Kislev 13, 5785  ·  14th December 2024

Parashat Vayishlach

A Devar Torah by Ben Eaton

הַֽכְזוֹנָ֕ה יַֽעֲשֶׂ֖ה אֶת־אֲחוֹתֵֽנוּ

I want to talk about women's rights in Judaism. I was inspired by an essay several years ago in the Bulletin asking whether Judaism is inherently sexist.

That question has been at the back of my mind ever since. There is much that points to the positive status and special rights afforded to women in Judaism - for example: the principle of consent for marriage in Chayei Sarah and the principle of daughter's inheritance in Matot-Massei. But there are also parts of the Torah in which the status of women could be perceived as less than men: the Sotah ritual in Parshat Naso for example - where a man who suspects his wife of being unfaithful can subject her to a public spectacle that seems degrading and humiliating. Or parshat Tazria where women remain ritually impure for 40 days after the birth of a boy but 80 days after the birth of a girl (although I should add that there are non-sexist explanations for both of those).

So why, of all the parshot I could have picked to explore the Torah's approach to women's rights, did I pick Vayishlach? The short answer is because of Simeon and Levi's question to their father: הַֽכְזוֹנָ֕ה יַֽעֲשֶׂ֖ה אֶת־אֲחוֹתֵֽנוּ "should our sister be treated like a whore?" It's an uncomfortable question at the end of an uncomfortable Sedra - one that is not normally read in Liberal congregations. For the men, it's a good parsha: Jacob wrestles an Angel to a stalemate and gets a blessing in return that is the birth of Israel as a people, he reconciles with his brother (who despite his fears doesn't kill him), he gets another son, and Esau goes on to found an entire nation (the Edomites - although their future isn't so rosy, as we read in our Haftarah). For the women, it's not so good: Dinah is raped and, in the section that follows, Rachel dies in childbirth.

On the understanding that the Torah is always trying to tell us something, what is the point of this chapter? My take is that the Torah does neither feminism nor patriarchy. That certain strands of Judaism are patriarchal says more about the cultural lens through which they interpret the Torah, rather than what the Torah actually says. For example, it is generally frowned upon for Orthodox women to wear a Tallit, despite the Commandment to have fringed corners on the garment not being sex-specific. It is a custom which persists because it is a custom – not a commandment.

Social Sexism and Legislative Sexism

This is what I like to call social sexism - there's no legislative or practical basis for it, and it manifests in both the secular and religious sphere. It's the sort of thing that musician Taylor Swift refers to in her song "The Man". Swift - who is, by any reasonable metric, both immensely talented and successful - seems to invite a disproportionate amount of opprobrium for her art (a problem that also beset Barbara Streisand in her heyday). She speculates how her critics would treat her, were she a man:

"They'd say I hustled
Put in the work
They wouldn't shake their heads and question how much of this I deserve
What I was wearing
If I was rude
Could all be separated from my good ideas and power moves?"

— Taylor Swift, The Man

Overcoming social sexism requires changing people's view of each other and probably needs its own d'var, but what about legislative sexism? Unpacking Simeon and Levi's question raises two things that are important when legislating for a just society: the first is the way in which the role of women is defined, but the second (and arguably more important) is the practical realities of women's sexual vulnerability.

I came to this realisation after reading an article on the BBC News website about women who were kidnapped and trafficked in Sierra Leone. The article described the women as "sex workers". Would Simeon and Levi's question have the same effect, if it was "should our sister be treated like a sex worker?" It's obvious that it fundamentally changes the question's meaning and power. "Sex work" makes it sound as if it's like any other job. "Sex work is work" as those seeking full decriminalisation will insist (a list which includes Amnesty International, Human Rights Watch, The Green Party, and Liberal Democrat Party). But this is nonsense - sex work is not work, it's abuse. To quote Gili Varon, writing for the Jewish Telegraphic Agency in 2012:

"...utilizing terms such as 'employment' and 'profession' to describe prostitution lends credence to a system that preys on women who have faced severe physical and emotional oppression. More than 80 percent of women in prostitution have been sexually or physically abused in their youth, often by family members...Entry is not a matter of choice but an unwitting endpoint in a cycle of abuse and despair."

