This week’s Torah reading of Lekh-l’khah contains the Torah’s first reference to the city of Shechem—a place that comes up in multiple incidents throughout Genesis, and elsewhere in the Hebrew Bible. According to the Babylonian Talmud, it is “a place ordained for calamity,” because of several tragic events that took place there. Tamar Weissman takes a careful look at this assertion, and Shechem’s paradoxes:
Each of Shechem’s tragic stories always starts promisingly. . . . For all of the negative associations cataloged [by] the Talmud, Shechem is equally evocative of fraternity, and the yearning to find commonality.
The calamities associated with Shechem are all the more shocking because we are oriented to expect the warmth of brit (covenant) there. This is because the Bible’s introduction of the city is so redolent with promise. Shechem was the very first place that Abraham arrived in his destined land; it was the very first place where God ever appeared to him in a vision (Genesis 12:6-7). . . . In that formative moment, when dreams and plans materialized into firm reality, when Abraham’s feet were on the good plain between two mountains in the land destined for him, God assured him: “to your seed will I give this land.” So began the love story between Abraham’s family and the land of Canaan, there in Shechem. And so we are primed to consider Shechem as a special place, a redemptive place.
Read more on Lehrhaus: https://thelehrhaus.com/timely-thoughts/shechem-place-of-brit/