Voices of WRJ: Vayishlach

This week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, is a filmmaker’s dream. It is filled with intrigue, reconciliation, lust, revenge, violence, birth, and death, a virtual hodge-podge of life. “And Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she bore to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.” It is from this part of the parashah that Anita Diamant found the seeds to create her bestselling book, The Red Tent. A book that preceded the WRJ Torah: A Women’s Commentary, and gave voice to Dinah, one of the voiceless woman of the Torah. Was Dinah’s encounter with Shechem, the Hivite prince, a vicious sexual attack, as presented in the portion, or was it the loving consensual relationship that is presented in The Red Tent by Leah herself? Were the violent actions of Dinah’s brothers necessary to avenge the crime that they saw, or did their actions leave Leah grief stricken and totally alienated from her family? There is certainly lots to ponder in this small section and I challenge you to find a partner and study it further; we are lucky to now have the WRJ Torah: A Women's Commentary and its Study Guides to help. In The Red Tent we learn of a place where the women of the community came together for advice, support, and fun. Here they were able to look to the future and determine how they might make it better. In many ways, this sounds very much like my sisterhood, a virtual place where we do the very same things. Thousands of years later, even in a more egalitarian world, women need the company of other women. As the WRJ slogan says “We are Stronger Together.” Whether we are helping one of our women through a recurrence of cancer, making sure that all our teens can attend a NFTY event, or gathering food and crockpots for the hungry, our tasks are made easier by doing them together. As part of our ongoing partnership with the Center for Hunger Free Communities at Drexel University and its Witnesses to Hunger Program, the women of Temple Brith Achim were able bring the beginnings of food sufficiency to over fifty families in one of the poorest population areas of the country, in Philadelphia’s inner city.  By collecting and distributing crockpots and healthy ingredients to needy families, even those without working stoves would be able to prepare warm meals on cold winter nights. When my sisterhood joins with the other sisterhoods affiliated with WRJ, we enlarge our tent to include the entire world. By contributing to the YES Fund we are able to help keep Reform/Progressive Judaism alive and vibrant across the globe and support other programs to make the world a better place. While what we do in our sisterhood tent is important, the women with whom we connect and the relationships that we make are the greatest benefit. No matter where they live, my WRJ friends are there for me, as the women of The Red Tent were there for each other. I look forward to seeing and spending time with many of my long distance friends at the WRJ Fried Leadership Conference in Austin, TX, Jan. 30-Feb. 1, 2015. Either by coincidence or design the Lifetime Network will premiere a miniseries based on The Red Tent on December 7th and 8th, the very week that we read Parashat Vayislach. I look forward to watching.