Yehudah and Tamar: The Scandal That Prepares the Redemption

This evening we take up the subject of Yehudah and Tamar — another scandal in the biblical narrative. We have already said that the Torah does not hide from us the reality of life: scenes that can recur, surprisingly, even in a life, and that affect our aspirations — our noblest aspirations. For we must live with the awareness of the imperfect and the aspiration to the perfect, with the reality of the impure and the aspiration to the pure. More than that: it is the imperfect and the impure that in fact stimulate man’s drive toward perfection and purity. And we must draw the lesson from every event, because through every event there is always something to be learned — and this is not at all negative; quite the contrary.

What may seem to us most scandalous in life, in our daily existence, can carry a small glimmer of moral light in the way it unfolds. We will see this, in fact, through this account of Yehudah, which suddenly interrupts the whole story of Yosef. Chapter 38 is grafted onto the parashiyot of Yosef, and one wonders why the Torah breaks off the story of Yosef just when he has been sold by his brothers and lands in Egypt. His descent into Egypt is already the seed of the fulfillment of the promise G-d made to Avraham: that his descendants would be forged in a land not their own, that there they would be exploited to the very limit of their strength, and that from there the Holy One, blessed be He, would deliver them, bring them forth, and charge them with carrying the destiny of humanity.

But before this descent into Egypt became a reality for the whole house of Yaakov — and afterward for the embryo of the Jewish people — the Holy One, blessed be He, decided to prepare what would later be the liberation of that people. How would it come about? Through Yehudah. Now it was Yehudah who proposed selling his brother Yosef to the Ishmaelites — not Reuven. Two of the brothers set out to save Yosef. Reuven wanted him thrown into the pit, so as to rid himself of shefichut damim, bloodshed — that is, of the crime of fratricide. And Yehudah, likewise acting on his own impulse, said: No — why leave him to rot in the pit? […] He will feel servitude in his own flesh, he who dreamed of greatness and of pre-eminence; so let us sell him. And that is how Yosef ends up in the dungeons of Egypt. But this descent of Yosef into Egypt — this yeridah — is for the sake of an aliyah, an ascent: in the end it leads to Yosef’s being promoted and revealed as

the moshel — the governor, the ruler, the viceroy. And at that same moment, vayered Yehudah, “Yehudah went down”: Yehudah too experiences a descent. His brothers, seized with remorse as they see that their father will not be consoled for the loss of Yosef, reproach Yehudah for having persuaded them to sell their brother. He too is excluded. His brothers no longer acknowledge him; he parts from them and is drawn toward an Adullamite man named Hirah. And there Yehudah falls in love with the daughter of a Canaanite — whereas until now the patriarchs had avoided any marriage alliance with the inhabitants of Canaan, Yehudah indeed becomes attached to a Canaanite woman. Of course, everything depends on the level at which one reads the text. For whoever regards Yehudah as a tzaddik, this woman was not of Canaanite origin.

No — she was bat ish socher, the daughter of a merchant: kena’ani here means a trader. And ushmo Chirah, “his name was Hirah.” The Torah tells us this man’s name — why is he called Hirah? It is not for nothing. It should make us reflect that there was a Hiram who helped Shlomo build the Temple, the Sanctuary. That is another level of reading. For it is true — one must know that when we read the Torah, it all depends on the level at which we read it, and from what perspective: commercial, political, moral or metaphysical. Each person will discover himself through the interpretation he gives the biblical text; he will project himself onto the text.

So, to continue the story: with this woman he has three children. The first is Er, the second Onan, the third Shelah — three children, again with significant names. Er means “awaken,” but, as in aru aru ad hayesod bah, “raze it, raze it to its foundations,” it also means “destroy”: here is a destructive intelligence. Onan, the second son, comes from the word on, strength — kochi vereshit oni, “my strength and the first of my vigor” — but it is also a synonym of avelut, mourning. Here is a strength one relies on, on which one builds one’s hopes, but unfortunately it claims many victims, and there is a scent of mourning about it. Vatosef od vateled ben, “she bore yet another son” — the third: Shelah. Shelah, shalah, is illusion; it is also the imaginary; it is also a will to transcend that destructive side of a negative intelligence and of a harmful strength, and to hope for a better world that would have learned the lesson. Ad ki yavo Shiloh, “until Shiloh comes”: Shiloh is a synonym of Mashiach, the Messiah. And there it stops: vehayah bi-Chziv beledtah oto, “he was at Keziv when she bore him.”

