Vayeitzei II: What about the women?

ותקרא את שמה דינה - ולא נכתבה הודאה על לדת הבת לדעת למה נקראת כן, שאין מודים על הבת כמו על הבן. ולהודיעך בא, שכל בני יעקב היו זכרים חוץ מזו. וכן בת אשר סרח. בכל שבעים נפש לא היו רק שתי בנות, יוכבד וסרח:

One of the most jarring things about the Tanakh to a contemporary reader in Western society is the way in which it simply devotes far less time and detail to women than it does to men. Whether one approaches this point critically or apologetically, it simply cannot be denied that this pattern neither matches our reality nor the commitment of virtually all—irrespective of religious perspective and lifestyle—to the spiritual life of women as a critical component of contemporary Jewish life. This point begs דרשני, some avenue of explanation, if the Tanakh is to be a guiding force in our lives today.

In the midst of a long narrative about the birth of Ya’akov’s children, 11 boys in all, we are told in Bereishit 30:21 that Leah also had a daughter, Dinah. This announcement is almost a side point, with no etymology given for her name (unlike all the others), and her seeming irrelevance to the natal arms race going on throughout the parashah between Rahel and Leah. More important, Dinah is often genealogically invisible. She is indeed mentioned as part of the count of 70 who descend to Egypt with Ya’akov, but she is not reckoned as a tribe, never given a distinct blessing and Bereishit 35:22 (as well as I Divrei Hayamim 2:1-2) simply states that Ya’akov had twelve children. [I will never forget when my then three-and-a-half year old daughter exclaimed upon hearing this verse when I learned it with her last year, “But there are thirteen!”]

This is, in my mind, one of the first places in the Torah where one truly needs to confront the issue of gender in terms of who the protagonists in the narrative are. The first couple obviously includes a man and a woman and Avraham, Yitzhak and Ya’akov are all paired with women with interesting and defining personalities that reach out at us from the story. But with Ya’akov’s children, we get the first glimpse of a dynamic that will expand over time to phrases like שש מאות אלף רגלי הגברים (Shemot 11:37), the directive אל תגשו אל אשה (Shemot 19:15) and the general omission of women from the censuses taken in Bemidbar, all of which point to a marginal role for women, wherein they are largely ignored or viewed as adjunct players.

Again, departing from the assumption that women can no longer be treated as adjuncts in our contemporary religious world—quite independent of the question of whether an egalitarian approach is the solution or that of the Beis Ya’akov school system—how do we best relate to these passages and teach them to our children, especially our daughters? I am always confronted with two main options: 1) I can note that there were many women present at the time, but the details of their lives were simply not considered important by the Torah. We might approach things differently today, but the Torah reflects its own reality and historical context. Dinah is mentioned here only because of the story we will later hear about her being raped (another instance of הקדמה!), but any number of other daughters of Ya’akov (some of whom seem to be referenced in Bereishit 37:35—ויקמו כל בניו וכל בנתיו—see R. Yehudah’s view on this verse cited by Rashi) were simply not significant enough to mention. This approach has the advantage of being historically honest and accurate, though it runs the spiritual risk of distancing ourselves from the Torah by locating it in a time, place and idiom far from our own and thus jeopardizing an intuitive sense of its eternal hold on us. 2) I can claim, in a case like this, that Ya’akov actually had only 12 sons and one daughter, and no other children. Similarly, in the count of 70 people headed down to Egypt, there were only three women: Dinah, Serah and Yokheved. The Torah would always mention women when they were present; it just happens that there were none. [One deals with Bereishit 37:35 by saying it refers to daughters and granddaughters, i.e., the three women named above (Ramban) or to daughters-in-law (see R. Nehemiah cited in the above Rashi).] The advantage here is that I assert the Torah’s interest in women as principals, when they happen to be there, and thus the text is a model for the active engagement of female personalities that one can relate to regardless of gender. The obvious disadvantage is that it is very hard to sustain this reading in light of the larger context of the Tanakh, especially the 600,000 figure given at the Exodus, which pointedly only counts the adult men.

Rashbam—without, I assume, any concern for the issue I am raising here—blends both approaches in his commentary here. On the one hand, he explains unapologetically that the birth of a girl was simply not as celebratory an event as that of a boy and, therefore, we are given no record of Leah’s thanking God for this child and the corresponding naming. On the other hand, he asserts that there indeed were only three women in Yitzhak’s clan (if we exclude daughters-in-law).

