NOTES for Gen 34:1-31
The story of Leah and Shechem is ugly, to put it mildly. Very mildly, because what actually happens here is treachery of a kind seldom encountered. Distrust and fear rule Jacob’s tribesmen here; that is obvious. Equally obvious is the contrast between Jacob himself and those same tribesmen. This is understandable: a particular individual is one thing, while a people, a tribe, or a human community is another. The spiritual level of a chief or leader is one thing; the spiritual condition of the people, especially on average, is another.
Above all, this is because there is no such thing as spirituality “on average.” It is always a personal matter, a matter of the person. Collectivism and spirituality, spirituality and mass consciousness, are incompatible. To live a normal and complete spiritual life, one must cease to be part of the crowd, the mass, or the “people” as the crowd or mass understands it.
And it is impossible to work with the crowd, the mass, or the people as a whole if what is meant is specifically spiritual work. Such work is always, by definition, done one person at a time. It is personal. God worked with Jacob for many decades, and He managed to accomplish something. He accomplished quite a lot, in fact; one need only compare the Jacob who left his family home with the Jacob who returned there. The others, however, simply went on living their ordinary lives without changing very much.
Jacob was quite enough for them, a leader whom they were certain God had given them. And so it was until they had to make decisions quickly and by themselves, relying only on their own experience. That was when the collective psyche came into play: the collective unconscious with its unrecognized and often illusory fears, and reflexive cruelty as a response to those illusory fears.
Naturally, this cruelty was concealed behind respectable justifications that were actually rather doubtful. Judging from the biblical account, the young people were serious about each other, whatever may have happened at their first meeting. The result is known: hostility instead of peace, bloodshed instead of family happiness. Jacob can do nothing about it; everything has already been done without him. This is how the history of God’s people unfolded: leaders appointed by God at the head, and a mass of people no different from any other. This continued until, during the Exile in Babylon, a people formed as a community at last, but that is another story.