way has characterized a couple of thousand years of Jewish history, and we see his moral and practical example in a long line of revered figures that stretches from Maimonides, a renowned Jewish philosopher who served as the court physician to the vizier of Egypt and, it is said, the crusading Richard the Lion-Hearted, down to Chaim Weizmann, the “George Washington of Zionism,” who fought his war for a Jewish homeland in Palestine in the corridors of Whitehall and secured the first modern-day foothold on the soil of the Holy Land in the form of the Balfour Declaration with a pen rather than a sword.

Then, within a single decade of the mid-twentieth century, history appeared to reverse the judgment of the court of conscience. Jacob’s
way failed the Jewish community in Germany and the rest of Europe during the Holocaust, when the strategies of survival that had worked for a couple of millennia proved worthless against industrialized mass murder. Some were alert enough—and fortunate enough—to escape from Europe in time to avoid the worst excesses of the Holocaust. A heroic few armed themselves and fought back in the ghettos and forests and even in the death camps. But the greater number of European Jews perished, at least in part because they assumed that the Germans were too civilized to murder six million men, women, and children in cold blood—and, later, they assumed that the Western democracies were too civilized to permit it.

The scene that emblemizes the failure of Jacob’s way is one that was described to me by a Holocaust survivor who saw it with his own eyes: The venerable rabbi of a shtetl in Poland marched down the street with a Torah in his arms to welcome the storm troopers of the Third Reich because the old man recalled his own experiences during World War I, when the German occupiers turned out to be far more gentle and generous than the Polish peasantry
or
the Russian overlords who ruled them. The rabbi’s assumptions proved to be tragically wrong, and, like millions of his brethren, he paid for his mistake with his life.
*

As if prompted by the agonies of the Holocaust, the biblical court of conscience has begun to reconsider the antagonism between Jacob and his sons. A pronounced revisionist strain in postwar biblical scholarship suggests that Simeon and Levi, rather than Jacob, are the “real heroes” of Genesis 34 precisely because they picked up their swords and made war on Shechem to vindicate their sister’s defilement. For example, one contemporary biblical critic was moved to point out that two “extra-canonical” books—that is, Bible-era religious writings that were excluded from the Hebrew Bible itself—offer a countertradition that undercuts the “official” version of the massacre of Shechem as reported in the Book of Genesis. The Testament of Levi shows us an angel descending from heaven to hand Levi a sword and shield: “Take
revenge on Shechem because of Dinah, and I will be with you, for the Lord has sent me.” And the Book of Judith, as we have seen, suggests that God himself armed Simeon with divine weaponry.
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God was on the side of the warriors, the countertradition holds, rather than the peacemaker.

The revisionist approach to the rape of Dinah reaches a crescendo in the work of one Bible critic, Meir Sternberg, who boldly insists that Jacob, “the tale’s least sympathetic character,” is guilty of “egocentricity” and “cowardice” and even “immorality” because his only stated concern about the massacre of Shechem is wholly self-serving. “[T]he slaughter is reprehensible only in its consequences,” writes Sternberg. By contrast, he argues, Simeon and Levi are “the real heroes” of Genesis 34. “Their concern has been selfless and single-minded: to redress the wrong done to their sister and the whole family,” Sternberg concludes. “Their idealistic and uncompromising stance makes them the most intricate, colorful, and attractive characters in the story.”
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Against the background of the Holocaust, of course, the sword-bearing sons of Jacob seem far more compelling to us than their pragmatic and pacifistic father. For the same reason, the resistance fighters who made a heroic last stand against the Nazis in the streets and sewers of the doomed Warsaw ghetto strike us as nobler than their fathers and mothers, sisters and brothers, who boarded the boxcars and rode into Auschwitz, even if the fighters ended up just as dead as the victims of the gas chamber. But the real question, the tough question, is not how to die but how to live, and it is a question that is being asked—and answered—in the streets of Jerusalem and Tel Aviv, Hebron and Nablus in our own times.

The taunting words of Simeon and Levi—“Is our sister to be treated as a whore?”—may be blood-stirring and soul-shaking, especially in the light of recent history, but it turns out to be the wrong question to ask at a time when men and women in what we still call the Holy Land are all too willing to raise a sword against each other because each one persists in regarding the other as a stranger.

The Bible confirms that
something
convinced the rest of the Canaanites not to revenge themselves upon the Israelites for the slaughter of
Shechem, as Jacob feared they would do. One explanation is found in the passage that follows the story of Dinah in the Book of Genesis: God abruptly orders Jacob and his clan to leave the place where the blood of Shechem and his people was spilled, and to pitch their tents at another site in Canaan. Jacob purifies his household by ordering the removal of any idols and other paraphernalia of idol worship, and then the clan sets off toward its new encampment at a place called Bethel. Jacob’s fear that the Canaanites will muster against the Israelites turns out to be unfounded.

