Home, Endangered
A #MeToo Midrash
Elana Stein Hain
Elana Stein Hain is Director of Faculty and a Senior Fellow at the Shalom Hartman Institute of North America. She is writing a book called Circumventing the Law: Ends and Means in Rabbinic Jurisprudence.
Sometimes the very institutions we count on put us in danger.
A child is abused by parents or teachers: the people and places meant to safeguard them become a source of danger. A congregant is harassed by their rabbi: the figure meant to inspire instills fear, and a place of belonging provokes alienation. A professional is harassed by a supervisor or board member, and the organization responds by protecting the aggressor; those meant to promote flourishing stifle inconvenient truths.
Concerns about victimization and the misuse of power, especially around money and gender, have erupted in the past few years of #MeToo scandals, in society generally as well as in the Jewish community. Concerns about victimization at home and about misuse of protective structures around race have only intensified during the Covid crisis, and these too carry important resonances for Jewish communities.
We enjoy so much infrastructure for shaping well-ordered communities and society: homes, schools, religious institutions, charitable and social organizations, government, law enforcement, court systems, and more. And we need them, desperately. When they work well, they cultivate healthy people and communities. They promote the common good, reward productive behaviors, and discourage bad behaviors. We rightly invest these institutions and the people who lead them with a great deal of authority and trust.
Nonetheless, it is precisely our need for these institutions and leaders and our trust in them that allow systems created with good intentions to be manipulated to hurt good people. To invest someone with the confidence that they can lead you, while also subjecting them to oversight and scrutiny, can cause cognitive dissonance. It is destabilizing to think that the structures we rely on also need us to oversee them. Too often, our need for these institutions and leadership deters us from reflecting on how power is being used and abused, lest we find something that threatens to unravel the narrative or the success that surrounds them; lest the contributions they have made and continue to make to our community become undone. We find it more expedient to look away.
“When we remain fearfully unwilling to interrogate how power is negotiated in our trusted and even sacred places, we allow for bad actors and bad systems”
So much of our recent experience in America — from #MeToo to an anti-racist movement against police brutality — has laid bare a simple truth: when we remain fearfully unwilling to interrogate how power is negotiated in our trusted and even sacred places, we allow for bad actors and bad systems to go unchecked. We create victims who suffer in silence. Telling the stories of those violations of trust — and the ways they are, or might be, repaired — is one of the tools we have for repairing our institutions. But such stories are not easy to tell.
The corruption of trusted institutions that should serve as homes for our communities is negotiated in a heart-pounding way in a thirteenth-century French Jewish folktale recorded in Hebrew in the early-twentieth century anthology Otsar HaMidrashim. In this story, a pious protagonist fends off serial rape and murder attempts. While female identity is fundamental to her victimization, the story raises broader questions about the ethical use of power. Like Chaucer’s slightly later tales, it engages the damsel in distress motif as well as dramatic heroics; indeed, The Tale of the Jewish Cadi and His Pious Wife in the Arabian Nights1 is a close cognate of our story. But the folktale is full of Torah as well, with rich allusions to Biblical and rabbinic texts, and plot twists that subvert the expectations that the medieval genre usually entails.
Here is how our story begins2:
It happened that a man went off to do business and left his wife in the care of his brother, and commanded his brother: My brother, watch over (literally, “place your eyes and heart upon”) my wife to provide for her and to protect her (literally, “to serve her and to guard her”) until I return in peace. And his brother responded: I shall do as you say. The man left for business to a far-off place, and the woman was left alone under the care of her brother-in-law (literally, “in the hands of her husband’s brother”). What did he do? He would come to her every day and say: Submit to me, and I will do all that you want, and I will give you whatever you want. She would say to him: God forbid! For any who denies her husband is as one who denies her Creator! Moreover, such a woman would be punished in Hell. And also, my husband is your brother, and he deposited me with you to protect me rather than to harm both me and you! How could you even deign to place a hand on your brother’s deposit (pikadon)? He gave me to you as a deposit, without [permitting you] to enter a domain which is not yours! Moreover, I am your brother’s wife, and I am Biblically forbidden to you during his lifetime! And anyone who covets his fellow’s wife will lose his money, will eventually contract scale disease, and will be judged in Hell — to descend and never to ascend.