I honestly don’t know which approach is better for raising Jewish girls who we want to self-understand as full participants in Jewish life. In some ways, this problem is just part of the larger tension of peshat and derash that gets played out in Rashbam’s commentary. The peshat is (almost) always more satisfying as a read of the text and as an honest assessment of where our own assumptions differ from biblical ones. But derash is what makes the Torah relevant to us in an ongoing way, what transforms an ancient Near Easten text situated in the Iron Age and helps us understand it as God’s eternal Torah. How can we be faithful to one while maintaining the goals of the other?

Vayeitzei I: Just the Facts, Ma’am

ויקח - אחת: מאבני המקום - כדכת' ויקח את האבן אשר שם מראשותיו: על כן קרא שמו לוי - יש לומר שיעקב קרא לו שם:

I don’t want to jump the gun too early in this process (particularly since we haven’t yet gotten to Rashbam’s famous comment at the beginning of Parashat Vayeshev), but I think we can begin to say some useful things about what peshat means for Rashbam. As I mentioned in an earlier post, it seems to me that one of his core criteria for considering something peshat, is that it requires only the facts and details of the Torah itself to understand it. That is to say, once I need to interpolate external information in order to make my interpretation cohere, I have left the world of peshat for that of derash. A peshat interpretation reads like a planned, authored work of literature, prepared with its reader in mind. The peshat acts on the reader, who can passively absorb its meaning. Derash is an active process, whereby the reader acts on the text, exploiting its inconsistencies and lacunae to make points that find their origin outside of the text itself. Peshat is sacred Scripture, to be understood on its own terms, derash is religious language, where the text becomes the sacred lexicon for expressing broader religious insights and truths. We will have to test this hypothesis as we continue.

In any event, there are (at least) two places in our parashah where Rashbam implicitly assaults the midrashic read of the text cited by Rashi and offers a way of reading the text without any esoteric presumptions. The first is in Bereishit 28:11, where Rashi notes the discrepancy between the plural form מאבני, possibly suggesting that Ya’akov took multiple rocks and placed them under his head, and 28:18’s use of האבן, indicating a single rock. This then becomes an opportunity to assert that a miracle occurred here, whereby the multiple rocks were fused into one after fighting over which one would merit supporting Ya’akov’s head as he slept. Rashbam rejects this and asserts a reading that eliminates any need to posit this extracanonical story: ויקח מאבני can just mean that he took one of the many stones present, and this then matches perfectly with the subsequent description of Ya’akov’s removal of the single rock that lay under his head.

Second, in Bereishit 29:34, we are told that קרא שמו לוי, which distinguishes Levi, Ya’akov’s third child, as being the only child that is not named with the female form of קרא, suggesting that someone other than Leah named him. Rashi cites the midrash that this alludes to the angel Gavriel’s intervention in the naming of Levi, as a portent of the latter’s eventual priestly character. But Rashbam turns us back to the text and suggests that it must be that Ya’akov is the anonymous male namer here, thus freeing us from engaging angels or other beings that have not been introduced as part of the story.

For more examples of this sort of dynamic, see Rashbam on Bereishit 21:9 (where he claims that the word מצחק has no sinister connotation, but merely indicates an age of sufficient maturity such that Sarah realizes the time has come to act to secure Yitzhak’s primacy in the household), 25:27 (where interprets the phrase יושב אהלים to be a simple reference to shepherding, as opposed to a more esoteric reference to the study of some sort of primeval Torah), and 27:1 (where he insists that Yitzhak’s poor eyesight is solely a function of age, as opposed to post traumatic stress disorder from the Akeidah or Esav’s intermarriages).

In none of these cases do I think that Rashbam is necessarily rejecting the alternative reading; it is just that it is not peshat. He is invested in defending the notion that the Torah can also be read as a book without necessarily also seeing it as an esoteric repository of wisdom and magical tales.

