Counsel from Scripture

The news this week that Israel is planning to withdraw several thousand troops from Gaza is a signal to the world both that the fighting will continue (because the rest of the IDF currently stationed in Gaza is staying) and, at the same time, that the future will be different from the past, that the struggle to destroy Hamas is poised to move into a different phase. That phase will require fewer soldiers in place, clearly. But it doesn’t mean that Israel is planning to act less aggressively to free the remaining 100+ hostages. That decision—to abandon the hostages to their fate—would be as unimaginable ethically as it would be suicidal politically for the current government, and there is virtually no chance of that happening. So we who are watching on from the wings are basically being prepared to expect the current struggle to last for weeks, perhaps even for months, into the future. Eventually, the situation will be resolved one way or the other. But no matter how successful Israel eventually is in securing the release of the hostages and in degrading the ability of Hamas ever again to perpetrate a pogrom on the scale of last October’s, the issues that divide Palestinians and Israelis will remain in place either to be resolved eventually or never to be resolved.

I have written over these last months from many different vantage points, but today I’d like to put my favorite yarmulke back on and discuss Gaza from a theological point of view, from the point of view of our own tradition. And there’s a moment in the scriptural narrative that comes right to mind too!

Shortly after returning to Canaan with his family, Jacob settles in Shechem (today known more regularly as Nablus, a corruption of the Roman name for the place Flavia Neopolis). It turns out not to have been such a good choice however. Shortly after arriving there, Jacob’s sole daughter, Dina, heads into town to make some girlfriends among the locals. Nothing too strange there: Dina had twelve brothers and, as far as Scripture relates, no sisters at all. (The reference elsewhere in Genesis to Jacob’s “daughters” is generally taken to denote his daughters-in-law.) The basic idea seems harmless enough. Why wouldn’t she want to get to know some local women her age? Whether she is successful or not, Scripture doesn’t say. But what does happen is that she attracts the attention of one Shechem ben Hamor, the son of the local prince-in-charge, who is so drawn to her that he forces himself on her. What follows then is unexpected: having attacked her because he was drawn to her, he is now depicted as being drawn to her (possibly) because he attacked her…or at least because his intimate knowledge of her confirms his initial suspicion that Dina is lovely and worthy. And now he wants to marry her. His father approaches her father. An initial proposal is made, but Jacob refuses to answer and insists that he has to wait for his sons to return from wherever it was they were herding their cattle and take counsel with them.

What follows is one of the Torah’s darker stories. The brothers return and they are outraged. Why wouldn’t they have been? But, being vastly outnumbered, they decide to proceed stealthily. They agree to Hamor’s father’s suggestion that Jacob’s family and the locals ally themselves together as one people, which he suggests will happen when their children marry each other. The brothers appear to consider this, then respond formally by agreeing if  the men of Shechem agree to be circumcised. A Jewish girl marrying an uncircumcised man? They can’t imagine such a thing! Amazingly, the locals agree. And they do it too, proceeding—in their world with neither anesthesia nor sterile O.R.s—to have their foreskins removed.

And then we get to the even bloodier dénouement of the story. While the local men are still smarting from their surgeries and are obviously in a weakened state, two of Jacob’s sons, Simon and Levi, go on a killing rampage, executing all the males of the city, bringing Dina back home, making the local women and children their captives, and taking all local wealth as booty.

But what follows is the reason I’m writing about this story today to interpret it in light of the October pogrom, a brutal attack that also featured rape and the degradation of Jewish women as part of the foes’ attack plan. (That part of the Hamas attack has only just recently been told in detail: if you somehow missed the NY Times story on the matter, gruesome and harrowing as it is, click here.) Jacob, playing the traditional role of the golus-yid, cries out, “All you’ve accomplished is to make the surviving Canaanites hate me. Plus there are not that many of us—and now they will all gather up against us and murder not just me but my entire house…including all of you as well.” In other words, his primary goal here is to avoid riling the locals up, to avoid friction or hostility, and to stay safe. The brothers listen politely, then respond with a  single rhetorical question expressed in exactly four words in the original Hebrew: “Were we supposed to let him treat our sister as though she were a whore?”

The story provokes a lot of unanswered questions. But the issue really has to do with the final few lines cited above. Jacob’s chief goal here is to live in peace with the neighbors and he is apparently ready to overlook something as horrific as the rape of his own daughter to achieve that goal. He is therefore being depicted as the kind of person who prefers cowering in the shadows to risking the possibility of making people angry by standing up for himself and demanding justice. This is not meant to be a flattering portrait, nor is it one. But the portrait of Simon and Levi (and possibly, if they were in on it, Jacob’s other sons too) is also unflattering in the extreme. Rape is horrific. But in what justice system is someone other than the perpetrator punished? To go on a killing rampage that shows neither mercy nor forbearance to anyone at all in an entire city because of the deeds of one person—that is not meant to be a flattering portrait either. In the end, both sides are caricatures: one featuring Jacob as the apotheosis of nervous timidity and the other featuring Simon and Levi as the archetypes of extreme violence prompted not by the quest for real justice but by rage.

And what does that story mean in terms of Gaza? The key here is that neither portrait is meant to be flattering, let alone something to emulate. For Israel to have looked the other way after October 7 to avoid upsetting the locals and their fellow travelers in Iran and Lebanon (not to mention Turtle Bay) would have been fully unjustifiable from any point of view, including especially the moral. To annihilate Gaza entirely because of the actions of specific people would have been no less tragic and certainly morally wrong. But the correct response is what we actually saw: Israel going into Gaza with the specific goal of finding the perpetrators and bringing them to justice, and also doing whatever it was going to take to guarantee that Hamas would never be capable again of mounting that kind of attack on Israeli civilians. Despite the rhetoric of so many haters, I see no evidence that Israel has embarked on a campaign designed to solve the problem in Gaza the way Simon and Levi solved the problem in Shechem: with wholesale slaughter of all inhabitants as a kind of collective punishment for existing in the same place as terrible wrongdoers. That there have been casualties, including deaths, among civilians is terrible—and not something any normal person should not regret. But the civilian Gazans are not mere bystanders either: they are the ones who put Hamas in power in 2005 and so are not that different from the civilian Germans who overwhelming put the Nazis in power in 1933: both paid and are paying a truly bitter price for having put themselves under the governance of violent fanatics who could not have been clearer about their plans for their enemies.

In my opinion, Israel had no choice but to enter Gaza in response to the events of October 7. That the leaders of the nation chose to find a middle path between Jacob’s timorousness and Simon/Levi’s rage speaks well for the nation and its leadership. How this will all end, who can say? But to pretend that the Torah’s most specific lesson about responding to violence—and particularly to violence against women—has gone unheeded is simply incorrect. It merely requires reading carefully and thoughtfully. And it requires understanding that sometimes Scripture depicts a moral dilemma as a kind of crossroads not because either path is the correct one forward, but because neither is.