When this third child is born there are no more children; it is over. This marks the end of these two attempts, which did not succeed because the intelligence was not put to good use, and because the strength, too, proved destructive. So how is this borne out in the text? Yehudah takes a wife for Er, his firstborn. This woman is called Tamar; her numerical value equals that of shemesh, the sun. Yehudah, full of energy and full of faith, would like to consecrate the exclusion he has just lived through by bringing forward another current: not the one that leads man toward Egypt, but on the contrary the one that draws him out of Egypt; not that of a negative intelligence, nor of the violence of a strength that is likewise [destructive], but a messianic current, in which brotherhood truly comes into its own — for it is fully borne out in the brotherhood a couple lives, in companionship.

Ahavah, love, finds its fulfillment in brotherhood — a brotherhood in which one effaces himself entirely to serve the other, without jealousy and without hatred. The sin of Cain and Hevel must be repaired, and that is what is being sought, even in the destiny of Yosef and Yehudah, because they are two brothers. We will see that Yehudah and Yosef are both destined to be leaders — but not in rivalry: they must be able to fulfill themselves in complementarity. Well, that is a parenthesis: peace that itself leads to walking together. And Tamar — the date palm — is the tree that rises toward the heights. Of course, when its fruit is bashel, ripe, it is very sweet, because it has matured; but it is inedible, uneatable, before it has reached that maturity.

Tamar also has another meaning: timrot ashan, a column of smoke. The ketoret is the incense; when it burned it gave off smoke with an intense fragrance. In the smoke, in the haze of that smoke, there was this fragrance. But that fragrance owed itself to an impure element — or rather, it was made strong, reinforced, multiplied, I would say, by this impure element, the chelbenah, which was in it and which was forbidden. And she had this ability to integrate the impure into the pure, and precisely to justify this imperfect world that G-d left in a raw state so that man could become His partner in the work of creation. Er falls victim to this intelligence that paid homage to beauty: fascinated by a woman, he did not want at all to see her spoiled by carrying a child. He wants no child. He would like to keep the woman as an avodah zarah, as an idol. “And Er, Yehudah’s firstborn, was evil in the eyes of Hashem, and Hashem put him to death.”

Now here Hashem intervenes in the story — a story that may be read, translated and expounded, unlike the story of Reuven, which is read without being translated or expounded. No, this is not simply a wild outburst of human nature: G-d’s hand is also at work in this story. It is as though, behind everything that happens here, there were an invisible hand — a hand that drives Yehudah toward a Canaanite woman, that compels Yehudah to choose a woman such as Tamar for his sons, and then leads him to stumble in his own choice, caught up in this trial, this pitfall he does not overcome. He was forced into it. It happens sometimes in life that there are situations we no longer master, which compel us to act against our own convictions. And afterward we wonder why we let ourselves be carried along. We would like to take it back, but what has been done has been done. So there is first a failure with Er, and there will be a second failure with Onan. With Onan — as was customary at the time, for levirate marriage was already practiced then, if only in its beginnings: a woman who had joined a family became a full member of it, in order to bear children and secure the family’s future. What does one do? Since the brother has died and left no child, the younger brother takes his sister-in-law, marries her, and gives a name — ensures the continuity of his deceased brother through the child he will have. This is what is called yibbum, and it indeed demands an effacement of oneself, of one’s own will, for the sake of the family. But Onan — the idea of a child who would be his brother’s project rather than his own disturbed him enormously. So he carried out the yibbum: he respected the form, but he would not go all the way. He too, one way or another, refused to give Tamar a child, and he practiced onanism. These unfortunate men are children already destroyed at the root.