The corruption is immediate. The protagonist is in her own home, the primal institution of safety and security, in the care of a trusted family member. And yet she is in danger. Out of necessity, her husband has placed his confidence in his brother. Our heroine becomes the victim of this necessity and of this confidence. Even as a victim, however, she expresses herself in a clear, booming voice. She advances arguments — drawn from a shared institution, the Torah itself — to explain why her brother-in-law’s actions are wrong. Her knowledge of Torah runs deep: she knows the legal nuances of the difference between a gift and a deposit (pikadon), and she employs these concepts to argue with her brother-in-law. Indeed, she goes a step further: she makes claims about reward and punishment, though the particulars of her claims are unfounded in the Torah text itself.3
He will not listen. The story continues:
“Take the pail and go draw water.” When he left to the water, he (the brother-in-law) jumped at her and wanted to rape her. And he said to her, “Do my will.” And she screamed a great and bitter scream — and there was none to save her — until he left her alone because she screamed. And he went out to the market and hired false witnesses against her, telling them: “Come and testify that you saw that I found her consorting with her house servant.” What did those evil people do? They came before the Sanhedrin (the supreme religious court), and they brought her before them, and they testified: “We saw such and such that this Jane Doe did with her servant.” And the Sanhedrin sentenced her with stoning. Immediately they took her and placed Egyptian rope around her neck and took her out to the stoning house outside of Jerusalem, stoned her, and placed upon her a heap of stones, as is the law for one who has been stoned.
Notice whose voice is heeded, who is trusted. On the one hand, the protagonist’s voice is heard; her screams scare off her attacker. The threats of shame and repercussions, conventions of the system itself, scare him away. Yet injustice is delivered by voices deemed more powerful than her own: the servant heeds her brother-in-law’s orders to leave the house, the witnesses testify falsely, and the Sanhedrin accepts the testimony and pronounces judgment. All the while, the protagonist does not speak at her trial. The system ignores her voice.
“Our folktale inverts the biblical Joseph story: the man holds the power, and the female protagonist tries to maintain sexual purity.”
The Biblical Joseph story echoes here in the background: Potiphar’s wife tries to seduce Joseph, a slave in her home. When he wards off her advances, she accosts him until he runs away. In the aftermath, she claims that Joseph attacked her and ran when she screamed, and so has him thrown into jail. Our folktale inverts the situation: the man holds the power, and the female protagonist tries to maintain sexual purity and is (not thrown in jail but) “immediately” given the death penalty. This woman is pious like Joseph. She is clearly the hero of the story, with whom we are meant to sympathize. And like Joseph, her own family abuses her.
Our protagonist is not safe at home even though she does everything right: she is pious and advances Torah arguments, which represent the foundations upon which her home community is built. She is endangered by the institutions meant to protect her: by her family, by her neighbors, and by the court itself.
The story could have ended here in tragedy. She has been killed by injustice. And yet she will not rest:
And it was on the third day, a man came from a different city who was bringing his son to study Torah in Jerusalem. When they came to the house of stoning, it became dark outside and they could not reach Jerusalem, and they slept that night in that place. And they put their heads on the heap of stones and slept there. Then they heard a voice speaking from within the stones, sighing and screaming and saying: “Woe is me that I have been stoned due to calumny!” And the man heard the voice speaking from within the stones, and he turned the stones over the whole night to one side, and he saw that it was a woman! And he said to her: “Who are you, my daughter?” And she said to him: “I was the wife of so-and-so.” And he said to her: “What are you doing here?” She told him: “This is what happened, and they stoned me, though I have done no crime or violence.” She said to him: “Sir, where are you going?” He responded: “To Jerusalem to teach my son Torah.” She said to him: “If you will take me to my country, I will teach him Torah, Prophets, and Writings.” He said to her: “But do you know how to learn/ teach?” She said: “Yes.” Immediately, he took her to his country with him, and she taught his son Torah.
