Teaching the stories that disturb us

On difficult narratives in Tanakh and the responsibility of teaching them.

This week, I taught a group of 18-year-old seminary students one of the most disturbing stories in all of Tanakh. Actually, I taught them two.

We were learning about intertextuality, the way one biblical narrative echoes another, inviting us to read them in conversation with each other. We began with Lot and the destruction of Sedom in Bereishit 19, and then turned to Pilegesh B’Givah in Shoftim 19.

The linguistic and contextual parallels are striking: visitors arriving in the evening, offers of hospitality, men surrounding a house and demanding its guests, and the horrifying offer of women in their place. But there is one difference that makes the second story even more disturbing. In Bereishit, we are reading about Sedom, a city synonymous with wickedness. In Shoftim, we are reading about Givah, a city of Bnei Yisrael. These are our people.

For many of my students, this was their first encounter with Pilegesh B’Givah. I warned them that the narrative includes horrific sexual violence and could be deeply upsetting. I emphasized that these stories are shocking because the events they describe are shocking. Tanakh does not hide uncomfortable truths about human behavior, even when those truths concern our own people.

But there is a difference between acknowledging the disturbing nature of a text and being careless about how we teach it. That is something I have had to learn.

At a different time, I taught a similar lesson to another audience. Afterward, someone approached me privately and suggested that my presentation might not have been sufficiently sensitive to the range of personal experiences represented among those attending, including the possibility that some had experienced sexual assault or abuse. I was grateful for the feedback and reflected seriously on the possibility that my words and manner of presentation might have caused additional pain or discomfort.

The truth is that I do not know the personal histories of those in my classroom, nor should I presume to know them. As educators, we cannot know everything our learners have experienced, how those experiences have shaped them, or what they bring to their encounter with the text.

I’ve always been fairly direct, and I tend to teach that way. But being direct is not the same as being sensitive, and knowing the text well doesn’t necessarily mean knowing how to teach it responsibly.

That earlier feedback stayed with me. This week, we read carefully, stopped frequently, and made room for questions, reactions, and discomfort. I wanted my students to engage honestly with the text without feeling they had to suppress their emotional responses to be serious learners. I didn’t try to make the story less horrible than it is, either. The horror matters, even if we cannot dictate how it will affect each student.

Tanakh contains an uncomfortable number of stories involving the abuse, exploitation, or vulnerability of women: Dinah, Tamar, Pilegesh B’Givah, Lot and his daughters, and even the Bnei HaElohim taking women from among the Bnot HaAdam, a passage at the end of Parshat Bereishit that some interpret as powerful men taking women without their consent.

These stories are part of Tanakh. We don’t get to pretend they’re not. So what are we supposed to do with them?

We could avoid them, rush through them, soften their language, or reassure ourselves that these things happened long ago in a very different world. But that doesn’t do justice to the text or to our students. We cannot be afraid to confront the difficult stories in Torah. We must handle them sensitively, but we must handle them.

Tanakh doesn’t always show us the best of humanity. Sometimes it shows us the worst, including within our own communities. That is what makes the conclusion of Sefer Shoftim so devastating.

Pilegesh B’Givah doesn’t end with the woman’s death. The other tribes demand that Binyamin surrender the perpetrators. Binyamin refuses, and a civil war nearly destroys the tribe. In their efforts to preserve Binyamin, the remaining tribes then destroy Yavesh Gilad, sparing hundreds of young women to provide wives for the survivors. When those women aren’t enough, they arrange for additional women to be seized from Shiloh.

A nation horrified by the abuse and murder of one woman ultimately responds by subjecting hundreds of other women to violence and exploitation. One atrocity leads to another. By the end of Shoftim, it isn’t only individual criminals who have lost their way. The community itself has lost its moral bearings. Even those attempting to correct an injustice become responsible for further injustice.

These narratives also raise questions that remain painfully relevant. How do communities respond when wrongdoing occurs among people they know and respect? Can loyalty to our own interfere with our willingness to acknowledge another person’s suffering? How do we pursue justice without creating further harm? Contemporary allegations of abuse and misconduct remind us that these questions are not confined to the days of Shoftim. We need the humility to recognize the limits of what we know, the willingness to take suffering seriously, and the responsibility to respond with both fairness and compassion.

This brings me back to my classroom.

My students are young women preparing to build their adult lives, relationships, and understanding of the world. They deserve to encounter Tanakh in all its depth and complexity, including the parts that make us uncomfortable. But they also deserve teachers who recognize that these aren’t merely ancient stories to be analyzed from a comfortable distance. Sexual violence isn’t only something that happened in the days of Shoftim. It remains a reality in our world, and we cannot assume that those learning with us have never encountered it.

I don’t want my students to be afraid of Tanakh, or to think that difficult questions, painful emotions, and moral outrage have no place in serious Torah learning. Equally, I don’t want them to feel that they must demonstrate any particular emotional response to prove that they understand the text. Some may respond with questions, others with silence, anger, sadness, or a desire to explore the narrative more deeply. All deserve room in the Beit Midrash.

My responsibility is not to determine what they should feel, but to help them engage with what the text is asking us to confront. Tanakh isn’t simply asking us to identify the failures of people who lived thousands of years ago. It challenges us to examine our own loyalties, assumptions, responses to suffering, and ability to seek justice without losing compassion.

I’m still learning how to teach these stories. I don’t know whether I always find the right words, pause at the right moments, or leave enough room for each student to find her own way into the text. But I do know that avoiding these narratives isn’t the answer.

I cannot promise my students that these stories won’t disturb them. But I owe them the care, honesty, and sensitivity to help them confront the uncomfortable truths that Tanakh does not shy away from. Studying Tanakh isn’t only about understanding the past. It’s about examining ourselves, our communities, and the choices we make today.