— Gili Varon, Jewish Telegraphic Agency, 2012

Similarly, Louise Perry in her book, "The case against the sexual revolution":

"When this idea is taken to its logical conclusion, we end up with the sterile language of business introduced to the brothel or the alleyway. In academic writing that attempts to impose this framework, pimps and madams engage in 'sex work management', rape becomes a 'contract breach', and violence, pregnancy and disease become 'occupational health risks'. The horror of what is actually happening is deliberately obscured..."

— Louise Perry, The Case Against the Sexual Revolution

The Word זוֹנָ֕ה

There are other ways that we can translate the word זוֹנָ֕ה - Rashi, interprets it as "one unprotected". The question becomes "Should one make our sister become as a woman who has no-one to protect her?" While this may seem somewhat patriarchal, a notable feature of the parshah is that Dinah never speaks - so it stands to reason that someone must speak for her. As Mary Harrington, a writer and reactionary feminist, puts it: "'Chivalrous' social codes that encourage male protectiveness toward women are routinely read from an egalitarian perspective as condescending and sexist. But...the cross-culturally well-documented greater male physical strength and propensity for violence makes such codes of chivalry overwhelmingly advantageous to women, and their abolition in the name of feminism deeply unwise."

In addition to זוֹנָ֕ה, there is another word to be found in the Torah: קְדֵשָֽׁה. This refers to a "cult prostitute" - usually someone who engaged in sexual relations as part of Canaanite religious rites – one of the many depraved practices for which we are later commanded to dispossess the inhabitants of the land. Although the Torah does take a more sympathetic view of קְדֵשָֽׁה - one of the notable uses is in the story of Judah and Tamar in parshat Mikketz (which also introduces the concept of levirate marriage, on which Gwendoline gave a fascinating d'var earlier in the year). However, the use of different words between the parshot is not accidental - when the Torah uses the word זוֹנָ֕ה it is always pejorative.

And so, Simeon and Levi's question struck me as the question when it comes to understanding the practical approach that the Torah takes to women's rights. Because the immutable thing that distinguishes men from women is their biology - everything else is socially constructed. To some people this might seem reductive, but as author Helen Joyce puts it: "Defining women as the people whose bodies developed along the female reproductive pathway is limiting only if you regard female embodiment as limiting."

Or to quote Hyam Maccoby (in the 1978 book 'The Day G-d Laughed'): "Judaism is a religion of the body. Even immortality is conceived in terms of the resurrection of the body, not in terms of a so-clean wraith-like soul floating clear from the contaminations of matter. Judaism never thinks of the body as getting in the way of the spiritual life. On the contrary, the body is the instrument and subject-matter of the spiritual life; as well say that stars get in the way of the study of astronomy. The meaning of law is the civilization of the body; those who wish to have religion without law really wish to have religion without body."

Women's Material Concerns

There are aspects of society in which this is highly relevant. Women are the half of the species that gets pregnant and gives birth (during the course of which, according to the UN, a woman dies every 2 minutes worldwide) and are overwhelmingly the primary carers. Women have a much shorter fertility window than men. Women are also on average physically weaker than men and this does introduce practical limits. I can mention women such as Colonel Or Ben Yehuda, commanding officer of the Caracal battalion who, in 2014 as a junior officer, was involved in an engagement with terrorists on the Egyptian border where she carried on fighting and commanding her troops despite being shot, and whose mostly female soldiers successfully fought hundreds of terrorists on October 7th for over 17 hours. But I can also point to the fact that since 2018 when all military roles were made available to women in the British armed forces, only three have passed P Company - the selection course for the elite Parachute Regiment - and none have passed the Royal Marine Commando course.

The Torah is ultimately pragmatic and accommodates for the differences between men and women - e.g., women are exempted from military service and going to the Temple during the pilgrim festivals. The niddah laws accommodate the reality of menstruation and the physically strain it places on women.

