Musar su Genesi 35:22

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.

In Genesis 44,17, Joseph said to his brothers: ואתם עלו לשלום אל אביכם, "As for you, go up in peace to your father." The word אתם, in that connection was used advisedly. Joseph meant that the brothers themselves could come to their Father in Heaven safely, i.e. they would not in this world suffer the execution as kidnappers who sell their prey. On a future occasion, however, their re-incarnates would have to pay for the crime with their lives. The Ten Martyrs mentioned were the ones who had to pay with their lives for that sin which had gone unpunished for so long. The allusion in the verse just quoted serves some Kabbalists as the reason why Reuben, who had not been a party to the sale of Joseph, was included among those who were executed for the crime. His sin had been of a different nature, namely the incident described in Genesis 35, 22, involving Bilhah. Reuben's own words provide us with a hint of this when he said after discovering that Joseph had been removed from the pit (37, 30): ואני, אנה אני בא, "Where can I go to?" Rabbi Abraham Saba in his Tzror Hamor comments on this that the letters in the words and אני and אנה are the respective first letters of א-ל נקמות י-ה-ו-ה נקמות הופיע, "G–d of retribution, Lord, G–d of retribution, appear!" (Psalms 94, 1) The reincarnations of Joseph and Benjamin were not among the Ten Martyrs described.

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.