Toledot III: Enriching the Narrative

אם לוקח יעקב - דרך חכמה אמרה רבקה ליצחק להרחיק יעקב מעשו ולא גילתה לו שבשביל שטימת אחיו עשתה כן:

Why is Ya’akov sent away to Lavan’s house back in Aram? According to Bereishit 27:42-45, it is in order ot run away from Esav, who, in his rage over having been robbed of his birthright and blessing, threatens to kill his brother. But according to Bereishit 27:46-28:9, it is in order to find a wife from the old country and to avoid intermarrying with the local Canaanite women. Indeed, two different verbs are used to command Ya’akov’s departure: In 27:43, Ya’akov is told קום ברח—run away, escape (a verb also used in Bereishit 35:1, 7 and Hoshea 12:13)—whereas in 28:2, he is told קום לך—go, travel. These two modes of departure really stand independent of one another: in one, Ya’akov flees in fear from danger; in the other, he strides off with purpose and mission. In one, he quickly abandons the land of his youth, in the other he walks in the footsteps of his ancestors, who also made purposeful journeys from one end of the Euphrates to the other. Both are critical aspects of Ya’akov’s narrative and history, but each stands on its own.

Rashbam, in keeping with his literarily sensitive approach to the Torah, links these two and introduces a marvelously complex dynamic into an already dramatic story. In his comment here, he casts Rivkah as concealing from Yitzhak the fact that Esav was in a murderous rage, instead preferring to enlist his support for Ya’akov’s departure by invoking the trump card of intermarriage. In this reading, the entire plot line about the fear of marrying Canaanite women is ultimately a tool Rivkah uses in order to get Yitzhak to play a role in hastening Ya’akov’s escape. The drama of Yitzhak and Rivkah operating in parallel universes—she firmly rooted in the oracle she heard and he groping in the dark—thus sees itself through to the end. They are never truly working as a team; even at this late stage in the story, Rivkah is still concealing things from him and finding ways to effect what she knows to be the divine will.

Yet another great example of a more linear reading of the Torah as a unitary narrative and the ways in which it adds nuances that transcend the individual narrative components.

Toledot II: Morality independent of Torah

עקב אשר שמע אברהם בקולי - על העקידה דכת' עקב אשר שמעת בקולי: וישמור משמרתי - כגון מילה דכת' בה ואתה את בריתי תשמור: מצותי - כגון מצות שמונה ימים דכת' כאשר ציוה אותו אלהים: חוקותי ותורותי - לפי עיקר פשוטו כל המצות הניכרות כגון גזל ועריות וחימוד ודינין והכנסת אורחים, כלם היו נוהגין קודם מתן תורה אלא שנתחדשו ונתפרש[ו] לישראל וכרתו ברית לקיימן:

Bereishit 26:5 contains the intriguing claim that Avraham was a faithful servant of God, observing, God says, משמרתי מצותי חקותי ותורתי. These are charged terms: Which mitzvot was Avraham observing? Which חקים? Aside from the exegetical point at stake here, there is a much larger question: What did human (and Jewish/Israelite) morality look like before the revelation at Sinai?

Rashi, based on midrashim, jumps in here to tell us that Avraham observed משמרתי—the peripheral restrictions set up to protect against violation of the Torah’s core prohibitions, such as not marrying relatives slightly more distant than those listed in Vayikra 18 and 20. He also observed מצות—those things that a person could intuit on one’s own, such as the prohibitions on theft and murder—as well as חקים—commands that have no intrinsic meaning (according to this midrashic tradition), such as the ban on eating pig or wearing mixtures of wool and linen. And finally, he kept תורתי—the oral traditions that accompany the written Torah, those traditions that go all the way back to the revelation to Moshe at Sinai.

Rashbam takes these verses in a very different direction, albeit building on Rashi’s (his grandfather’s) explanation of מצות as commands that form a kind of natural law that is intuitive to all and can be generated by reason alone. Rashbam carefully explains every term here to refer to something that is completely independent of the covenant at Sinai. Avraham heeded God by following the command to bind Yitzhak, the משמרת here refers to the command of circumcision, the מצות refer to the timing of circumcision, and חקים and תורות are just synonymous words for the category of natural law already spelled out by Rashi.

