Tag Archives: Parashat vayeshev

Vayeshev:a reminder that we cannot occupy the same space as previous generations,we create the world anew.

Posted on by
Reply

L’italiano segue l’inglese

Rabbi Yocḥanan says: Everywhere that it is stated: And he dwelt, [וישב] it is nothing other than an expression of pain, of an impending calamity, as it is stated: “And Israel dwelt in Shittim, and the people began to commit harlotry with the daughters of Moab” (Numbers 25:1). It is stated: “And Jacob dwelt in the land where his father had sojourned in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 37:1), and it is stated thereafter: “And Joseph brought evil report of them to his father” (Genesis 37:2), which led to the sale of Joseph. And it is stated: “And Israel dwelt in the land of Egypt in the land of Goshen” (Genesis 47:27), and it is stated thereafter: “And the time drew near that Israel was to die” (Genesis 47:29). It is stated: “And Judah and Israel dwelt safely, every man under his vine and under his fig tree” (I Kings 5:5), and it is stated thereafter: “And the Eternal raised up an adversary to Solomon, Hadad the Edomite; he was of the king’s seed in Edom” (I Kings 11:14). (Sanhedrin 106a)

Rabbi Yochanan bar Nafcha, was a great aggadist and also a leading Talmudic scholar. His words should be taken seriously. Essentially his comment is that whenever someone settles down too comfortably on the land, it is the prelude to uncomfortable – or worse – happenings.  The verse that names this sidra reads “And Jacob dwelt [וישב]  in the land where his father had stayed, in the land of Canaan” (Genesis 37:1)

What is the tragedy that is being signalled?

Rashi comments at length on this verse and links it with the next verse which reads rather abruptly “These are the generations of Jacob, Joseph being seventeen years old……” Rashi observes: “Another comment on this verse is: וישב AND HE ABODE — Jacob wished to live at ease, but this trouble in connection with Joseph suddenly came upon him. When the righteous wish to live at ease, the Holy one, blessed be He), says to them: “Are not the righteous satisfied with what is stored up for them in the world to come that they wish to live at ease in this world too! (Genesis Rabbah 84:3)

We find ourselves in this text rather uncomfortably sandwiched between Jacob’s father who lived in Canaan, and his son, Joseph who is about to be sold into slavery in Egypt, and who will never return to the land as a living man, but whose bones will be brought back after the exodus.

The tragedy is Jacob’s. His older sons do not like the two sons of Rachel, who has died giving birth to Benjamin. The sibling hatred will play out and change the lives of many. But I think if we are to follow Rabbi Yochanan closely, we will see that the tragedy that unfolds is less to do with the sons of Jacob repeating and intensifying the sibling rivalry between him Jacob and his twin brother Esau, and more to do with Jacob’s repeating his own father Isaac’s actions.

Jacob settles not just in the Land of Canaan, he settles “b’eretz migurei aviv” – in the land where his father had been a visiting stranger. The phrase is apparently extraneous – once we know he is in Canaan we have the information we need, so this rather odd extra must be able to tell us something. And of course, it does.

Jacob is repeating the actions of his father Isaac – at least in part. Isaac had moved to the Philistine city of Gerar during famine and had deceived the king Abimelech saying his wife was his sister – as his father had done. He went to dig and reclaim the wells his father had dug, but was chased away each time and ended up in Beersheva having finally dug a well he could keep – which he called Rechovot (Genesis 26:23ff) and then in Beersheva he met God, accepted the Covenant in his own right, and pitched his tent and dug a well there. It took him a while, but he eventually stopped replaying his father’s life and created his own space and used his own agency.

Jacob however encamped where his father had camped. It seems he was looking for a quiet life without actually doing the work to enable it. And in his doing so, his unquestioning repeating of his father’s actions without making the necessary changes to either make the space his own, or to bring up to date his relationship with the land, he precipitates the tragedy.

