"You have made my name to go forth as evil among the inhabitants of the land, among the Kenaanites and Phezerites. And I am a people of small number, and they will gather together against me, and destroy me and the men of my house." Targum Pseudo-Jonathan (Genesis 34:30) preserves Jacob's rebuke to Simeon and Levi in all its bitterness.
Notice what Jacob does not say. He does not say "you were wrong to avenge your sister." He does not say "you should not have killed." He says: you have made my name stink. We are few. They are many. They will wipe us out.
The father who calculates
The rabbis noticed the tactical flavor of Jacob's complaint. The patriarch is thinking about survival, not morality. His objection is about consequences, not principles. This is one of the most morally complicated moments in Genesis — a father who does not defend his daughter's honor, but also does not defend his sons' violence, and ends up naming only the political damage.
Jewish tradition has wrestled with Jacob's response for centuries. Some defend him: a leader's first job is to keep the family alive, and this speech is a father's fear wearing the clothes of a rebuke. Others read him harshly: silence on the question of Dinah was a deeper failure than anything Simeon and Levi did.
The takeaway: even patriarchs can fall short in the moments that matter most, and the Torah records those failures unflinchingly.