There are several interpretations which suggest that Dinah may not have been raped and that this is a tale of patriarchy - a theme developed in the book "The Red Tent" by Anita Diamant. But this is not consistent with the text, which quite clearly states that Shechem laid with Dinah by force. Some might view the response of Dinah's brothers to be patriarchal - their "property", and by extension their pride, has been violated and so they show the responsible parties who is "boss". But this is inconsistent with their behaviour – according to verse 7 they were distressed before they were angry – the order is important. Why were they distressed first? Because they cared. Their first thought was not for their pride, it was for the hurt that their sister had endured and may still be enduring - it was empathy. In this light, and given the lack of a legal structure in which Shechem could be brought to justice, their subsequent actions don't seem so unreasonable. This position is endorsed by Maimonides, who posits that Shechem's actions were enabled by the tacit compliance of his people - although it is rejected by Nachmanides who considers it to be what, in modern terms, would be called "collective punishment".

We must also look to Shechem's behaviour: he kidnaps and rapes Jacob's daughter and then goes seeking Jacob's approval to marry her. Why would he do this? Surely if he thought his actions were wrong, it would show remarkable chutzpah. But he makes no apology, he simply asks for approval to marry Dinah as if it's a done deal. At no point does he enquire as to Dinah's feelings or wants. Shechem even says "Ask of me a bride-price ever so high, as well as gifts, and I will pay what you tell me". Despite the fact that he has probably has the military might to overrun Jacob - as suggested in vv30 - he sees "acquiring" Dinah as a simple purchase. The question then becomes about whether Dinah is a commodity whose body is to be bought and sold for the gratification of others, or whether she is a person with the same rights as her brothers.

The Torah legislates against rape, albeit not in a way that we may be entirely comfortable with – the restitution or punishment depends on whether the rape took place in the city or open country and whether there were witnesses. There are also specific laws against the rape of women during war. Prostitution is explicitly forbidden in Judaism - we are not to "degrade the land with harlotry" - yet The Torah recognises that prostitution will continue to exist (e.g., Rahab in Jericho in the Book of Joshua or the prostitutes that petition King Solomon).

But we live in far more enlightened times now - or do we? Married women could not get a mortgage or a contraception without their husband's approval until 1975. Domestic violence against women wasn't outlawed until 1976. Rape in marriage, although technically outlawed in 1991, was only put on the statute book as an offence in 2003. In the year to September 2021, just 1.3% of rape cases recorded by police resulted in a suspect being charged (or receiving a summons) and only a fraction of those led to a conviction. Female Genital Mutilation has been illegal in the UK since 1985, but the first prosecution didn't happen until 2019, despite it happening to thousands of girls a year in the interim period. The UK incarcerates some of the most vulnerable women in society in mixed-sex prisons (as do several other countries including Canada, the US, Spain, and Israel). When this was challenged in 2021 the High Court ruled it to be lawful. Annex B of the 2019 NHS accommodation guidance abolished single-sex wards and in 2023 there were 2088 rapes on NHS hospital wards. Women campaigned to ban bare breasts from page 3 of tabloid newspapers for decades, eventually succeeding in 2015 - but in the last decade, where you can lose your livelihood for acknowledging the reality of biological sex, the Internet has given citizens of all ages free, on-demand, hardcore pornography. Finally, if you'd like to have a baby but lack the equipment or inclination, you can rent a woman for 9 months with commercial surrogacy.

So perhaps in 2024 we're not as progressive as we believe ourselves to be and even the uncomfortable passages of the Torah are telling us something valuable. There is a certain intellectual delusion in thinking that the Torah, which has sustained our people for millennia, is outdated or irrelevant because of social mores that have changed frequently even in my lifetime. Maybe Simeon and Levi understood the harsh reality of women's material concerns a lot better than we do with our supposedly enlightened notions. Perhaps we should be paying a lot more attention to what's actually written in the Torah, so that we can truly engage in Tikkun Olam.

Shabbat Shalom