Memory and Midrash

Andrea Luna

In October my close friend of over 40 years died unexpectedly. After burying her and starting to deal with her estate, I realized that along with all Sue’s property I had inherited Auntie Bea’s silver Shabbat candlesticks. Many of us have an Auntie Bea, a family matriarch who looms larger than life in our childhoods and continues to dispense largesse until they die. Mine was Aunt Vera, Sue had Auntie Bea. I remembered the candlesticks well, they looked exactly like Joan’s and Bea Matlin’s (though Bea’s were brass). Sue’s Friday night candle lighting was usually at my house, with my candlesticks, and Auntie Bea’s candlesticks eventually disappeared from her fireplace mantle. As I packed and deconstructed Sue’s household, I looked for Auntie Bea’s candlesticks, visualizing them out of retirement and lit once again at my Shabbat table. It literally wasn’t until the last day, in the very last closet on the bottom of a stack that I found the box labeled “candlesticks”, and there, finally, I found Auntie Bea’s silver candlesticks. And they were totally and completely different than how I remembered them. I mean, totally.

I thought a lot about memory while writing this derash and how elusive true recall is in family stories...now, and way back then. Have you ever compared details of a childhood event with your siblings or parents or cousins when the versions didn’t quite match? At this moment in our national american narrative we are struggling to listen to narratives of our history that have barely, if at all been included in our written history, or suppressed, or, excuse the expression, “whitewashed’. We are being compelled to accept that all voices matter.

The fluidity of memory in family history and the stories of the Patriarchs and Matriarchs in Torah is meta-theme in my textual exploration. Families are complicated and contentious, full of unexpected twists and reversals of fate, secrets, manipulation, often violence and abuse, the overcoming of obstacles, the surrender to love or hate or both. Families are where our humanity plays out in lineages stretching back to the Garden, the mythic and mysterious place where we all began.

I love the Genesis stories in

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2 Torah because I love family stories. As the oral tradition was written down,

different versions of many stories were included in or excluded from the written record. Midrash is “the rest of the story” found in works outside the Torah text.

Midrash

Midrash and rabbinic readings "discern value in texts, words, and letters, as potential revelatory spaces", writes the Hebrew scholar Wilda C. Gafney. "They reimagine dominant narratival readings while crafting new ones to stand alongside—not replace—former readings. Midrash also asks questions of the text; sometimes it provides answers, sometimes it leaves the reader to answer the questions". ( Gafney, Wilda (2017). Womanist Midrash: a reintroduction to the women of the Torah and the throne (First ed.). Louisville, Kentucky. )

The Gemara, the development of the Mishna’s halakah contains both Aggadic and Halakhic Midrash. Often in studying a Torah portion my first go-to commentary is Rashi. Not surprisingly, there is a large body of commentary and study of Rashi’s commentary. Prof. Rabbi Marty Lockshin (in thetorah.com: Rashi on the Torah: What Kind of Commentary Is It? ) writes: “Rashi (Rabbi Solomon b. Isaac) wrote the most famous Jewish Bible commentary in history. Over 900 years later, scholars still argue about the nature of the commentary: Is it an attempt to explain peshat, the plain meaning of the biblical text, or is it an anthology of midrash?...”

We see that, in some texts, we can deduce what textually-based consideration led Rashi to include a midrashic explanation, and in a few others, Rashi himself explains his own thought process. These factors have led to a commonly accepted position among contemporary traditional Jews: that it’s always appropriate to ask the question מה קשה לרש"י “ – “What’s bothering Rashi (about the way the biblical text was written)?”

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R. Elijah Mizrahi, Rashi’s most famous super-commentator, took the ...position—that not every comment of Rashi is a reaction to a textual difficulty, but because Rashi prefers the midrash and does not want to interpret the verse according to the peshat.”

Today I will recount, briefly, different versions found in our Midrashic tradition, of the stories in the Torah’s “peshat”, “plain text” that we’ve been reading in the book of Beresheit and that that leads later to Asenat’s marriage to Joseph.

Jacob and Esau

So let’s scroll back, or using Margaret’s concept of a few weeks ago, flip through the layered transparencies, to the meeting of the brothers in Gen. 33:1: “Jacob raised his eyes and saw- behold, Esau was coming, and with him were four hundred men- so he divided the children between Leah, Rachel and the two handmaids. “

I find Esau very interesting: foil to his brother, a charismatic, robust, huntsman, his father Isaac’s favorite, hunting and riding around with the Caananite tribes who his mother Rebecca was afraid he would marry into (and he eventually did) while Jacob studied in Shem and Eber’s yeshiva.