He too is struck down by Hashem; he dies. So there remains the third child, who should — it is the wish of Tamar and of the deceased brothers — marry her: Shelah. But Yehudah says to himself: two sons have fallen victim to their union with her. Does he suspect Tamar of being a bad omen for the family? Perhaps. Does he fear for his son Shelah, that he might suffer the same fate? And does he therefore want to bring Shelah to the age at which he can dissolve this bond? That too is possible. The fact is that Yehudah says to Tamar: shevi almanah beit avich ad yigdal Shelah beni, “remain a widow in your father’s house until my son Shelah grows up.” She must wait.

Yes, Shelah is still young; that is possible. Perhaps Yehudah, if he knew what Er and Onan had done, wanted Shelah to show his maturity this time — so that if he took Tamar he would not act as his brothers had. But when Shelah grows up, she is still waiting. And Yehudah does not offer to unite her with his son Shelah. Having been set aside, she will not accept it; she wants to assert her will one way or another. For there is this bitter side of Tamar — mar, bitter — that drives her to revolt. She will not submit to a fate. She has become part of this family and wants at all costs to fulfill herself within it — just as Ruth will do later by taking the initiative with Boaz. So she resorts to a ruse: she drapes herself in a veil, in a garment — all to remain within Yehudah’s family. She watches his comings and goings and stations herself at a street corner, and indeed Yehudah, passing by, cannot resist the allure of this woman. Did she seduce him? The text says nothing, does it? But Yehudah, having lost his wife, goes up to the shearing of his flock with Hirah — once again the Torah insists on putting forward the name of this Hirah: re’ehu ha-Adulami, his Adullamite companion — to Timnah. Now, Timnah is a place we know. Once, with Shimshon, it says vayered: it is a yeridah, a descent. But here, when Timnah is mentioned, it is an ascent — that is, here the path leads toward the heights; it spurs man toward elevation.

And then it is said: hineh chamich oleh Timnatah, “behold, your father-in-law is going up to Timnah.” And she takes off her widow’s garments, covers herself with a veil, wraps herself, and sits be-petach einayim, “at the opening of the eyes” — there where the eyes are fixed, she thinks of her two husbands, from whom she had expected so much, hoped for so much, and had nothing. And so the brother who used a ruse against his father, who showed him the garment and said to him haker na, “Do you recognize your son’s garment or not?” — the brother who used a ruse against his other brother — now falls victim himself to a woman who wraps herself in a garment, and who will later say to him: look, recognize this, recognize these things. And it is she who will then tell him […]: yes, I am pregnant, I am pregnant by you. But we will come to that later, not now. Let us continue. So he goes to her, of his own accord — driven by an outside impulse, it matters little.

At that time, before the laws of marriage were instituted, if one met a woman in the street and she was pleasing, either one gave her what she asked in order to satisfy one’s desire and she went away, or one took her as a wife. In reality they were called kedeshot — not zonot, harlots. Kedeshot are, if you like, kedoshim: women consecrated, but in another way. That was the law of union at the time. If a woman was pleasing, then — insofar as she consented — one gave her what she asked and united with her. And he does the same. We are in a world where the Torah has not yet been given, where the rules of marriage have not yet been laid down — now, supposing we are in a moral world. The woman asks for the three things a woman may claim from her husband out of respect for her personhood: she’erah, kesutah ve’onatah lo yigra, “her food, her clothing and her conjugal rights he shall not diminish” — namely, that he care for the respect of her person, that he clothe her, that he feed her.

These are the three conditions to which every new bridegroom commits himself to this day. And what does she ask for? Chotamcha, u-feticha, u-matcha, “your seal, your cord and your staff.” Mateh — as in mateh lechem — is bread; petil is the cloth, the garment; chotam is the seal, your seal — that is: the respect of my person, you will guarantee it to me. There is also a small remez, a hint, here, which there is no need to explain. And then: vayiten lah, vayavo eleha, vatahar lo, “he gave them to her, and came to her, and she conceived by him.” Was it simply a passing encounter, after which he no longer wished to know her? Or a real intention to unite with this woman, who was very beautiful — since he was a widower and seeking a wife, and she was younger than he, and, as we said, very beautiful? The text says that after obtaining what she [sought], she puts back on the garments of her widowhood.

