Loneliness: the burden of silence

"And Jacob had heard that he had defiled Dinah his daughter, and his sons were with his livestock in the field, and Jacob held his peace till they came" (traslation of v. 5 by Robert Alter)

*********************************************************

[Ya'akov actually keeps silent until the end of the story (ch. 34:30)]

"... This moment becomes the turning point in the story of Jacob... henceforth he will lose much of his paternal power and will be seen repetedly at the mercy of his sons, more the master of self - dramatizing sorrow than of his own family. This same pattern will be invoked in the David story: the father who fails to take action after the rape of his daughter and then becomes victim of the fratricidal and rebellious impulses of his sons." (from: The Hebrew Bible a Translation and commentary, Vo. 1. Robert Alter, 2019, p. 130)

****************************************************************

“…. A word about intimate harm and social harm. Some injuries are perpetrated in a hidden space – one on one: a person rapes his son, a woman experiences harassment by another person, and so on; But there are also vulnerabilities at the social level - such as the traditional halakhic stipulation that women should sit behind a partition inside a synagogue because their body is a spiritual disturbance to the community. This act of building a mechitza, a partition, is not just an act of exclusion, but it is an act of institutionalized sexual violence, defining the bodies of women and girls as a distraction from holiness. Rape or sexual violence perpetrated on the bodies of Jewish women or girls are another layer of this kind of violence which is based on an ancient, extensive, social, and religious infrastructure, one that defines our bodies as a tempting, and perhaps flawed, thing.

The intergenerational trauma discourse can be very helpful as we try to understand what is inhabiting our bodies, the bodies of Jewish women: not only as Jewish women, but also as women. Entire bookshelves full of Jewish-feminist texts have already been written on various dimensions of this question. But we took this knowledge and tried to thread the needle of this theoretical knowledge into our body, which beyond being a woman’s body and a Jewish body, is also a rabbi’s body. It can be extremely painful at times.

It seems to me that each of us needs to answer these questions for herself: What can a woman rabbi contribute to a conversation about healing from sexual assault? Does the rabbinate and Jewish spiritual practice have anything constructive to contribute to this conversation? Is it possible to repair Jewish society with Jewish tools, despite being saturated with so much violence against our bodies and souls?....”

{From - B’not Dinah, The Daughters of Dinah: A Look at Our First Years ,by Rabbah Gila Caine and Rabbi Ayala Miron Translation by Rabbi Efrat Rotem [CCAR Journal: The Reform Jewish Quarterly, Summer 2022, the Central Conference of American Rabbis, pp. 78-89]}

****************************************************************

I suggest reading the story of Bat Yiftach, or the story of the rape of Tamar, as the Haftrah for this week's Torah portion "Vayishlach". You can find the text here: www.sefaria.org/sheets/528920