A damning scene: She is safer in the dark of night, outside city limits, buried under boulders, with strangers, than she was in her own home.
Like God revealing the Torah at Sinai, she appears from beyond on the third day.4 This father, like Biblical Jacob envisioning God in a dream as he sleeps with his head on a rock, hears the protagonist’s voice, a voice worth listening to. The man traveling to teach his son Torah — in his own way part of the very same system — wants to hear her story, and believes her story! Though he owes her nothing, he listens, he trusts. She knows who she is, but now others will too, because someone is finally willing to listen.
In the Book of Ruth, Boaz ask Ruth at granary: “Who are you, my daughter?” By contrast, our hero’s redemption does not come through marriage. Instead, she redeems herself through her surprising knowledge of Torah.5 Each time I read this part of the tale, I relate to this woman’s struggle to find her inner home in Torah itself. She can believe in herself all she wants, but until at least someone else in the world believes in her too, she is shouting in the wind, or under a pile of boulders. In this case, the traveler, himself on a righteous mission, offers her an alliance that helps her to find that home, literally and figuratively.
“She knows who she is, but now others will too, because someone is finally willing to listen.”
Had the story ended here, we would be left with a vague, but somewhat satisfied feeling that she will be fine, maybe even become a religious reformer. But as soon as she is in her new home, more troubles arise:
One day, the servant of the house became interested in her and said to her: Submit to me and do my will, and I will give you whatever you desire. But she did not wish to sleep with him. What did the servant do? He took a knife and wanted to kill her, but [missed and?] hit the young lad [instead] and killed him and ran off. And the news reached the lad’s father’s house that the lad had died, and he told the woman: “Since this is the case, leave my house and go on your way. Because every time I see you, my heart rages and clamors over my son.”
She is once more in the domestic space, where a reader might expect a medieval woman to be safe. Yet once again she’s endangered. In another inversion of the story of Joseph and Potiphar’s wife, the house servant holds the power, and she finds herself trapped. The boy, her student, becomes collateral damage. Perhaps she would have fared better had she remained underneath the boulders outside the city. Perhaps the family who took her in would have fared better had they not done so. Once again, she ventures out to the margins.
What did the woman do? She went on her way, and when she got to the ocean’s edge, a pirate ship came and took her captive. And God caused a torrential wind on the ocean, and there was a great storm, and the ship was close to breaking apart. And the sailors saw and cried each to one another and said to each other: “Let us draw lots to know who is accountable for this evil that has befallen us.” And they drew lots, and the lot came out on the woman. And they said to her: “Tell us, what is your occupation?” And she said to them: “I am a Hebrew, and I fear the God of the heavens Who made both the sea and the dry land.” And she told them all that had happened to her. What did the men do? They were filled with mercy for the woman, and God made a miracle for her, that the pirates did not touch her. And they threw her to the dry land and made for her a small dwelling. And the ocean quieted from its intensity, and the ship went on its way.
Pirates symbolize homelessness: they have no home, floating instead from place to place, seizing what they want along the way. If we have been paying attention so far, we know that here, ironically, she will be safe. A group of bandits protect her more than her own brother-in-law, more than her own religious court, more than her own neighbors and colleagues.
She has insisted on the primacy of Torah and fear of God. And here, in the place you might least expect, God shows up to validate her claims. She has morphed from Joseph into Jonah, the Bible’s most successful and poignant prophet. Like Jonah aboard the ship, this woman teaches her pirates a lesson. Unlike Jonah’s sailors, however, her pirates do not throw her overboard to save themselves. When she relates her story, they not only believe her; they help her to build a new world and home for herself far away from her native society. The villains become the heroes, while would-be heroes lurk in the background as villains. Only by stepping out of the old order into a new existence can she be safe. She has finally found a true home.