Yehudah tries to redeem the pledge he gave her — chotamo, his seal; petilo, his tallit; u-matehu, and his staff — and sends her what he had promised, the value of a gedi izim, a young goat. But his companion, Hirah the Adullamite, does not find this young woman, and he asks the people of the place: “Where is the kedeshah? Where is she?” — the one who sought to be mekudeshet, consecrated, but who went about it in a way that was not quite lawful, so that her conduct was not that of a kedeshah. We may suppose that the people of the place knew this woman and why she came, and they said lo hayetah va-zeh kedeshah: by what she did, she was not a kedeshah — or else, as the plain sense has it, there has never been any kedeshah here; we have never known her. When the companion returns to Yehudah, he tells him: I did not find her, and the people of the place also said there has been no kedeshah here.

Then Yehudah said: let her keep what I gave her; but we will not make a scandal. For if we stir things up too much, we will cover our family with shame, cover my own person with shame. No. Vayehi ke-mishlosh chodashim, “about three months later” — three months later he is told: zantah Tamar kalatecha, “Tamar your daughter-in-law has played the harlot,” and she is carrying children in her womb. They come to tell him this about Tamar, his daughter-in-law. Well, he need only break with her altogether: if his intention was not to give her Shelah, this is the best opportunity.

Ah, but no — he is the one who is affected, because in reality he had his eye on Tamar, and he could not accept that she had been unfaithful to him, perhaps. So he says: hotzi’uha ve-tisaref, “bring her out and let her be burned” — reduce her to ashes. Yes, and it is at that moment that she chose not to crush Yehudah, but simply to say: here are the objects that were given to me as the pledge of a promise and of a bond I had — with whom, I cannot say; it is for you to recognize them. From this our sages learned that a person should be willing to throw himself into the fire, to be burned, rather than humiliate his fellow.

Yes, she did not want to humiliate him; she wanted him to take responsibility. And Yehudah says tzadkah mimeni: she is right, it is from me — it is by me that she is pregnant, because I did not give her to Shelah my son. Velo yasaf od le-da’tah, we are told: “and he did not know her again” — there is no other child. You remember vehayah bi-Chziv beledtah oto: at Shelah, the third child, Yehudah’s wife stopped bearing children. Here it is he who stopped, at the birth of these children — not at the birth, even before, when she knew she was carrying te’omim be-vitnah, “twins in her womb.” And this time it is te’omim. With Yaakov, Rivkah too was pregnant with two children, but there it was tomim, tomim without the aleph — that is, two false twins: one a tzaddik, the other a rasha. Whereas here both are tzaddikim, so the word te’omim is whole: they are truly twins. This is an important idea, and we are going to see why. For at the moment of birth a particular phenomenon occurs — and now the text no longer speaks of Yehudah; it speaks only of Tamar.

When the first child emerges, he puts out his hand and then draws it back in, and it is the second child who bursts out; only afterward does the first one come. The midwife [had tied a scarlet thread on his hand, saying: this one came out first]. […] Mah paratzta alecha paretz, “What a breach you have made for yourself!” — and because of this bursting forth he is given the name Peretz. And the second, the one who first put out his hand, is named Zerach. Zerach means the sun, the rising of the sun — the sun rises, you see? Zerichah is the rising of the day; peretz is the bursting forth. What does this mean? And here the account breaks off, and the Torah returns to Yosef. Now, we said that this passage about Yehudah was preparing the redeemer of the Jewish people, even before the people went down to Egypt and suffered the lot of slaves.