What do we learn from this? It is that we cannot live the same life as our parents; we cannot simply step into their shoes and claim their experience. The world moves on and we must move on with it. We may inherit artefacts from them – even houses or land – but we cannot just use them or live in them without change. For that way brings stagnation and ultimately our lives would narrow and dry up. As LP Hartley wisely wrote “The past is a foreign country, they do things differently there”

The joy of the Jewish tradition is not that we do things exactly as our forebears did – we innovate, we decorate, we edit, we create a new thing from the old. (see Isaiah 43) If we really did things in exactly the same way, we would not be living Judaism, we would be living in a museum.

The same is true of Jacob here in sidra vayeshev. He is encamped on the land as if he is his father. But land changes, its needs are dynamic; one cannot treat it the same way year in and year out.

Rashi quotes Genesis Rabbah on this verse and it is an uncomfortable – or rather it is a challenging read. “Are not the righteous satisfied with what is stored up for them in the world to come that they wish to live at ease in this world too! (Genesis Rabbah 84:3)

We are not to expect to live an easy life in this world – not that we need expect difficulty, but we must expect to work at it, to be challenged by our surroundings, however familiar they are to us. We cannot sit back and just do what our forebears did, we live in a different world, and our children will live in a different one again. It is up to us to live in our world, to face modernity in our time, to deal with the realities of now. If we just try to conserve or preserve the past our existence will be futile and pointless. We have to use the past as our guide, but not allow it to bind us too tightly, because our reality is not the reality of our forebears.

This is true also in how we live in and treat our world. For many years the sea became a dumping ground, taking pollution away from our awareness – only now are we truly seeing the effects of those years. For many years oil and petroleum based products were freely created and wasted. It seemed to earlier generations that the resources of the earth were infinite – we now know they are finite. For many years we were happy to pump emissions into the air and assumed they dispersed and became safe – we now know differently…..

We live not in the more innocent world of the past, but in a world where we can measure the pollution and the climate change, where we see the floods and the droughts, the famines and the devastations, and where we can see our part in their creation.

We live in our time, but we keep an eye for the next generations, just as the second verse of this chapter reminds us Jacob did. What will we do to enable the next generations to have a cleaner, safer world? Or will we also encamp on the land that does not truly belong to us, and use it without real responsibility, until tragedy becomes inevitable?

 

Vayeshev: ricordiamoci che non possiamo occupare lo stesso spazio delle generazioni precedenti, ma possiamo creare di nuovo il mondo.

Pubblicato da rav Sylvia Rothschild, il 17 dicembre 2019

 

 

            Il rabbino Yochanan dice: Ovunque sia affermato: E dimorava, [וישב] non è altro che un’espressione di dolore, di una calamità incombente, come si afferma: “E Israele dimorò a Shittim, e il popolo cominciò a  fornicare con le figlie di Moav ”(Numeri 25: 1). Si dice: “E Giacobbe si stabilì nella terra in cui suo padre aveva soggiornato, nella terra di Canaan” (Genesi 37: 1), e in seguito si affermò: “E Giuseppe portò loro del male a suo padre” (Genesi 37 : 2), che ha portato alla vendita di Giuseppe. E si afferma: “E Israele dimorò nella terra d’Egitto nel paese di Goshen” (Genesi 47:27), e in seguito si afferma: “E fu vicino per Israele il giorno della morte” (Genesi 47:29 ). Si dice: “E Giuda e Israele dimorarono sani e salvi, ogni uomo sotto la sua vite e sotto il suo fico” (I Re 5: 5), e in seguito si afferma: “E l’Eterno fece levare un avversario contro Salomone, Hadad l’idumeo; che era della stirpe reale di Edom” (I Re 11:14). (Sanhedrin 106a)

 

Il rabbino Yochanan bar Nafcha era un grande aggadista, nonché un importante studioso talmudico. Le sue parole dovrebbero essere prese sul serio. In sostanza, egli nota nel suo commento come ogni volta che qualcuno si stabilisce troppo comodamente sulla terra, è il preludio a eventi scomodi, o peggio. Il verso che da il nome a questa sidrà recita: “E Giacobbe dimorò [וישב] nella terra in cui era stato suo padre, nella terra di Canaan”. (Genesi 37: 1)

 

Qual è la tragedia che viene segnalata?

