Dreaming Peace No Matter What-Reissuing What Dinah Thought
The great Rabbi, Rebbe Nachman, told a story of the tainted wheat. The king’s advisors told him that the wheat for the following year was poisoned and anyone who ate it would go insane. But, they said, they had a sufficient portion for themselves which was safe and would allow them to govern the people. “No,” the king replied, “we will also eat the wheat but we will mark our foreheads so that when we look at each other we will know we are mad.”
We are all mad. We do not need to mark our foreheads to know this. The omnipresence of violence, individual and governmental, of war and torture, the extremity of the military budgets, and the devotion to discovering new and more powerful weaponry, different and more extreme poisons, the levels of distrust and the commitment to stirring up hate as means of attaining power are the unassailable signs.
The vicious, terrifying massacre across Southern Israel by Hamas of hundreds of innocents, children, women, the elderly, and the savage bombardment and invasion in retaliation by Netanyahu and his cabal, reducing Gaza and now the West Bank, Syria and Lebanon to dust and, again, killing innocents and torturing to the count perhaps of 15,000 [47,707 with 18,000 children dead 2-26-2025] are both the example and evidence that as a species we are inhabiting nightmare. Still, it is essential to find a path to the light through the embattled underground tunnels of our besieged minds.
It is as a gesture of hope or prayer that Hand to Hand has decided to reissue What Dinah Thought which was first published by Viking in 1989. It holds us responsible for our hearts and minds and asks us to imagine another way in the midst of the savagery and terror or because of these.
This is the Preface to the new edition:
This book was published 34 years ago, during the time of the first Intifada. Earlier, in the eighties, someone had asked me if I knew the Biblical story of my name and I began reading the Old Testament that had been given to me as a child and came upon the reference in the Glossary of Biblical Terms which is an epigraph to this book.
“Dinah, daughter of Jacob by Leah, was ravished by Shechem, a Hivite. For that reason, and with the help of a peculiarly low cunning, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s own brothers, revenged the insult.
“What Dinah thought of the whole matter is not recorded.”
***
And Dinah the daughter of Leah, which she bare unto Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land. And when Shechem the son of Hamor the Hivite, prince of the country, saw her, he took her, and lay with her, and defiled her.
And his soul cleaved unto Dinah the daughter of Jacob, and he loved the damsel, and spoke kindly unto the damsel. And Shechem spoke unto his father Hamor, saying, “Get me this damsel to wife.”
...And Hamor the father of Shechem went out unto Jacob to commune with him. ...And Hamor communed with them, saying, “The soul of my son Shechem longeth for your daughter: I pray you give her him to wife.
And make ye marriages with us, and give your daughters unto us, and take our daughters unto you. And ye shall dwell with us: and the land shall be before you; dwell and trade ye therein, and get you possessions therein.”
***
If that had been the end of the story, perhaps we would be living differently now in kinship with each other, if the story hadn’t started with a rape, if Simeon and Levi had not gone against their father’s will and killed all the men to avenge their sister, if they had not ravaged and claimed the Hivites land, had not taken all the crops and the flocks of animals and the women as concubines.
The original motivation for the novel was to investigate this Biblical story, somehow still unacknowledged, the ancient core of the intergenerational conflict remaining very much in our collective DNA, the story which has not been mourned, for which amends have not been made, to see if the retelling of it in a new way, the reliving of it, even if only in the creative imagination, could offer healing to the terrible history which was (which is) once again exploding in violence.
This is, again, the motivation for re-issuing the book in the hope that it can inject a vision of possibility for this time.
I did not know then what I know today, when the circumstances were not nearly as horrific as they are now when we are engaged in unconscionable violence as those in power assert their desire to entirely eliminate the other no matter the damage to the innocent populations, including the children and the elderly. I say, we, above, as this is not a tribal dispute, but a most brutal war, immediately arising out of recalcitrant beliefs and prejudices that have global causes and consequences.
The Old Testament story resonates with the current combat, including rape which has become a weapon of war. Might the old story and those stories that evolved from it move toward resolution in the manner of the Hivites inviting the Israelites to live among them; they visioned the two peoples, whom I want to imagine now as Israelites and Palestinians, living together as one people.
In 1985, I had the opportunity to go to Israel/Palestine to visit the holy sites on behalf of the novel. I particularly wanted to visit the tomb of Joseph which is in Shechem, now known as Nablus, on the West Bank, even when there were dangers from both sides that made it impossible for a Jewish-American woman to travel there, particularly alone. But I was determined; Joseph was a dreamer, and I needed to be in his presence. Though we were separated by thousands of years, our stories were intermingling with each other. Inevitably, I or Joseph prevailed and my journey to Shechem/Nablus and to Israel was later chronicled in What Dinah Thought, an entirely different book emerging from the holy and besieged land than was first imagined.
What I came to understand through that pilgrimage, and the writing of it, was that the Jews and the Palestinians needed to see each other truly as they are, and if and when they did, love and appreciation would be inevitable. But if they continued to refuse the profound humanity of the other, and their equal needs for life and land, if they sought hegemony and domination rather than co-existence, then as their mutual inability to see the other worsened, the sieges and assaults would continue without safety for anyone, their grief and agony would persist and increase – as it has.
Some years ago two women, one Israeli, one Palestinian met in Los Angeles in a circle designed to create connection between the two peoples. After some meetings in which they spoke honestly to each other, each admitted that they had never seen the other, that the other had been entirely invisible to them as people, but not as enemies.
And so now, October, November, December 2023, even, or especially in the midst of such a war as is occurring, it is essential that we see the other, that we see whom we are killing although we could, if we allowed it, find deep alliances with each other.
In this novel, Dina Z, an American filmmaker is seeking to document the lives of people who dwell on ancient holy ground and to discover how that history affects them. She falls in love with a Palestinian activist and sees him and his people in ways that were not available to her before the ancient story of Dinah and Shechem was revived through their meeting.
I have an Israeli friend who, like Joseph, is a dreamer. And like the ancient texts, she dreams war and then she also dreams the antidotes to war. The old texts speak of war but they also speak of reconciliation, Hamor and Jacob, Jacob and Esau, Joseph in Egypt, and so on. Harm done, hurt inflicted, and then forgiven. It is this unlikely miracle of peacemaking, we must seek, even when it seems impossible, even when the urge to avenge and kill governs all reason.
The world has never been in such danger. We have become a species obsessed with developing technologies that destroy. Of the imminent danger to all life, Barry Lopez said in Horizon,
“... dramatic change in the near future seems to be in the offing, and if the species is to achieve its aspirations for justice, reduced suffering and transcendent life, and if it is to prevent the triumph of machinery that it so clearly fears, an unprecedented level of imagination is required.”
In this novel, the raped and the murdered, seeing who the other truly is, overcome the immediate horrors and meet in the heart. The reality is that the formerly innocent ones traumatized by current horrors world wide that result from our aggressions will ultimately become the leaders. Can we imagine that these ones, nevertheless, will also dream the antidote to war and become peacemakers? Can we imagine this? Are we willing to imagine this? When we are, the wars will be over.
At the end of the novel, Dinah asks Shechem, “Why isn’t there peace yet?”
This is the question we must all ask and for which we are all responsible.
***
Please accept What Dinah Thought as an offering to the times, to the ancestors, to history and the future. Though it seems so unlikely, may peace come, may it be created by our common efforts and hearts.
❤️ Love you, Deena