“And they journeyed,” we are told in Genesis, “and a terror of God was upon the cities that were round about them, and they did not pursue after the sons of Jacob” (Gen. 35:5).

The traditional interpretation of the passage is that the ritual of purification conducted by Jacob and his clan, an act of obeisance to the Almighty, induces God to keep the Canaanites at bay: “a terror of God” is what deterred the Canaanites from revenging themselves for the deaths of their countrymen. But the modern reader might be tempted to conclude that terror of Simeon and Levi had something to do with it—and, for that reason, the way of Jacob’s warrior sons threatens to overshadow Jacob’s way in the moral and political calculus of various decision-makers, both Arab and Jew, in the modern Middle East.

Something closer to Simeon and Levi, for example, can be seen in the pioneers of modern political Zionism in the late nineteenth century, who organized self-defense units in the towns and villages of Russia. “Violence must be answered with violence,” declared the manifesto of one of the early Jewish bands. The leader of another movement appeared to invoke the memory of Dinah when he wrote that armed self-defense was not less than “[a war] for the honor of our sisters, for our national honor, for our future as a nation.”
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The veterans of those early skirmishes served as role models—and, in some instances, as leaders—of the Haganah, the underground army of the Zionist movement in Palestine, which was organized to protect the Jewish community against Arab violence and later prevailed against the armies of seven Arab nations that declared war on Israel as soon as the tiny Jewish state declared its independence in 1948. To the men and women who struggled to create the Jewish homeland, and especially to the survivors of the Holocaust, the destiny of the Jewish people now passed into the hands of what Menachem Begin called “a new specimen of human
being … completely unknown to the world for over 1800 years, ‘the fighting Jew.’”
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Over its first half century of statehood, Israel came to rely on the sword to protect and preserve itself against the enmity of its Arab neighbors and, perhaps more crucially, the Arabs who live among Jews in Israel itself and the lands that Israel secured during the Six-Day War. The military prowess of the Israel Defense Forces fundamentally changed the very image of the State of Israel from a David to a Goliath. Only recently has Jacob’s way reasserted itself in Israel, and the fighting Jew has been forced to learn once again when and how to sit down and talk.

Significantly, Yitzhak Rabin—a veteran of the Haganah who repeatedly distinguished himself on the battlefield in Israel’s struggle for independence and survival—went on to earn a Nobel Peace Prize precisely because of his willingness to make peace with the Palestine Liberation Organization. Rabin commanded the Israel Defense Forces during the Six-Day War, but he will be best remembered for shaking hands with Yasir Arafat. Significantly, Rabin is also an exemplar of “the new Jew”—a soldier and a statesman, a man who knows when to make war and when to make peace, a vigorous hybrid of Jacob and his warrior sons.

But it is equally significant that Rabin was felled not by an Arab but by a fellow Israeli who insisted that he had been called upon by the Almighty to slay the man who made peace with the stranger. The assassination of Rabin demonstrates exactly why the example of Simeon and Levi is so treacherous—all it takes to strike down a towering figure like Rabin is a little man with a loaded gun who had managed to convince himself that God handed it to him and bid him use it. One can almost hear the impudent question that Simeon and Levi put to Jacob—“Is our sister to be treated like a whore?”—on the lips of the assassin who murdered Yitzhak Rabin.

A close reading of Genesis 34 allows us to see that the Bible offers two visions of the stranger and two approaches to dealing with him: one that exhorts us to make war, the other that encourages us to make peace and even, as the story of Dinah and Shechem may secretly suggest, make love. “I have set before thee life and death, the blessing and the curse; therefore choose life,” says Moses to the Israelites (Deut. 30:19), as if to suggest that the correct choice is so obvious that only a fool or a miscreant would choose the wrong one. But the Bible is not always so
clear and straightforward in its moral instruction, and much mischief has been done over the centuries and millennia precisely because zealots can always find chapter and verse to justify even the most grotesque article of faith or plan of action.

In fact, no matter how excessive the revenge of Simeon and Levi on Shechem may appear to us, the Bible suggests that Jacob’s way
and
the warrior’s way are appropriate, each in its own time. “To every thing there is a season,” we read in a celebrated passage of Ecclesiastes: “A time to love, and a time to hate; a time for war, and a time for peace” (Eccles. 3:1, 8). Tragically, the Bible never tells us with clarity or certainty how and when to choose between them. The enigmatic fragment of Genesis in which Dinah’s story appears, like so much of the Bible, can be used to validate either one.