A Dvar on Vayishlach

What a piece of work.

What shall we take from Chesler's demented exegesis?

First, let's contextualize; many readers will know that Chesler has built a cottage industry of demonizing Muslims and promoting her own toxic variety of right-wing Zionism. A woman of modest intellectual powers, she famously described the Buddhist political heroine Aung San Suu Kyi as a Muslim, regarded India as an "Arab land", and blamed Hamas for launching attacks on Israel pre-1967 (Hamas, of course, didn't exist in the '60's). Her voice is reliably found among the most extreme chorus of retro-Zionists, explaining away Israel's every outrage with an insouciant indifference to history or morals. 

 Chesler begins by detailing the crimes against women apparently rampant among the darkies of Algeria, Bangladesh and Darfur, yet neglects to mention Israel's unhappy place at the pinnacle of sexual trafficking. Just an oversight, I'm sure. 

One must always be suspicious of  an apologist for Israel compulsively reporting upon the incidence of the (admittedly awful) murderous misogyny found in some quarters of Arab or Muslim or Hindu society. Proportional to population, does Chesler imagine that more women fall to Arab patriarchy than to the Western variety? Does she think that the voice from the grave calls more loudly if the corpse resulted from fucking while unmarried than from not getting that Bud Light to her cranky sociopath of a husband quickly enough?

But what has this to do with her nominally apolitical bit of biblical explication? OK, let's get to Chesler's money shot; the story of Dina. Briefly, a woman is raped. In retribution, her brothers decimate a city, guilty and innocent alike. Moral? By not blaming their sister for her plight, Shimon and Levi demonstrate their feminist bona fides, far more evolved than the benighted wogs all around them (although I recall Deuteronomy authorizing the stoning of one's wife should the little harlot be found unintact on the wedding night). Their actions underscore their recognition that rape is especially repugnant to God, thereby illustrating their superior spiritual enlightenment. And the murdered multitudes? Naughty, that, but let's not waste our beautiful minds on such things, to quote one of Chesler's equally addled contemporaries.

Note the utility of her interpretation to Chesler's intellectually famished and ethically depraved prescriptions re the Palestinians; even the most murderous assault upon them may be pardoned since Israel only acts in self-defense and truly regrets all the collateral damage; besides, like those of Dina's brothers, Israel's actions have great spiritual import. Not simply massacres, they speak to a special relationship with the Almighty. These are the calculations of brutes.  

A very sorry performance from Chesler, but sadly not atypical of her exertions. 

Are you really incapable of composing a scathing polemic against Chesler without whitewashing the distinction between overzealously and sloppily avenging an act of rape and commiting the uncommon barbarity of an honor killing? Or does your sense of honor preclude that?

One paragraph out of thirty-one mentions that distinction, and because it does so in a way that barely cites some obvious, attendant cultural geography, you rail against Chesler in a way that makes the cold, lifeless hand from Edward Said's corpse long for a surrogate finger to point at the nearest passerby amid wild accusations of chauvinism.  

And in the righteous and furious flight of you and your indigenous valkyries, you apparently missed this one:

"Please understand: The Torah and Talmud's position on rape is complicated, contradictory and, from my point of view, quite misogynistic e.g. raping a married woman is a capital crime since she is another man's "property;" but, the rape of a single, un-betrothed woman sentences her rapist to a lifetime of marriage to her unless she won't have him. He must still pay her father a monetary fine."

That's some insouciant indifference to history or morals.

As you were.

"...whitewashing the distinction between overzealously and sloppily avenging an act of rape and commiting the uncommon barbarity of an honor killing?"

First of all, congrats for descending to Cheslerian depths of moral degeneracy by describing the massacre of countless innocents as "overzealous and sloppy". Yeah, that captures the ethical significance of mass murder perfectly.

Second, I don't mean to efface the difference between civicide and honor killing at all. While moral calculations of this sort are famously troublesome, I'd guess that, if they had to, most observers would consider the wholesale slaughter of the guiltless a tad naughtier than a single honor killing.

All that bit about Said and "indigenous valkyries" is indecipherable. Please resubmit in English.

Finally, you will note that my "indifference to history or morals" comment referred to Chesler's disgusting fondness for celebrating Israeli criminality, not to her efforts at biblical interpretation.   

What really happens in this Torah portion?  Shechem, a Hivite, rapes Dina. But he also avows his love for her and wants to marry her.  Dina has no voice here, so we have no idea what she thinks.

