Righteous Anger and What We Do With It

The Torah reading is a very sad and painful tale about one of the children of Jacob, Dinah.  Dinah was forcibly taken by the son of a local prince and violated.  After raping her, Shechem longed for Dinah.  Shechem, the rapist, desired Dinah and his family approached Dinah’s family to ask that their families be joined.   The families came to an agreement: If the entire city were circumcised, Dinah’s family would consent to the arrangement. Shechem and his people agreed.  The deed was done.

At eight days old circumcisions, a brit milah, is no big deal but at twenty or thirty years old it is a significant operation.  On the third day as the men were recuperating and in great pain, two of the sons of Jacob, Shimon and Levi, attacked and slew the entire population: the perpetrator, his family, all the inhabitants under their rule and even the livestock were slaughtered.  After the revenge, Jacob, the father of Shimon and Levi was distraught.  He accused Shimon and Levi of making him a vile, disgusting, and a terrible thing in the eyes of the inhabitants of the land.  Without mincing his words, Jacob heaped his angst on Shimon and Levi by also telling them that their family would now be targeted by the other tribes nearby.

Many years later, as Jacob lay dying; he assembled all his children and blessed them.  He chose his words very carefully as he blessed them with the gifts they had already begun to show.  When it came to Shimon and Levi, Jacob blessed them by saying “you are companions of violence...”  He went on to tell them they would eventually be subsumed by the other tribes because of their unchecked ferocious anger.

What is truly remarkable is that after all those years Jacob did not calm down, moderate his disappointment in his two children.  His initial reaction to Shimon and Levi remained decades later.  Not even at the cusp of death was his anger mollified.  So, Jacob was not speaking out of anger; he was speaking from his heart.

What do we make of Shimon and Levi?  Are they heroes or villains?  The Sages are divided.  Two opinions, one by Rambam and the other by Ramban, indicated that the entire people, the city of Shechem, had violated some great universal principle that made it imperative that Shechem’s people shared the common guilt for Dinah’s rape.  Yet, the explanations seem forced.

In 1961 Stanley Milgram conducted a famous study at Yale University.  He collected volunteers to administer electric shocks to another “volunteer” who was strapped into a chair.  When the “volunteer” in the chair answered questions incorrectly he was to be administered electric shocks by the other.  The real volunteer sat before a panel with thirty switches in a straight line.  From left to right they read, “Slight Shock, Moderate Shock, Strong Shock, Very Strong Shock, Intense Shock, Extreme Intensity Shock, Danger: Severe Shock.  The “volunteer” in the chair was an actor who, when he saw that a charge was being sent by the real volunteer they made painful noises, at times even complaining they had a heart condition.

Ranging from 15 to 450 volts the volunteer pressed the switches that would have sent shocks rippling through the subject.  After hearing the actor scream at 150 volts over 80% continued to press the shock button.  Well over sixty percent of the volunteers in the trial complied with task and pressed the switch at full strength, 450 volts!

About the same time that this experiment was going on, another occurrence was riveting the world’s attention in Israel.  In 1960 Adolf Eichmann was captured in Argentina.  The architect of the “Final Solution,” Adolf Eichmann oversaw the murder of six million.  

Eichmann stood trial in Jerusalem about one year later.  A reporter for the New Yorker was dispatched to cover the story, Hannah Arendt.  What she found shocked her.  Arendt expected to see a monster with all but fangs and blood at the edges of his lips.  Instead, Arendt found a bureaucrat.   She was amazed at Eichmann’s inability to think critically.  Eichmann appeared like any unstriking businessman and not the picture of a psychopath at all.  His “following orders” justification was recited remarkable clarity and with no self doubt or guilt about sending millions of Jews to their deaths.  