Gen. 33 depicts him as a powerful, wealthy man, with a known reputation as a seducer of women. When Esau asks : “Who are these with thee” upon meeting, and the wives and children of Jacob prostrated themselves, Rashi quotes Genesis Rabbah 78(2) that when Joseph and Rachel stepped near, “In the case of all the others, the mothers approached before the children, but Joseph came in front of Rachel, because, “my mother is a beautiful

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4 woman, for fear that this wicked man will set his fancy on her, I will step in

front of her and prevent him from seeing her.”

Flip on another image: Torah (Gen.32: 22): says that Jacob, instead of following Esau as he promised, took his wives and two handmaidens and his eleven children and passed the ford Jabbok and sent them on. Why only eleven children?

Dinah

Because Jacob is so afraid of Esau that he locked Dinah inside a chest (some midrash say “a cage”) to keep Esau from setting eyes on her and wanting to seduce and marry her. (I imagine that Dinah was hidden in a basket hanging from one of the camels and covered when they passed Esau’s entourage. )

However, Yaakov was punished for this because had he let Esau marry Dinah, perhaps Esau would have become a tzaddik. (Rashi quoting Bereishis Rabbah 75:9) Instead she fell unto the power of Shechem. Aviva Zornberg sees Dinah’s tragedy as “the final point in a narrative chain

That goes back to Jacob’s failure to love his brother Esau.” (Genesis the Beginning of Desire, Chapter on Vayishlach, p. 226).

So we come to DInah’s “tragedy”: And the beginning of the story of Asenat’s parents, in the Midrashic storyline I’ve followed.

Gen. 34: Now Dinah- the daughter of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob-went out to look over the daughters of the land. Schehem, son of Hamor, the Hivvite prince of the region, saw her; he took her, lay with her, and violated her (Vayyaneha). He became deeply attached to Dinah, he loved the maiden...”
Dinah doesn’t speak at all in Torah. “Rape “ is the traditional reading of what transpired between them. Artscroll translates: “violated her”, JPS : “raped her”. Recent commentary reads it more specifically as “debasement’, lowering her social standing. Note in The Torah, A Women’s

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5 Commentary , p. 191: “Interpretive debates about the story and its import

revolve around the meaning of the word “innah”, here rendered as “rape”. The root “ayin-nun-hay” in Brown Driver’s Brigg’s lexicon is translated be bowed down”, “to come low” .

Shechem wants to marry Dinah,begs his father to negotiate for her, Hamor offers an alliance. Her brothers are outraged.

Dinah’s brothers trick Shechem and all his men into becoming circumcised (they are grown men, it’s not like infant circumcision) and then slaughter them all and take the women and children captive and plunder the entire city.

Jacob seems to disavow the massacre...or does he? Recent scholarship on Jacob’s tribal role in Canaan adds a new transparency to Dinah’s catastrophe.

An Earlier Jacob Tradition?

Jacob the Conqueror of Shechem by Dr. Rabbi Zvi Farber in thetorah.com:

“Hints in the biblical text suggest that an earlier version of the patriarch stories described them as ancient leaders of Israel, akin to the heroes in the book of Judges”. (This was one of the most interesting body of scholarship that I found in my research for this drash. Bear with me while I take a bit of a detour on our pursuit of the story of Asenat). )

Flip those transparencies ahead to Gen. 48:22, when Jacob, realizing that he is on the verge of death, offers some final words to Joseph:

“And now, I assign to you one shechem more than to your brothers, which I wrested from the Amorites with my sword and bow.”

Modern scholarship has struggled with the interpretation of Gen 48:22, ; “shechem” typically means “shoulder”, but can be used more broadly to mean “portion”. If it means the city of Shechem, when did Jacob take it

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with Sword and bow? Farber explores possible interpretations by commentators including that it symbolizes Jacob’s prayers that conquered the land. He finally accepts as the most satisfactory answer that Jacob conquered the land militarily...but that story is not recorded in Torah...and reflects a lost conquest tradition not preserved in the biblical corpus about Jacob making war on Shechem.

Years earlier, John Skinner (A Critical and Exegetical Commentary on Genesis, ICC 1, NY, Scribner 1910) offered a more radical hypothesis:

“The verse... seems to carry us back to a phase of the national tradition which ignored the sojourn in Egypt, and represented Jacob as a warlike hero who had effected permanent conquests in Palestine, and died there after dividing the land amongst his children.”

Skinner’s hypothesis was bold for his day, but it finds resonance in current... models of Pentateuchal studies that reckon with a fundamental distinction between the Patriarchal and the Exodus traditions.... that they are connected secondarily, and that they probably reflect independent accounts of the origins of Israel. In one version, God chooses a particular person or family, brings them to Canaan and promises that their descendants will eventually inherit the land. In the other version, God chooses a people in bondage, frees them, and brings them to the land.