This approach obviously has some significant literary and historical benefits, in that it allows the Torah to read as a coherent work from beginning to end, without presuming some sort of anachronistic knowledge of Torah (with a capital T) by Avraham hundreds of years before Sinai. In that sense, it fits with Rashbam’s larger project of peshat—which I would increasingly define as what the Torah would mean if we just read it like a book. But there is also some important theology at stake here. For Rashi, there is an implication that one cannot be fully righteous without having a stake in the Jewish covenant, and the rabbinic version of it at that. The written and oral Torot are eternal and ubiquitious, available to the righteous independent of the axes of time and history. For Rashbam, Torah enters the world in history, built on a foundation of morality and a human-divine relationship that stand independent of it. The Jewish path is thus not necessarily the exclusive pathway to God, though it is for Jews. And here is the last piece of this commentary that is so intriguing. For Jews, Rashbam argues, the convenant at Sinai not only adds new obligations and supplements older ones, it casts morality itself in new terms, as part of the ברית, the covenant that now defines the relationship between God and Israel. Natural law, once generated by reason alone, is now, for the Jew, a convenantal matter as well, and part and parcel of our relationship with God. [For another example of this approach to renewal of old mitzvot at Sinai, see Rambam’s commentary on Mishnah Hullin 7:6; though note that he only discusses “ritual” mitzvot there.] The tensions between these worldviews are worth exploring further and I invite comments to try to flesh out the implications.

Toledot I: Oracles

(כג) ורב יעבוד צעיר - ולכך אהבה את יעקב שאהבו הקב"ה וכדכת' ואהב את יעקב: (כח) אוהבת את יעקב - שהיתה מכרת בתומתו וגם ממה שאמר הק' ורב יעבוד צעיר. והוצרך להקדים כאן אהבת יצחק לעשו ורבקה את יעקב להודיע מה שכתב לפנינו יצחק רצה לברך עשו ורבקה הערימה לברך את יעקב. (יג) עלי קללתך - עלי ועל צוארי, כלומר [אל תירא] כי היתה בוטחת במה שאמר לה הק' ורב יעבד צעיר:

At this critical moment in the prehistory of Yitzhak and Esav, Rivkah is privileged to receive a communication from God about the fate of the children in her womb. Seeking the reason for her pain, she is told in Bereishit 25:23 that a transnational struggle is unfolding within her, with the younger child destined to triumph over the older. Rashbam sees the entire subsequent narrative as emanating from this verse, which anchors Rivkah’s attachment to Ya’akov and justifies her machinations to make sure that he emerges as Yitzhak’s true heir. Yitzhak, Rashbam seems to imply, was unaware of this oracle, and, as a result, preferred Esav based on more earthly considerations. Rivkah, aware of the deeper historical implications, favored Ya’akov. This disparity helps fill in the gap in Bereishit 25:28, where we are told, without explanation that Rivkah loved Ya’akov more than ( to the exclusion of?) Esav. Her favoritism was rooted in this divine prediction and her sense that she was to help realize it. It also explains her confidence in Bereishit 26:13 when assuring Ya’akov that she would accept the brunt of any curse that might result from tricking his father—she knew that the plan had to succeed, as it was divinely ordained. Yitzhak, on the other hand, deaf to this oracle (and later blind), follows a different path. We thus have here another classic example of Rashbam’s use of הקדמה, an approach that sees the narrative of the Torah as setting us up for plotlines that will later emerge.

[For other examples of this dynamic in this parashah, see Rashbam on Bereishit 25:34 and 26:15.]

One other note: the ancient oracle of Delphi was famous for both predicting the future as well as doing so in a way that was marvelously ambiguous such that the acts and follies of human beings often ended up shaping its true meaning. Another approach to the above oracle is that Yitzhak did indeed hear it, but interpreted it differently. Part of the richness of Hebrew is the fact that word order in a sentence does not on its own determine what is the subject and what is the object. [Indeed, removing this ambiguity is often the entire function of the direct object designator את.] Take, for example, the first phrase of Yeshayahu 40:19: הפסל נסך חרש. This clearly means that the smith (subject) makes a molten statue (object), despite the fact that “statue” is the first word in the phrase. Similarly, here, Yitzhak may well have heard the same words, ורב יעבד צעיר, but would have understood צעיר to be the subject of the sentence, which would then be predicting that, after a long struggle, the younger brother would indeed serve the older, and thus he reserved his greatest affection for Esav. Rivkah, on the other hand, heard differently, and thus the tragic arc of this narrative unfolds based on dueling interpretations of the divine will. And perhaps like the Delphic oracle, the meaning of God’s words here were ultimately meant to be shaped by human will and initiative, with Rivkah gaining the upper hand.