A Wife as Part of Her Husband: Dinah, Yosef, and the Nature of Marriage

The shiur analyzes a perplexing Midrash on Parshas Vayechi addressing the pasuk "vayakumu kol banav v'chol benosav lenachamo"—all his sons and daughters arose to comfort him. The Midrash asks: Yaakov only had one daughter (Dinah), so why does the Torah (תורה) use the plural "benosav"? The Midrash cryptically adds "halvai kovrah"—he wished he had buried her. Rabbi Zweig poses three fundamental questions: First, why does the Midrash need to add the statement about wishing to bury Dinah—wouldn't the question work just as well without it? Second, why does the Midrash answer that "a person is not restrained from calling his son-in-law 'son' and his daughter-in-law 'daughter'"—what does this have to do with actual daughters? Third, why does the Torah teach this lesson specifically here, when there were many other opportunities throughout the Torah to convey this principle? The shiur builds its answer on a fundamental Rashi (רש"י) in Parshas Vayeitzei. When Leah became pregnant with what would have been her seventh son, she prayed it should be a girl so that Rochel would have at least two of the twelve tribes. Through Leah's prayer, the child was transformed in utero from male to female—from what would have been Yosef into Dinah. Rabbi Zweig draws a critical distinction between two ways to understand this transformation. Rabbeinu Gershom Meor HaGolah explains that Leah was pregnant with Yosef while Rochel was pregnant with Dinah, and they switched. According to this view, Dinah was Rochel's child who happened to be born from Leah. But Rashi's language suggests something more radical: Yosef himself became Dinah—the same neshamah transformed from male to female. According to this reading, Dinah is not just any daughter; she is the feminine version of Yosef.