I think I was supposed to have written a Dvar Torah for this week’s parsha; I had even sketched out clearly in my mind what it was supposed to include. But as I was praying the Kabbalat Shabbat service in my synagogue, I realized that I had completely dropped it out. As I don’t write or use the internet on Shabbat, I couldn’t post what I had planned.
But shortly before Shabbat, my cousin Mary Brett Koplen, a Rabbinical Student at the Jewish Theological Seminary of America, wrote this brief piece that is better than what I had planned. I now share it, unaltered, with her permission:
This Saturday morning, in the 5th Aliyah we experience Dinah's rape. This is an intense moment every year for anyone who might see themselves in Dinah. What strikes me this year is not the details of the rape, but what come after. Caught between an apathetic father and brothers who take this violence as their own assault to avenge, we lose Dinah. She disappears through the spaces of our Holy Book, never to be mentioned again.
Our Torah this week compels us to ask: what do we do in the after? Do we sit in silence like Jacob? Do we lament the ways another's experience of violence has effected us? We have done a lot of work in 2017 holding powerful men accountable. And yet, we still lament the loss of male talent when dangerous men are fired from jobs which they made dangerous for women. We do not stop to wonder: how many talented women have veered off career paths that no longer provide them a basic experience of human dignity. How many talented women have we lost?
Shechem and all of the men in his city are circumcised then murdered for this crime, which we refer to as an act of zealotry. We are taught to recognize these murders as crimes, and mourn them as loses. Yet there's another lost life that we don't see. After the rape, the silence, the revenge, we lose Dinah. We lose Dinah in a disappearance that isn't even accounted for.
What will we feel called to do as we sit through the reading of tomorrow's 5th Aliyah? Will we stayed seated in our silence? Or will we go out looking in search of the women who are lost? I pray that we can take lesson from this week's Torah. That we learn how to be in the After.
Shavua tov!