 

Rashi commenta a lungo su questo versetto e lo collega al versetto successivo, che recita in modo piuttosto brusco: “Queste sono le generazioni di Giacobbe, Giuseppe che ha diciassette anni …”, egli osserva: “Un altro commento su questo versetto è: וישב E DIMORÒ: Giacobbe desiderava vivere a proprio agio, ma improvvisamente  ebbe questo problema collegato a Giuseppe. Quando il giusto desidera vivere a proprio agio, il Santo, (benedetto sia Lui), gli dice: ‘I giusti non sono soddisfatti di ciò che è conservato per loro nel mondo a venire, che desiderano vivere a proprio agio pure in questo mondo!’” (Genesi Rabbà 84: 3)

 

Ci troviamo, in questo testo piuttosto scomodo, tra il padre di Giacobbe che viveva a Canaan e suo figlio Giuseppe, che sta per essere venduto come schiavo in Egitto e che non tornerà mai più da vivo nella terra, ma le cui spoglie saranno riportate dopo l’esodo.

 

La tragedia è di Giacobbe. Ai suoi figli più grandi non piacciono i due figli di Rachele, che è morta dando alla luce Beniamino. L’odio tra fratelli si svilupperà e cambierà la vita di molti. Ma penso che, seguendo da vicino il rabbino Yochanan, vedremo che la tragedia in divenire riguarda meno i figli di Giacobbe, che ripetono e intensificano la rivalità fraterna tra lui e il fratello gemello Esaù, e ha più a che fare con lui stesso e la sua ripetizione delle azioni del padre Isacco.

 

Non solo Giacobbe si stabilisce nella Terra di Canaan, ma si stabilisce “b’eretz migurei aviv“, nella terra in cui suo padre era stato straniero in visita. Apparentemente la frase non è rilevante, una volta che sappiamo che egli è a Canaan abbiamo le informazioni di cui abbiamo bisogno, questa aggiunta piuttosto strana deve quindi servire a dirci qualcosa. E ovviamente così è.

 

Giacobbe sta ripetendo le azioni di suo padre Isacco, almeno in parte. Isacco si era trasferito nella città filistea di Gerar durante la carestia e aveva ingannato il re Abimelech presentando sua moglie come propria sorella, così come aveva già fatto suo padre. Era andato a scavare e recuperare i pozzi che già suo padre aveva scavato, ma ogni volta ne fu cacciato e, dopo aver scavato finalmente un pozzo che poteva tenere, che chiamò Rechovot, finì poi a Beersheva (Genesi 26: 23ff). A Beersheva successivamente incontrò Dio, accettò l’Alleanza a pieno titolo,  piantò la sua tenda e scavò un altro pozzo. Gli ci volle un po’, ma alla fine smise di ripetere la vita di suo padre, creando il proprio spazio e il proprio agire.

 

Giacobbe, tuttavia, si accampò dove si era accampato suo padre. Sembra che stesse cercando una vita tranquilla senza realmente operare per potersela consentire. E nel fare ciò, nel ripetere automaticamente le azioni di suo padre senza apportarvi le modifiche necessarie per personalizzare lo spazio o per aggiornare il proprio rapporto con la terra, fa accelerare la tragedia.

 

Cosa impariamo da questo? Che non possiamo vivere la stessa vita dei nostri genitori; non possiamo semplicemente metterci nei loro panni e rivendicare la loro esperienza. Il mondo va avanti e dobbiamo procedere con esso. Potremmo ereditare da loro dei manufatti, persino delle case o dei terreni, ma non possiamo usarli o viverci senza apportarvi dei cambiamenti. Perché altrimenti ci sarebbe stagnazione e, alla fine, la nostra vita si restringerebbe e si prosciugherebbe. Come scrisse saggiamente L.P. Hartley: “Il passato è una terra straniera, lì fanno le cose diversamente”.