Shechem's father makes an offer to Jacob, Dina's father, to essentially unite the Hivites and the Israelites through intermarriage and sharing the land.  He is willing to pay whatever Jacob asks to seal the deal.  A very generous offer by the standards of the time. 

Jacob's sons are dead set on revenge, but pretend to agree on condition that all of the Hivite men become circumcized.  Amazingly, they agree to these terms.  While they are in dibilitated due to the operation, two of Jacob's sons descend on the Hivites, massacre all their men and rescue Dina.  Whether Dina wants to be rescued is unknown for once again, she has no voice.

Meanwhile, the rest of Jacob's sons plunder the Hivite town, seizing all their proprety and taking all their children and wives as captives, who will then presumably be raped and/or forced into marriages with their Israelites captors. All this deception, bloodshed and rapine to protect the honor of poor silent Dina!

Jacob's reaction is one of horror. He correctly declares "You have brought trouble on me, making me odious among the inhabitants of the land."   

 From this story "odious" story, Chesler derives a feminist message?  Apparently the fate of the Hivite women are none of her concern.  

What a shonde! 

While your willingness to accuse those you disagree with of "celebrating Israeli criminality" is as predictable as the tides, I suggest you look up the word "presentist" (in a historical context) before directing phrases such as "moral degeneracy" at me. It might even exist in a few English dictionaries.

There is absolutely nothing wrong with recognizing that the bible represented a moral advance for its time, and drawing inspiration and practical lessons from that fact, while accepting that the times in which we currently live are different. To judge the morals of people from long ago using standards that they hadn't developed betrays a sense of historical illiteracy. I'd have thought such an insight would be obvious to someone who distinguishes between current Israeli acts and biblical interpretation, but perhaps not.

Sorry you didn't like the quips on Said and the rest. I suppose that's why you pretended not to understand them.

On a more philosophical note, I'd argue that honor killings are worse than committing acts of excessive brutality (is that an acceptable way to put it?) toward bystanders to a crime. While targetting civilians innocent of an act with which they are peripherally associated (but not necessary culpable) is bad, I don't see how it rises to the level of targetting and killing an actual victim of a criminal act. The latter is especially warped and represents a shifting of blame that goes above and beyond the former. To redefine the victim of a crime as the perpetrator of that same crime is not something for which I can find precedent in any moral code, and seems like an especially egregious act of cognitive and moral dissonance. But the construction of eleborate ways in which to protect one's "honor" - (a pretty outdated concept in itself) - will apparently do that.

"...your willingness to accuse those you disagree with of "celebrating Israeli criminality"..."

No, I accuse those who celebrate Israeli criminality of celebrating Israeli criminality. 

"To judge the morals of people from long ago using standards that they hadn't developed betrays a sense of historical illiteracy."

Except, I guess, when those standards comport with our own. That is, if a biblical people seemed to have acted like barbarians, why, that's only because I'm judging them by contemporary standards. But if they do something that seems to express current moral thinking, well then, clear evidence of an ethical time machine-they're behaving like 21st century people! Good for them!

Anyway, didn't Jacob's reaction, cited in the comment above, suggest that, even by the standards of the time, his sons' behavior might have been a little...ethically gamy?  

"...the bible represented a moral advance for its time..."

Here your postmodern respect for the "standards of the time" seems to have vanished, replaced by a sort of normative absolutism. What exactly is a "moral advance"? To recognize something as an advance, we would need an exterior standard with reference to which we could distinguish advances from retreats. Your implicit standard is, of course, "what middle class Western members of post-industrial capitalist like to think is right". But, as your former genuflection to "standards of the time" indicates, you acknowledge the highly contingent nature of such beliefs. "Moral advance" is a more problematic notion than you seem to realize.

Also, as the previous poster noted, we don't really know what Dina wanted, but it sure suits Chesler's (and, I guess, your) purposes to make her and her brothers out to be latte-sipping east coast feminists.

Sadly, I was being entirely serious when I said that your "quips" were indecipherable. Pick a random person on the street. Show that person your "quips". If s/he claims to tease any meaning whatsoever from that tangle of words....well, s/he's lying. Nice try, but you still must rewrite.

"...(killing civilians) is bad, (but) I don't see how it rises to the level of targetting and killing an actual victim of a criminal act."