And these are the two phenomena that confront each other in the personalities of Yosef and of Yehudah. Yosef means to be the leader of the Jewish people, but he intends to be so in the golah, in exile, with the aim of keeping a hold over all his brothers — though in a genuine struggle. No — Yehudah, gur aryeh, the lion’s cub, who crouches like a lion, would lead the destiny of the Jewish people as a melech, a king, and not only as a kohen, as one who spreads around him the values he carries. He has a land; he wants to put an end to exile, to put an end to dependence. What does he do? He bursts forth. He wants no hand that goes in and comes out — that is, no endlessly renewed diplomatic attempts to achieve simply whatever can be achieved, all the while taking into account what the nations think.

No: from Peretz will come David — the one who raises his weapon against Goliath, the one who brings about the kingship of Israel. It is he who liberates the Land of Israel, he who builds, or already foresees, the site on which the Temple will be built. Ruth will unite with Boaz, of the line of Peretz, in similar circumstances in order to bring David into the world. […] Then there is the one who indeed put out his hand and drew it back — because one must not assert by violence alone a hold on a land, on a promise of G-d that has not yet come to be. One must give it […]: there must be recognition among the nations. That is the break of day, the sun — that is Zerach.

Peretz and Zerach are two redeemers of the people of Israel, two currents. One may be a liberal Zionism, the other an Orthodox Zionism. One may be a Zionism that waits, that entrusts to the Holy One, blessed be He, the accomplishment of the final redemption; or else the one that says: no, we must not wait for it to come about little by little; we must act swiftly and […] — and that is Peretz. So these two, Peretz and Zerach, confront each other as they emerge from Tamar’s womb, just as Tamar herself had been caught in a struggle: either to revolt against the house, against Yehudah, or to keep Yehudah but act in another way — that is, to integrate the yetzer hara, the evil inclination, into the yetzer tov, the good inclination — and to act in such a way that what she does, she does with azut di-kedushah, a holy boldness — by a power, a force of holiness.

To force holiness to come about of itself — in this she succeeds. And that is what makes the story of Yehudah so bitter and so fascinating. Many things would of course remain to be developed and brought to completion, but I leave them to your reflection. […] We will continue when classes resume. If you have questions for now, with pleasure. — Yes, honored Rav: at the beginning of the lecture you said that Onan, by his conduct, was destroyed at the root. I would like to know what you mean by saying that Onan was destroyed at the root. He acted badly — but in what sense was he destroyed at the root? — The text says that when he united with Tamar, he contrived to spill his seed on the ground.

That is to say, in the end he did not want to give such a purpose to his strength, simply because it would serve his brother’s wishes, his brother’s goal, his brother’s project. So he, no — rather than let his brother succeed, he prefers destruction. It is a project — a phenomenon we are living through today, unfortunately. We are seeing it among ourselves: there are brothers who are aware of the danger of their initiative, and so on. Deep down they would have wanted to accomplish the thing, but for their own name — not for someone else, not for a brother, but for their own glory, for their own name. That is Onan.

— A small question. You spoke of Tamar’s bitterness and linked it to the will to fulfill oneself and to revolt. I have always thought that bitterness is something that, on the contrary, paralyzes or diminishes — not something that drives one to revolt. Bitterness is surely something passive. — Precisely here: if I must lose everything, if I do not reach my goal, then I will choose another path. There is the path of Er, which is ra, evil; there is the path of Onan, which is also ra, bad, is it not? I will choose a path of tov me’od, “very good.” Tov me’od — me’od, me’od — zeh ha-mavet: “this is death.” When one seeks this perfection to excess, it is death.

So the path Tamar chose is this one: I will go all the way; having nothing left to lose — ka’asher avadti avadti, “if I perish, I perish” — I will dare; I will enter a new phase. That is what Esther says regarding Achashverosh: until now I was forced; I was Achashverosh’s object. Now I myself will seduce him; now I will commit the fault; now I will destroy my pride, my morals, my whole project of being. But since I am now condemned to lose everything, I will do it for my brothers, to save my brothers. If it is to save my brothers, this is called azut di-kedushah — that is, committing an averah lishmah, a transgression for a higher purpose, in the name of a great mitzvah, for the sake of a great mitzvah. That is it — and that is the bitterness. The bitterness is to have hoped so much, and there things stand: they were promised to her, but they are not given to her; so she goes all the way. — But that recalls a little the story of the binding of Yitzchak: the sacrifice of Avraham, who sacrifices everything he wanted — his whole project — his son who is to be [offered up]. It does rather recall the same principle.