 

La gioia della tradizione ebraica non è fare le cose esattamente come le facevano i nostri antenati: innoviamo, abbelliamo, modifichiamo, creiamo una cosa nuova dalla vecchia (vedi Isaia 43). Se facessimo davvero le cose esattamente allo stesso modo, non vivremmo l’ebraismo, vivremmo in un museo.

 

Lo stesso vale per Giacobbe, qui nella Sidrà Vayeshev. È accampato sulla terra come se fosse suo padre. Ma la terra nel suo cambiare presenta bisogni dinamici: non la si può trattare allo stesso modo anno dopo anno.

 

Rashi cita Genesi Rabbà su questo versetto, ed è scomodo, o meglio, presenta una lettura stimolante: “I giusti non sono soddisfatti di ciò che è in serbo per loro nel mondo a venire, che desiderano vivere a proprio agio anche in questo mondo!” (Genesi Rabbà 84: 3)

 

Non dobbiamo aspettarci di vivere una vita facile in questo mondo, non che dobbiamo aspettarci difficoltà, ma dobbiamo aspettarci di lavorare, di essere sfidati da ciò che ci circonda, per quanto familiare sia. Non possiamo sederci e fare semplicemente ciò che i nostri antenati hanno già fatto, viviamo in un mondo diverso e i nostri figli a loro volta vivranno in un mondo diverso ancora. Sta a noi vivere nel nostro mondo, affrontare la modernità dei nostri tempi, affrontare le realtà di oggi. Se proviamo semplicemente a conservare o preservare il passato, la nostra esistenza sarà vana e inutile. Dobbiamo usare il passato come nostra guida, ma non permettere che esso ci leghi troppo strettamente, perché la nostra realtà non è la realtà dei nostri antenati.

 

Questo vale anche per il modo in cui viviamo e per come trattiamo il nostro mondo. Tenendo lontano per molti anni l’inquinamento dalla nostra consapevolezza il mare è diventato una discarica e solo ora stiamo ne stiamo davvero vedendo gli effetti. Per molti anni i prodotti a base di petrolio sono stati creati e sprecati liberamente. Alle generazioni precedenti sembrava che le risorse della terra fossero infinite: ora sappiamo che sono limitate. Per molti anni siamo stati felici di liberare emissioni nell’aria e abbiamo pensato che si disperdessero e diventassero innocue, ora sappiamo che è diverso …

 

Non viviamo più nel mondo innocente del passato, bensì in un mondo in cui possiamo misurare l’inquinamento e i cambiamenti climatici, dove vediamo inondazioni e siccità, carestie e devastazioni, e dove possiamo riconoscere la nostra responsabilità nell’averli prodotti.

 

Viviamo nel nostro tempo, ma teniamo gli occhi aperti per le generazioni future, proprio come fece Giacobbe, come il secondo verso di questo capitolo ci ricorda. Faremo qualcosa per consentire alle prossime generazioni di avere un mondo più pulito e sicuro? O ci accamperemo sulla terra che non ci appartiene veramente e la useremo senza una reale responsabilità, fino a quando la tragedia diventerà inevitabile?

 

Traduzione dall’inglese di Eva Mangialajo Rantzer

 

 

 

Vayeshev – the transformation from brat to tzadik begins here

Posted on by
2

The narratives of Joseph occupy a large tranche of the book of Genesis – in the next four weeks we will focus almost entirely on the life and the experiences of this eleventh son of Jacob and first son on Rachel.  By the end of the book of Genesis we’ll know more about Joseph than about anyone else in his family before or since. We’ll know about his dreams, his relationships, his skills, his political exploits, his love affairs, his character flaws and strengths, his successes and his failures; his problems.

