DAS Blog

In this week's parsha, Laban's defense for tricking Jacob is that "it's not our custom to marry to youngest child before the oldest". How much evil has been done under the banner of sticking to customs? Not only Laban defended his treachery by invocation of custom, but the inhabitants of Sodom defended their desire to rape by invocation of custom and claimed Lot, as a foreigner, was wrong to judge their customs. Those who mindlessly defer to custom often forget that the orthodoxies, both religious and secular, to which they defer began as revolutionary movements whose key insight was that deference to custom hides a lot of evil. Yet today those claiming to speak for Israel and for religious morality too often are really the heirs of Laban and the Sodomites when the seek to cover evil by invocation of reactionary mores and accuse those of us who judge them based on their guile of being "foreign" to their culture, "un-American" or such.

Customs can be comforting. Customs can cement a society. But we must be careful not to follow the path of Sodom or of Laban and allow deference to custom to excuse treachery.

Update: as cmike reminds me in the comments, Jacob is also the victim of, shall we call it karma? Indeed, one of the possible Prophetic readings for this portion criticizes Israel (the northern kingdom thereof) for taking after Jacob in being deceitful. Today, such prophets would be labeled as "self-hating Jews" by AIPAC and DLC types, nu?