— Yes, that is a good comparison you make, except that Avraham’s sacrifice was a trial, a test. And even then, G-d dissuaded him. He told him: no, no — ha’alehu, I asked you to bring him up, to raise him as a model for the nations, but not to the point of sacrificing him. But here, no: here it is something Yehudah and Tamar lived through to the very end. That is to say, the averah committed here is the initiative of man himself. It is not G-d who puts him to the test. — But is it really an averah? — Yes. — If there was no Torah yet, why is it an averah? — That is to say: the whole history of this universe begins with a fault, the sin of Adam.

Had there been no sin of Adam, we would be in a world that would bore us — because it would be a full world, a world without man’s merit, without anything else. Now, we start from the principle that the world was in a state of imperfection, and that it must be brought, little by little, to a state of perfection — but a perfection meant to be lived day by day. You know, I was saying yesterday that, as a rule, when a letter is found broken in a Sefer Torah, that Sefer Torah is disqualified until the break is repaired and the letter is rewritten, made whole. Yet there is one single letter in the Sefer Torah that is deliberately broken: the vav of shalom. Shalom — the vav is broken. Pinchas used violence to halt an epidemic of forbidden unions, of forbidden liaisons between the children of Israel and the daughters of Moav, which had already claimed twenty-four thousand victims; it had to be stopped. And Pinchas acquired the kehunah, the priesthood, by killing the one who led this movement of rapprochement with Moav — Zimri ben Salu. He killed him together with the princess Cozbi bat Tzur. And paradoxically, the Holy One, blessed be He, makes with him a covenant of shalom. Shalom is peace. Yes — but the vav of this shalom is broken. Why? Because a peace gained through violence is not to be commended.

It is true that we are not in a shalem world. The shalem, the perfect, does not exist; we live in a world that is not perfect. But what we must bring about is shalom: that imperfection should come, as it were, to support this movement toward perfection. How is it done? Yes — it is the vav. The vav is a letter of conjunction: it is what attaches one letter to another, one thing to another, a person to his fellow. So this shalom — which is also an attribute of G-d: oseh shalom bi-meromav, “He who makes peace in His heights,” in the celestial heights, between rival forces, and also, yes, between the material and the spiritual; this is His attribute of shalom — this shalom is realized on Shabbat. That is why we do not say “Shabbat tov” or “Gut Shabbos,” no, but “Shabbat Shalom.”

Shabbat is what gathers into itself all the imperfections of the week and brings about the harmony of all the elements of creation — and it also coordinates them, considering that everything we have done is already accomplished; it no longer needs to be continued. What we do, we will create anew […]. That is Shabbat Shalom: Shabbat and shalom. And this notion — this notion of imperfection, bound up with shalom — is important even at the level of the tzaddikim, because ki adam ein tzaddik ba’aretz asher ya’aseh tov ve-lo yecheta, “there is no righteous man on earth who does good and never sins.” And why must the Mashiach come? Lehachazir tzaddikim bi-teshuvah — to bring the righteous to repentance?

To bring the righteous to repentance? Because the righteous man, too, must be aware of his imperfection. — Todah rabbah! — There we are. So I will leave you, and after the break we will resume our lectures. — No lecture next week? See you soon. — There is no lecture next week? — No, there will be no lecture. That is what I was told. — No more lectures? Normally we had planned lectures until July 30. But it depends on whether Rav Benizri is still [available]. Rav, can’t you continue until July, or are you busy? — No — that is, usually, with the months of Tammuz and Av, I prefer to stop and resume at Rosh Chodesh Elul, if you wish.

— We will have a good reason to be in mourning — to double the mourning — because we won’t have the lectures. — We are in Shelah: we are neither in Er nor in Onan. — Very well, I will pass it on, then. Thank you very much, Rabbi. Goodbye — shavua tov.