Is This How We Celebrate a Bar Mitzvah?!

The lesson for a Bar and Bas Mitzvah, the day a Jewish boy or girl is initiated into the Jewish community, is that a Jew has to feel an intense sense of connection to every other Jew. This feeling must also be accompanied with readiness to sacrifice one’s own comfort and convenience.

The Shechem Massacre Enigma

One of the most bizarre spectacles we are treated to in this week’s Torah portion, Vayishlach, is the cavalier manner in which Jacob ostracizes his son’s Shimon and Levi for literally wiping out the adult, male population of Shechem. Instead of calling them, bloodthirsty murderers for having perpetrated one of the greatest massacres in Biblical times, Jacob merely refers to the way the other nations might react to this deed. “You have embarrassed us amongst the dwellers of the land,” was Jacob’s reaction. In modern parlance we might say, “A shandeh far di goyim.”

How is it that the great and holy Patriarch Jacob should be more concerned about public relations than with the moral fiber of his sons, who after all, were to become the progenitors of the Jewish nation?

Moreover, how were Shimon and Levi, two of the twelve, Shivtei Kah (Tribes of G-d) capable of committing such an apparently dastardly deed?

Furthermore, according to rabbinic tradition, Levi had just reached the age of thirteen. The fact that the Torah designates him as an “Ish-man” serves as the basis for the tradition that thirteen is the age of Bar Mitzvah, when one becomes an ish, and adult.

How can it be that the very basis of Jewish responsibility is somehow connected to the destruction of Shechem?

Not so Innocent

Maimonides explains that the people of Shechem were not innocent. They were guilty of allowing their mayor’s son to rape and torture Dinah the daughter of Jacob. One of the basic rules of humanity – incorporated in the Seven Noahide Laws that were given to Noah and all humankind – is to establish courts to enforce law and order. According to Maimonides, they were all guilty of doing nothing to protect the rights of others.

Hence, by allowing their community to degenerate into anarchy where might makes right, they forfeited their right to life.

Jacob, nevertheless, criticized them because he felt that they were not the ones to take the law into their own hands.

Maimonides thesis, however, does not explain why our sages would find an allusion to the concept of Bar Mitzvah in this most violent episode. Isn’t Bar Mitzvah all about responsibility and conformity with the ideals of Torah?

Isn’t the Torah and Mitzvos all about peace?

Indignation

The answer lies in a better understanding of the motivation behind their action. Their actions, though, misguided, was, however, prompted by a sense of righteous indignation. When their sister was abducted and threatened with further harm, they could not remain silent. They had to do something.

The lesson for a Bar and Bas Mitzvah, the day a Jewish boy or girl is initiated into the Jewish community, is that a Jew has to feel an intense sense of connection to every other Jew. This feeling must also be accompanied with readiness to sacrifice one’s own comfort and convenience, as Shimon and Levi undoubtedly risked their lives when they attacked the city of Shechem.

A Jew Cannot Stand Idle!

The age of Bar and Bas Mitzvah is when a Jew begins to experience the full impact of their divine potential. And when this potential power is unleashed, a Jew cannot stand idle when another Jew is in trouble. When a Jew is in touch with his G-dly essence, s/he cannot rest when Jewish values are threatened.

The Maccabees

The Maccabees, the heroes of the upcoming Holiday of Chanukah, inherited this trait of mesiras nefesh – the capacity for total devotion and sacrifice to an ideal – from their ancestor Levi.

They could not tolerate the Greek’s contamination of the purity of Judaism. Against overwhelming odds, they miraculously defeated the Greeks and insured the purity and therefore the survival of the Jewish religion.

Collective Bar and Bas Mitzvah

The Messianic Age is when we all will come of age and celebrate our collective Bar Mitzvah, at which time we will all experience the full capacity of our devotion to G-d and to our fellow Jew.

Our way of preparing for this is to follow in the ways of the Maccabees and not rest until we have helped every Jew discover their Jewish heritage. We pave the way for the Redemption of the Jewish people from exile by seeing to it that no Jew’s spiritual integrity be compromised, so that no Jew will be left behind.

From the book Light from the Future: Parshas Vayishlach by Rabbi Heschel Greenberg, published by the Jewish Discovery Center.