From now on, God helps her fulfill her original prophecies:
And this woman remained in the place and became a great and experienced healer. And God made available to her all kinds of herbs in the world, and she was able to use them to heal all manner of illness — including zav (illness related to seminal emissions), scale disease, and all illness. And this woman ascended further and further, and collected gold and silver, until she was renowned throughout the known world.
Our victim becomes a healer. Having established herself far from home, she cures the very diseases whose sufferers must, according to the Torah, “leave the camp.” The tale associates these diseases with sexual impropriety and with slander.6 Only here, “outside the camp,” can she cure them without being harmed by them. Only here is she known and valued.
Before long, however, her husband returns to find that all has changed:
Eventually her husband returned from his business to Jerusalem where he lived and heard the news around town that his wife had been stoned.What did God do? God brought great scale disease upon those people who had testified falsely against her, and upon her brother-in-law. They heard that there was a matron healer in the islands, and they said to one another: “Let us go to the healer.” And the man said to his brother: “Go with us.” All four of them (including her husband) traveled until they reached her place. When they entered, she immediately recognized them, but they did not recognize her. They said to her: “Our mistress (adonatenu — feminine of master), we have come from a faraway land, for we have heard that you are a great healer. Heal us from our scale disease and take from us an abundance of silver and gold.
The tale comes full circle. When her brother-in-law tried to seduce her, she warned him that he would lose his money, contract scale disease, and descend into Hell. And here we are: he has scale disease and is about to give away his money, while she has money and has ascended in stature. We know what is coming: his and his collaborators’ ultimate descent.
She said to them: “I cannot heal anyone until they tell me their greatest transgression, for otherwise the healing will not work.” They said to her: “We have done such-and-such.” She said to them: “I see on your faces that you are great sinners and that you have not actually revealed to me all of your sins, and so long as you continue to cover up your crimes, the healing will not be effective.” What did they do? They told and confessed, and they did not hold back out of shame, and related the whole story right in front of her husband! She said to them: “You have done evil, and your own mouths have testified against you. I swear that I will not heal you, for all the healing in the world cannot work for you. For God is not a human being who will lie. For God spoke via Moses, God’s servant and chosen one, and through God’s servants the prophets, as it is written: ‘Do not go as a talebearer in your nation, and do not stand idly by the blood of your fellow.’ Talebearing brings evil, and you are evildoers. I, the woman standing before you, am the person to whom you did all of these evil things. And you sent me out to be stoned as a result of your lying tongues, and yet God saved me due to God’s great mercy and kindness. And this man whom you have brought with you to me is actually my husband. And God knows the secrets of the world and the secrets of all creatures, and God brings all secrets out into the open, as it is said: ‘And [God] shall give a face to secrets.’” And those three people were stricken with scale disease and died from it. Immediately, the man understood the whole scenario and knew that this was his wife. And they were happy and gladdened of heart, and they gave praise to their Creator for all of these miracles.
Come and see how great the punishment is for calumny and false testimony. And one who spreads false reports will be stricken by scale disease. And all God-fearing people should keep their tongues from speaking evil, as it is said: “One who guards their mouth and tongue keeps themselves from distress (Proverbs 21:23).”
The protagonist herself now assumes judicial authority. She will prosecute the crimes that the original court did not by forcing the perpetrators to admit their wrongdoing, to unearth her from the pile of untruths that they have heaped upon her. If she was once the beleaguered Joseph of Potiphar’s house, she has now become the triumphant Joseph revealing himself to his brother-tormentors. Unlike Joseph, however, she does not forgive. She metes out punishment.
Her decision raises significant questions about forgiveness and about how to define justice. In the Arabian Nights version of the story, the protagonist forgives her tormentors. In our tale, she is judge, jury, and executioner. Is the death of these men inevitable, or could they have been rehabilitated? Is violence her only choice given the circumstances that she has come to understand? Can she trust anyone else to prosecute them, or is it only God who can mete out just punishment?
