by Rabbi Healy Slakman
Originally adapted from a sermon delivered November 28, 2025
I’ve been thinking lately about my grandmothers, both for the ways they shaped me and for the power with which they move through the world. As we read Genesis, with its sweeping narratives and vivid character development—amplifying certain voices in our tradition while leaving others at the margins—my grandmothers remind me to notice the presence, voice, and brilliance that arise from unexpected places.
Like many orthodox Sephardic and Mizrachi women, my Savta found power in the kitchen. The men in my family had voices elsewhere and in the public sphere: they regularly went to synagogue, they studied, they influenced the organization of communal life, and, unlike the women—few in number and whispering from the balcony of the synagogue—the men prayed loudly. Not separated from the Torah by a curtain, they prayed from the depths of their beings: witnessing, listening, and creating space for each other’s experiences.
My Savta, instead, prayed through her cooking. Nurturing us with soup, she prayed for our health. Protecting us from harm and evil, she infused her recipes with peppers, garlic, and unusual herbs. Bringing us together, marking time and making meaning, she made special dishes for celebration and commemoration, profoundly understanding exactly how we, her family, needed to be fed. Instead of whispering behind a curtain in the Tunisian synagogue of Ramla, this was the voice she fixed for herself: the voice of grating, chopping, boiling, and frying. She didn’t have the opportunity to pray aloud, so she found power in recipes and cooked food that her mother cooked, food from her home, food that captured memory, ritual, identity, and care.
My Baba—my other grandmother—an artist, not a cook, fashioned a different kind of voice in the face of limitations. As a painter and sculptor, she gave form to abstract emotions and complicated ideas: tangible, vivid, and beautiful paintings and sculptures. Savta prayed through taste and texture, Baba through line and color, through clay and canvas. Her art carried the parts of her that had no sanctioned place to speak. In her studio, surrounded by the works of her own hands, she crafted a world in which her voice was not silenced or sidelined, but expansive, unwavering, and wholly her own.
My grandmothers remind me how people carve out presence. This is in such sharp contrast to some of the text in Genesis. For example, Jacob’s experience stands unmistakably at the forefront of the narrative. His dreams, his fears, his vows, and his desires drive the plot. He is painted with perspective, agency, and voice—given volume and depth as we follow his journey, hear his words, and are invited into his inner world.
On the other hand, the women in the story—Rachel, Leah, and others—though central to the narrative, are rendered in far fewer strokes, with their interior lives largely unspoken, unseen, unheard. And in the Torah’s next generation, this silence becomes even more deafening. Genesis Chapter 34 introduces Dinah, Leah and Jacob’s only daughter, who goes out to visit the daughters of the land: וַתֵּצֵא דִינָה בַּת־לֵאָה אֲשֶׁר יָלְדָה לְיַעֲקֹב לִרְאוֹת בִּבְנוֹת הָאָרֶץ.
Dinah, the daughter of Leah, whom she had borne to Jacob, went out to see the daughters of the land.
Everything we explicitly know about Dinah comes from this one verse. Immediately following her introduction, Shechem, the son of Hamor the Hivite, sees her: וַיִּקַּח אֹתָהּ וַיִּשְׁכַּב אֹתָהּ וַיְעַנֶּהָ.
And he takes her and lies with her by force.
And from that moment on, Dinah is pushed to the periphery of her own story. The next twenty-nine verses turn their attention everywhere else—Shechem’s infatuation, his father’s negotiations, Jacob’s silence, Dinah’s brothers’ outrage, the political deliberations of the Hivites. Everyone speaks. Everyone decides except Dinah. The woman at the center of the story is rendered voiceless.
A midrash listens closely to the text and hears something we might otherwise miss: the same verb used when Shechem takes her—“וַיִּקַּח אֹתָהּ”—is used again when her brothers remove her from the Shechem’s house—“וַיִּקְחוּ אֶת־דִּינָה”—and they take her back. The midrash suggests that even the moment we might instinctively call her “rescue” carries its own kind of force or coercion. Although rabbinic and contemporary interpreters offer many speculations, ultimately we don’t know why because the Torah does not allow us access to Dinah’s interior life.
And it is out of that silence that her brothers decide what justice looks like. They kill every man in the city in Dinah’s name, supposedly on her behalf. Yet in the aftermath of her trauma, Dinah is denied the right to define her own experience. This is the uncomfortable truth the text forces us to confront: when a person’s voice is missing, or quieted, or misunderstood, even the most passionate attempts at justice or restoration can end up repeating the very harm that was meant to be repaired. Justice shaped without the person who suffered can never be whole.
As we enter the winter holiday season, many of the narratives that anchor our celebrations meld myth and memory, and are shaped across time through particular vantage points.
I hope you’ll join me this winter —and onward—in asking:
This article originally appeared in the Dec 2025-Jan/Feb 2026 issue of the Vine.