Musar for Shabbat 110:22

Since the commission of even such a "shade of an impropriety" can harm the public image of someone perceived as a צדיק, Jacob had to be punished. Dinah was raped, i.e. became someone's sex partner without benefit of the holy state of matrimony. Her brothers described such relations as only being conducted with a harlot, i.e. that only harlots were sexually violated (34, 31). The episode in which Reuben is described as having slept with Bilhah (35, 22) is also perceived as an indirect result of the flaw in Jacob's piety discovered by the guardian angel of Esau.

Concerning the other method of sanctifying the body, the method described in the Torah by the words: והייתם קדושים, Rabbi Shimon said that when one indulges too much in words, דברים, one is bound to commit a sin sooner or later. Rabbi Meir says in Avot 6,1 that כל העוסק בתורה לשמה זוכה לדברים הרבה "Whosoever studies Torah for its own sake will merit many דברים." In view of Rabbi Shimon's statement about the potential problems arising out of דברים הרבה, we seem to have a contradiction between the statements of these two sages. We also wonder what these דברים הרבה can possibly be in view of the long list of benefits listed in that same Mishnah as accruing to people whose preoccupation with Torah is totally altruistic. It seems that the answer may be found in something the Rivash (Rabbi Yitzchak ben Sheshet) wrote in a responsum about prayer. Concerning the ability to understand mystical dimensions as alluded to in Psalms 37,5: גול על ה' דרכך ובטח עליו והוא יעשה, "Leave all to the Lord, trust in Him; He will do it," the Rivash explains that G–d will arrange and reveal, יגלה, these hidden aspects of Torah to you. These hidden aspects are called דברים הרבה. The reason they are called this is that whatever is revealed in our world is only a little, whereas the ramifications of these hidden dimensions of Torah in the Celestial Regions are many. This is why the sages said: מקדש עצמו מלמטה מעט, מקדשין אותו מלמעלה הרבה, "If someone sanctifies himself a little in our world one will add a great deal more sanctity to him in the "higher" world." These are the דברים הרבה which Rabbi Meir referred to in Avot 6,1. This is also what Rabbi Shimon referred to when he said that if one is involved in such דברים הרבה it will lead to one's soul being out of step with the development of the body. One's soul will cleave to G–d whereas one's body will cease to function normally and one will have caused its death. Since we believe that there is no death without sin of some kind, the sin in such a case would be the unbalanced progress toward דבקות ה'. It is also possible that when Rabbi Shimon mentioned the word חטא, he equated it with חסרון, a deficiency. A biblical example of this would be אני ושלמה בני חטאים, in Kings I 1,21 where Bat Sheva reminds king David of his oath that Solomon would be his successor. She tells the king that unless arrangements for Solomon's succession to the throne are made prior to his death, both she and her son will be deprived of his promise. The word חטאים in that context can certainly not mean that Bat Sheva and Solomon would be sinners because David died. It means rather that the "physical aspect,” i.e. גופנית, of the promise that Solomon would rule would go unfulfilled. The word may also allude to the fact that when the revealed and the hidden do not go hand in hand, when the משכן and מקדש aspects of the Tabernacle do not work in unison, something will go awry. Man was created בצלם אלוקים, a combination of the physical and the spiritual; the two parts must work in tandem.

When Isaiah 49,3 quotes G–d as saying of Israel: ישראל אשר בך אתפאר, "Israel, you, in whom I glory," the reference may well be to Jacob in his capacity of ישראל סבא who dons the phylacteries of the head. Those phylacteries are known as פאר, as glorious headdress, as is well known. I have already mentioned that the whole Torah is compared to תפילין. Torah itself is subsumed in the word את, which the Talmud in Shabbat 55 understands as referring to people who observe Torah from א-ת. The extra letters את in אתפאר refer to such people.

As long as the angel's prediction about G–d changing Jacob's name had not been fulfilled, Jacob still bore the marks of his nocturnal encounter with Samael on his body. Dinah's rape was the visible effect of the contact with impurity during the encounter in which Jacob's thigh joint was injured. One of his offspring, Dinah, became infected with טומאת מגע, impurity contracted due to contact with something impure, as a direct consequence of her father's physical contact with something impure. The Torah (34,2) describes the rapist as שכם בן חמור החוי. The word החוי is an allusion to the original serpent which is called חויא in Aramaic. We have explained earlier that this נחש, i.e. its power, is active within the ירך, reproductive organs of man, and that this is the connection with the prohibition of the גיד הנשה. Through Dinah's experience, and the incident with Reuben in Bilhah's tent described later in 35,22 (although our sages view Reuben's deed as symbolical rather than actual, Shabbat 55b), any lingering vestige of the serpent's pollution was drained from Jacob, and after that his "bed" could be described as totally pure, or שלימה, in the parlance of our sages. It was at this point that G–d Himself bestowed the name ישראל on Jacob and blessed him.