For a long time it was assumed—and is still assumed by defenders of the traditional Documentary Hypothesis—that these two traditions were connected early in Israel’s history, before any of the Pentateuchal sources were written down. In recent years, however, a number of European scholars have argued that, in fact, the two traditions coalesced separately even in writing, and that the combination of the proto-book of Genesis with the (proto-)Exodus-Deuteronomy occurred very late, even after the Priestly redaction, making incorporation of the Genesis stories into the Pentateuch one of the last steps towards creating the overall structure of the Torah as it

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7 is known today. In other words, these scholars believe that the Patriarchal

accounts circulated separately as an independent written work (a proto-Genesis), not just as oral traditions. They further posit that the Joseph story was reworked in order to create a bridge between the otherwise unrelated books of Genesis and Exodus.

Jacob the Leader of the Israelites in the Dinah Story Skinner’s suggestion leads to a further intriguing possibility. Perhaps the passage in question is not merely an alternative story of the conquest of Shechem but may reflect an older version of the Dinah story, which has been heavily reworked and revised to form Genesis 34.

These examples bear witness to the existence of an older version of the conquest of Shechem story that portrayed Jacob as the conqueror. In this tradition, Jacob would have been the leader of a people as opposed to the father of a single family unit.

Conclusion of the final redaction: Suppressing Jacob the Conqueror - Why was the Jacob- as- Conqueror tradition suppressed? Skinner’s insight may be decisive: As the patriarch cycle began to merge with the Exodus tradition, it did not make sense to depict one of the patriarchs as conquering Canaanite territory before the return from Egypt.Wasn’t Abraham told during the covenant of the parts (Gen 15:13-16) that his descendants would take control of the land only in another 400 years? If Jacob were a conqueror then he would be acting too early and ignoring the explicit word of YHWH to Abraham.

In short, in the original form of the story, Shechem did not abduct and rape Dinah, he did not fall in love with Dinah, and his soul did not cleave to her. Like Samson with the woman from Timnah, Shechem simply saw her in the crowd and wanted to marry her.

In the original form of the story of the sack of Shechem, the Israelite offense was cold, calculated and completely unprovoked. The deceitful ploy

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8 and massacre were motivated by one concern: to amass great wealth and

appropriate women and children as slaves and concubines. In this form, the story served as a biting critique of the cruel and undignified act of betrayal of the children of Jacob. The sons of Jacob duped not only the people of Shechem but their own father as well, for they knew that Jacob would never have countenanced such an act of deceit and murder in the interests of plunder. By adding Dinah and presenting her as a victim of abduction and defilement, the editor rendered the massacre a response to a provocation. That version was not cold and calculated and it was not about greed. It was presented as a crime of passion and vengeance. As Jacob would later characterize it, it was a product of the brothers’ cursed wrath.

This explains why the editor continually refers to the “defilement” of Dinah. This is not meant as a justification of the massacre. Rather, it seeks to highlight the motivation behind the destruction. It provides the circumstances that allow us to appreciate the assailants’ distraught mental condition during their attack without thereby justifying it.

Justifying Jacob’s Curse: It is in this context that we must understand the editor’s depiction of Simeon and Levi harshly censuring their father to his face with the words, “Shall our sister be treated like a common whore”? This, again, does not serve as a justification, even if it comes at the end of the narrative. Rather, it contributes to the characterization of Simeon and Levi as insolent hotheads who have no respect for the pragmatic reason of their elders (whom they dupe) and fully deserve their final condemnation. We must recall that the final editor worked with Genesis 34 in conjunction with Jacob’s final words in Genesis 49. Thus, he presented the rebuke of Simeon and Levi to their father as a prelude to Jacob’s final condemnation of Simeon and Levi. He obviously was interested in justifying Jacob’s final curse.

This may also explain why he added the elements of Shechem’s love for Dinah subsequent to the defilement and abduction, and his active attempt

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9 to formalize the union with marriage.For if Shechem was trying to do the

right thing, then Jacob’s condemnation of the exaggerated reaction of Simeon and Levi in Gen 49:5-7 seems that much more justified. The editor’s choice to end with Simeon and Levi getting the last word adds punch to Jacob’s final curse, since it implies that he has been holding this in his entire life, and only now on his deathbed do these sons hear what he really thought.