Is this what God meant when He said just before the ultimate destruction in Noah’s time that “the thoughts of man’s heart are always evil?”  Was God also frustrated by humanity that the earth needed to be swept clean?  Is it possible that what lies at the center of every human being is so ugly and terrible that we do not deserve life?  Was Lord Acton’s statement, “Power tends to corrupt.  Absolute power corrupts absolutely” correct?  Given the opportunity to do evil and not be held responsible for our actions – like Eichmann and the volunteers in the Milgram study- we would all follow the same path?

Yet again in 1971 another experiment was conducted at Stanford University.  Two groups of students were divided into “prison guards” and “prisoners.”  The two week experiment was halted after just six days because of the terrible brutality used by the “prison guards.”

Katherine DeCelles, a University of Toronto professor, recently brought some new evidence to light.  In a study featured in Journal of Applied Psychology, DeCelles determined that people who had a high “moral identity;” those whose self-view, personal self-sense was to be kind were kind when they were in a position of power.  In other words, not all people placed in positions of power will abuse their privilege.  The way we see ourselves determines how we behave.

Perhaps this is the reason Torah preserves this very uncomfortable story about Dinah and her brothers.  Perhaps this is why we have Father Jacob telling his sons twice in his lifetime that they did wrong as a signal for us to learn the lesson Shimon and Levi should have known.  Perhaps this is also why the Torah never declares outright who was right and who was wrong in the story of Dinah and her brothers.  Which side we believe is correct may be an indication of our moral compass.  And, if by chance we chose wrongly God gave us an opportunity to turn ourselves around.

In Judaism we have a tool to keep us in check.  It is called teshuva.  Teshuva is the right and task of every being to change course.  When we perceive that we are on the wrong course we can repent and redirect our path.

As Golda Meir, the Prime Minister of Israel said in 1968, “When peace comes we will perhaps in time be able to forgive the Arabs for killing our sons, but it will be harder for us to forgive them for having forced us to kill their sons.”

Amalek, Shabbat Zachor

1. Rabbi Yosef Safati in his work Yad Yosef reveals that there are two kinds of hatred.  The first is exemplified by the Egyptians who feared that the Israelites would rebel.  Therefore, they decided, they needed to enslave them 
The other kind of hatred is like that of Amalek who held an irrational unfounded hatred against the Israelites.  He simply wanted to destroy them.

2. There are two mentions of Amalek in the Torah,  The Midrash states of them, echad domeh l'zvuv, echad domeh l'keleev.  One is like a fly and thother is like a dog.  In Exodus 17:8 comes the idea that Amalek is like a mad dog.  If you get to close, try to befriend him, the dog will bite.  There are some wicked ones who cannot be reasoned with, cannot be cajoled or cured.  Get too close and they will attack you.  Leave them to God, tells the Torah and "I will surely wipe out the memory, all thought, of Amalek."
Later in Deuteronomy 25:19 Amalek is likened to a fly.  A fly only comes when there is filth.  Some anti-Semites flourish because they are given a pretext to hate Jews.  They meet a Jew who is dishonest or direputable and they learn to mistrust all Jews.  In this instance Torah says, timcheh et zecher Amalek, clean up your own act and there will be no more Amalek.


3. Before Amalek attacks the Jewish people, the Torah tells that the people doubted and questioned: “Is God with us or not?” (Exodus 17:7). Once they allowed doubt to seep into their psyches Amalek was empowered to launch a full fledged assault. To explain the sequence, Rashi cites a Midrash (Tanchuma Yitro 3; Exodus Rabbah 26:2): [God says:] “I am always among you, and always prepared for all your necessities, but you say, ‘Is G-d with us or not?’ By your life, the dog will come and bite you, and you will cry out to Me, and [then] you will know where I am.” This can be compared to a man who mounted his son on his shoulder and set out on the road. Whenever his son saw something, he would say, “Father, take that thing and give it to me,” and the father would give it to him. They met a man, and the son said to him, “Have you seen my father?” So his father said to him, “You don’t know where I am?” He threw his son down off him, and a dog came and bit the son.

All doubts begin with the first cosmic doubt: “Have you seen my father?” “Is God with us or not?”  - Rabbi Simon Jacobson