Like when Israel makes West Bankers strangers to their own land, then kills them when they resist being hemmed in further to ever-shrinking cantons? That's what you mean, right?

Gee, maybe you're right. Maybe that is worse. 

"Except, I guess, when those standards comport with our own."

Are you taking issue with Chesler here or with me?

"Here your postmodern respect for the "standards of the time" seems to have vanished, replaced by a sort of normative absolutism. What exactly is a "moral advance"? To recognize something as an advance, we would need an exterior standard with reference to which we could distinguish advances from retreats. Your implicit standard is, of course, "what middle class Western members of post-industrial capitalist like to think is right". But, as your former genuflection to "standards of the time" indicates, you acknowledge the highly contingent nature of such beliefs. "Moral advance" is a more problematic notion than you seem to realize."

Talk about incomprehensible writing, Ismail! You must think yourself very clever to couch your ideas, or lack thereof, about what constitutes a "moral advance" in some kind of ambiguous, all-purpose caveat about the entire concept being a "problematic notion". But where on earth did my statement reveal anything resembling a "normative absolutism"? I give you credit if, by this phrase, you mean to imply that arguments can be made against seeing something understood to be an advance as such. That's honestly a clever one and your point is taken, if that's what you meant. But to say that my implicit standard is ""what middle class Western members of post-industrial capitalist like to think is right" is really a straw man. I said nothing of the sort, and I disagree with that in any event. If anything, I'm inclined to disagree with what many if not most "middle class Western members of post-industrial capitalist like to think is right." And while it's unclear to me that their beliefs as a whole (if one can identify them) are contingent upon anything of import to this discussion, their beliefs on an individual basis are certainly diverse enough to warrant further clarification before inserting such a broad appeal to them here as a way to describe what you suppose it is that I think.  

The "exterior standard" is the standard that existed at the time - not too hard to define.

I won't be rewriting anything. Since you're a plucky enough grammarian to have rewritten things I've stated in the past without much of a change in meaning, I don't find it a stretch to suppose that you understood what I meant above. I admit that there might have been a clumsy sense of subject-verb agreement in the dependent clause of one of those (and so what if there was?), but I find it hard to believe you would be that bitchy about my referring to Edward Said's lifeless hand in an anthropomorphic way. Can his hand not long for something over which it no longer has control? Is that what you're so perturbed about? For you to be this sensitive over bad poetry makes it easier for me to understand why do such a fantastic job inflating your sense of outrage over so many other, infinitely less trivial things - inserting puffery in places where clearer arguments would really be more helpful to everyone.

But here comes the real knee-slapper:

"Like when Israel makes West Bankers strangers to their own land, then kills them when they resist being hemmed in further to ever-shrinking cantons? That's what you mean, right?"

"Gee, maybe you're right. Maybe that is worse."

I've got to admit it takes some big, well-contoured balls to willfully confuse being considered culpable for an act that was perpetrated against you with any reason for which "Israel" kills West Bankers. If anyone is being killed by Israel solely for being a resident of the West Bank, then your drivel might make more sense. And I'm sure this happens among settlers (i.e. not "Israel" doing the killing) and sometimes through the confused and blundered actions of unsteady 18-year olds in the emotionally raucous heat of battle in the IDF (when their own lives are immediately at stake). But of course since that's what you want to believe as an all-purpose generalization, in your mind it must take on the appearance of self-evident, absolute truth - every other consideration be damned. And regardless of whether any such victims were actually evicted from anywhere in Israel. But of course, there is no such thing in your mind as a "problematic notion" when you avail yourself of the opportunity to cast Israel as the empowered agressor - and therefore 100% responsible for the existence of all evils committed between the Jordan River and the Mediterranean Sea - and everyone else as the disenfranchised victim - helpless, innocent and without the capacity to make wise, courageous or fruitful decisions. To you, anything more realistic, (and less Marxist), would be a much more problematic notion.  

I sometimes think that what you fear the most is the eventuality that Palestinians might take responsibility for anything - (other than an occasional suicide bombing). I admit that this thought might scare the hell out of me too. But it's still something that will have to occur someday. Just not today, right? 

As Phyllis Chesler tells us, rape is always wrong.  Whatever the faults of Levi and Simeon, rape remains wrong.

Israel is the country that had the first head of government, Golda Meir, who was neither the wife, like Sirimavo Bandaranaike, nor the daughter, like Indira Gandhi, of a previous head of government.