The narratives about him are long and somehow ponderous, telling the stories repeatedly, hammering the same points – the sibling rivalry, the parental favoritism, the tricks of hiding precious articles and retrieving them later;   It is hard to understand just why we are told every last detail about the life of this particular man, what we are supposed to make of this weight of information.

Tradition tells us that the stories of Joseph foreshadow the future experiences of Israel.  Reading the text we see that they also reconcile many of the themes that have come before. Joseph acts as a linchpin in the Genesis narratives – reliving and reworking the lives of his ancestors, and finally dealing with some of the issues which had held them back, finishing the business so to speak, and so allowing the people of Israel to move on in their religious journey.

The narratives of Joseph end one chapter of identity and open another.  No longer will individuals know God in the way that Abraham, Isaac and Jacob personally experienced and encountered the Divinity.  With Joseph comes the exile into Egypt which will culminate in Sinai and peoplehood.  A different sort of belonging to God is introduced here – one can not really say people are ‘relating to God,’ because in all of these narratives God is at one remove, a spectator in the story, hardly present except in the shadows at the edge of perception.

The metamorphosis which occurs with the life of Joseph is almost entirely a human one rather than one that speaks of divine interest – though it does have a flavour of fairy tale to it Political rather than theological, the transformation is very much of this world:-  A family changes radically when the favourite child falls victim to his own beliefs.  A poor immigrant succeeds beyond his wildest expectations in his adopted country.  A servant becomes a political master, changing the way the country structures itself and its socio-economic policy.  A slave becomes a prince.  A penniless Jewish refugee with no family or friends builds himself a life amongst a people not his own.

With Joseph we have a new construct with which to view our lives.  He is a Diaspora Jew, maybe even a secular Jew, certainly a political rather than a theological Jew.  Elie Wiesel describes him as “the first person to bridge two nations and two histories, the first to link Israel to the world…. In the context of the biblical narrative he was a new kind of hero heralding a new era…”  (in ‘Joseph, or the Education of a Tzaddik’ – Messengers of God p144/5

So not a patriarch, but certainly a recognizable human being and role model, giving us a different way of being.  Our problem in many ways is that we are far more like Joseph than like anyone else in the narratives – building our world on a political rather than theological basis, allowing God to be a spectator in our lives, at the margins of our identity.  Joseph is a role model with outstanding flaws for us to deal with, focusing so entirely on the present world that he seems to ignore the next one, becoming not so much integrated between two cultures as appearing to be assimilated into one almost without trace of his origins visible.

Yet Joseph is described in tradition as a Tzaddik – a Just and Righteous person.  The weight of the narrative must be trying to tell us something more – Joseph’s position as the mid point between the clearing up of past rivalries and the foreshadowing of future exile and oppression must yield more for us.  Again it is Elie Wiesel who identifies the critical point – “One recognizes the value of a text by the weight of its silence. Here the silence exists, and it weighs heavy…. “ First there is Joseph’s astounding silence during the brutal scene at Shechem, in which all his brothers except Benjamin participated.  When his brothers faced him with their hate – Joseph was mute.  More striking yet is Jacob’s silence – from the day that Joseph was taken we are told, he did not speak for 20 years.  He didn’t even speak to God.  He didn’t search for his son, didn’t go to the place where his son was last seen – he lived instead in a solitary, silent place, only resuming his conversation with and prayers to God after the family reunion, when God encouraged him to go to Egypt.

And what do we make of God’s actions – God too is silent.  Jacob didn’t address God in his interminable inconsolable grief, but neither did God address Jacob.

And Joseph in Egypt, as wealthy political potentate – where were his words, the one’s he could have sent back to Canaan to tell of his life’s story and put his father’s mind at rest?