This final section of the folktale reveals its thirteenth-century roots most clearly. To its original audience, the issue seems resolved: Divine providence is clear and present. The woman has had her day in court: she is rescued and reunites with her husband, while her tormentors die. She and her husband feel joyful relief and gratitude for the divine miracle they have witnessed. And the punishment of her oppressors serves as a cautionary tale to all who would dare malign others falsely.
Twenty-first century readers, however, do not expect to see Divine justice meted out in such a clear way. What’s more, a core part of the story is missing: how will the hero’s story impact the society from which she escaped? Will she use her voice to repair the institutions that failed and betrayed her? Will she reshape the norms regarding who gets the benefit of the doubt in her society and who is presumed guilty? In short, what systemic lessons will people learn from her travails? The folktale does not say. It simply warns people not to be bad actors and ensures that God will mete out justice.
Read today, this folktale challenges us to see the problems with trusting the structures of home — whether our personal homes, our communal homes, or even our conceptual homes (the ideas that frame our lives). Its hero is consistently safer outside of the structures that are meant to protect her: the “protection” of her brother-in-law or the authority of the Sanhedrin. Instead, she is safe when ostensibly lying dead under boulders, outside at night, with a strange man, and on a pirate ship. And the most glaring metaphor of all, she is safest when she serves an ocean away as a healer, outside her society of origin. This folktale offers us a survivor who embodies the best of what her society should be: she remains committed to the teachings that are supposed to animate the people and institutions that have let her down. She makes her proverbial home out of those values; she takes them with her wherever she goes. Again and again, she uses her voice to build and rebuild her home and her life.
Yet this folktale leaves an ellipsis that we ourselves must fill in. We do not know whether she will be able to bring about systemic change. We do not know whether she will have to return to those places that betrayed her. We do not know what life will be like for her to return, if she ever does, to those places that let her down.
If the tale is open-ended in this regard, so is our own Jewish communal story. When we find our homes corrupted, will we actually reform them? Or will we instead force victims to fend for themselves?
When survivors of sexual abuse and harassment come forward, we are quick to defend our institutions: we portray the institution as a victim of someone who threatens to tear it down. We do this because of how badly we need our institutions, because of how much these institutions do in fact achieve for our communities, and because of what these institutions are supposed to represent. We do this because we have not yet figured out how to integrate the experiences that cast aspersions on our institutions without needing to destroy the institutions themselves.
The next chapter is ours to write. We need to conceive of ways to constructively integrate the stories that challenge our institutions as a matter of healthy growth and practice. We need to stop seeing the allegations of victims and the health of an institution as antagonistic or as irreconcilable. In fact, if our institutions are to remain healthy, are to justify their reasons for being, they must reckon with such allegations.
Victims’ stories can indeed imperil institutions. But if we recognize that we want our institutions to stand for something, we will understand that not recognizing victims’ stories imperils those institutions much more profoundly.
This article appears in Sources, Spring 2021
Notes
1.Thank you to Dr. Chaviva Levin for first pointing out this parallel to me. See here to read the folktale in Arabian Nights.
2.To read the folktale in Hebrew, see here.
3. Her claims about “scale disease” may reference Pharaoh’s “afflictions” in Gen. 12:17, a punishment for sleeping with Abram’s wife Sarai. This interpretation, not explicit in the verse itself, may also refer to the fact that those who have scale disease are removed from the community in Biblical law due to their impurity. Our heroine may be asserting that he will be ostracized as a result of his actions. Ironically, it is she who will have to leave the community as a result of his crimes.
4. Perhaps a polemical appropriation of the New Testament account of the resurrection of Jesus on the third day after his crucifixion.
5.This stands in sharp contrast to the Arabian Nights version of the tale, where the woman is hired not to teach, but to nurse a baby.
6. The Bible itself associates scale disease with slander in the case of the prophet Miriam (Numbers 12), and rabbinic tradition affirms this association (See Babylonian Talmud Arakhin 16a).