Asenat

Gen.41:45: “Pharoah called Joseph’s name Zaphenath-paneah* (“he-who-explains-what is hidden” (Rashi; Rashbam), and he gave him Asenath daughter of Poti-phera, Chief of On* for a wife. (Poti-phera is identical with Potiphar [See Gen. 37:36], Joseph’s former master. That he allowed his daughter to marry Joseph vindicated Joseph in the eyes of the Egyptians from the charge that he had assaulted Potiphar’s wife).

Asenat is a supporting but pivotal character whose fate is woven into the Toldot, “lineage” of the families of Bereisheit. She has been on my personal “I will return to you” list for a few years, ever since I read in The Legends of the Jews, a multi volume collection of midrashim by Louis Ginzberg, that “Dinah died of grief when her daughter was given to Potiphar to raise.”

Dinah had a daughter?? Asenat? There is no mention of that in the official Masoretic text of Genesis. So I again went to the Midrash and contemporary commentaries.

Asenat was the main character widely disseminated in a popular religious story, a sort of heroic legend of Jewish character from Hellenistic or Roman times. It was part of the Greek Apocrypha, translated into Latin, Syriac, Armenian, Slavonic, and Ethiopic. Asenat is presented as a model of an Egyptian who becomes a Jewish proselyte, who renounces idolatry who seeks refuge in God. Pharaoh's daughter is thought to replace her in

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10 rabbinical tradition. Later in the story she is protected by Simeon and Levi

the avengers of Dinah.

More common is a Rabbinical narrative where Dinah is pregnant by Shechem when she is taken out of his house by her brothers (Yalk. Gen 146, Pirke R. El. 38, Targ. Yer. Gen. xli. 20, Midr. Aggadah, es. Buber, i,97).

The midrash I mentioned at the beginning of my derash says that she gave birth and died of a broken heart. When her brothers heard that she had given birth they wanted to kill the child to prevent public disgrace to the family. But Jacob intervened and arranged for her to be taken, but he first had an amulet, a golden disc inscribed with the name of God, put around her neck, and, according to one version, left her exposed under a thorn bush (“seneh”, hence her name “Asenath”) and the angel Gabriel carried her to the house of Potiphar in Egypt and where the latter’s wife was childless, and reared her as their own daughter. My personal midrash is that Jacob, as recent scholarship reveals, was a powerful personage and warlord in Shechem, orchestrated her adoption in Egypt by Potiphar. He cared enough for his grandaughter to stop his sons from killing her, and shows that by giving her the protective amulet.

Flipping ahead through a few transparencies: Asenat grows up and marries Joseph. That would mean that Joseph, son of Rachel and Jacob married his niece, his cousin Dina’s daughter. Dinah was the daughter of Leah and Jacob.

One rabbinic version had her give the golden amulet that Jacob put around her neck as a baby, to Joseph as a wedding gift.

Later, in a dramatic twist of fate, Asenat went up to Canaan with Joseph and their sons to devotedly nurse Jacob in his final days. And in another twist of fate, Shimon and Levi became devoted to her.

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11 I’ve spoken in the past about Mnemohistory: a religious story that is not

true history, but a cultural myth that becomes part of a tradition.

Prof Carl S. Erlich in thetorah.com

Although people often say that Judaism is a religion of history, it is more accurately a religion of memory. The stories of the Torah are not factual descriptions of our past as much as they are a record of how we think about our past and how we think about ourselves and our relationship with God. “

The midrashim I’ve cited today are just a few instances of a very large body of commentary that contains alternative versions of what’s in the Five Books of Moses, our written Torah. And even those books modern Torah scholarship is discovering, were often redacted, edited and even totally changed from much earlier versions. Our Torah is fixed, but Oral Torah is very fluid, evolving, murmuring in the white spaces between the transcribed words.

If I asked you all to channel your 20 year old self and write your life story, then asked you to channel your 40 year self, then perhaps your 50 year self, or your 70 year old self, the versions of your story would probably change. And if I asked you to then write a version of your story that wasn’t intended for anyone but you, with all the edited sins, secrets, flaws, consciousness or unconsciousness lapses, regrets, paths not taken, that’s “the rest of the story”.

And then there’s the Toldot of our personal Book, like the Toldot of Torah, the lineages, the stories that play out over generations, which
don’t end when we die. We may be unaware of the totality of the mystery and plot lines and ancient history that are spiralling through our individual lives, but they are there, in our blood, in our DNA, physical and spiritual. And like our sacred Book, there is the Hand of God, the Beshertness, the

12 mysterious prompts, the often seemingly minor details and people and

events that play out in cataclysmic events.

So hold onto that talisman glimmering in etheric beauty around your neck, the amulet that you received from a grandmother or grandfather or aunt long past; it is engraved with the shimmering, unpronounceable name of the Great mystery and reminds you that your story is being written by the Mystery Herself.