All the words that began this story, the terrible words that Joseph spoke about his brothers, the words of peace they could barely bring themselves to utter, the words of his dreams, the words he was to bring back to his father – all those words at the beginning of Joseph’s stories descended into silence when Joseph descended into the pit, and the silence became heavier and heavier until the moment of the family reunion in Egypt, until Joseph could no longer suppress the words, no longer restrain himself.  But this time his words were changed, they became the words of a man who had transformed himself, not just from the arrogant sibling who considered that the universe should worship him, into  caring and beneficent brother;    not just from immigrant slave to ruling prince.  The transformation was from spoiled and self-centered brat into Tzaddik, a man able to forgive the wrongs done to him, a man able to transcend his history and reflect not only his humanity, but the reflection of God that is at the core of all humanity.   The heavy silence was not a time of nothingness but a time of real change, change that ultimately allows us to move on from the preoccupations of this world – the rivalries and jealousies, the acquisitiveness and the defence of the self – and move into the book of Exodus, into the beginning of the redemption.

Tradition tells us that Joseph was a Tzaddik.  A Tzaddik not because God had made him one, not because he was brought up to be one, not even because his life inevitably trained him to be one.  Joseph was surely a Tzaddik because in the face of the pain of his conception and the difficulties of his upbringing, in the face of his own weaknesses and drives,  he still managed to overcome his experiences and actually transform himself, actually allow his humanity to develop, to become something he didn’t have to be, without any supernatural help.  Everyone else changed as a result of their encounters with God. Joseph changed despite not encountering God in any observable way.  As a role model, this is the Joseph we should be reflecting – not the assimilated but the searching Jew, who found God in the unlikeliest places because God is there to be found.

 

Tamar: taking her destiny in her own hands she will enable the messiah. Parashat Vayeshev

Posted on by
2

judah-and-tamar-chagallInserted into the Joseph narratives that take up much of the last half of the book of Genesis, is a chapter about Judah and about his family. It is also a chapter about the actions of a woman who is determined to right a wrong and how she achieves this goal. Situated as it is so discordantly in the Joseph narrative it is easy to turn the page, to ignore the text as we continue to read about Joseph’s troubles and his subsequent elevation. Because it deals with sexual acts, and with apparent impropriety, it is studied much less than it should be. The lens of the narrator is narrow, detail is sparse, but it is a text worth a great deal of attention, for it reminds us that in bible the women were actors in the story and not observers, they were out in the public space, their behaviour often created pivots in the chronicle. The story of Judah and Tamar shouts out “notice me” – the sons of Jacob are yet again challenged by a woman and this time they cannot cheat her or hide from her or marginalise her. Tamar is a risk taker while all the time behaving within the law. She is a model for modern Jewish women, her story reminds us our destiny is in our own hands.

Judah leaves his brothers and marries a Canaanite woman, the unnamed daughter of Shua, and has three sons: Er, Onan and Shelah.  Without comment from the narrator, time passes and he takes a wife for his first born son -Tamar. What do we know about her? Her antecedents are shrouded in mystery though we may assume that she was also a Canaanite woman. There is one tradition that suggests that she is the daughter of Malchitzedek, King of Shalem and Priest to the Most High God, and certainly she behaves in a way that bespeaks confidence and determination to get her rights fulfilled.

Tamar is married to Er, who was “wicked in the sight of God, and God killed him” (38:8). She was then married to his younger brother Onan, specifically (and anachronistically) for him to perform the act of yevamah, to provide a child who would legally be the child of the dead and childless Er.

But Onan knew that the child would not be formally his, as so when he went to her he deliberately spilled his semen on the ground rather than create a child who would inherit the portion of his dead brother, and the bible tells us “Vayera b’eynei Adonai asher assah vayamet gam oto: The thing that he did was evil in the sight of God, and he killed him too” (v10)

What did Er do that was so wicked he deserved to die? Bible doesn’t tell us. While there is a strand of tradition that suggests that the boys die as punishment for the wickedness of their father, so that he should feel the pain of the death of a child as he had caused his father to feel that grief when he did not protect Joseph, the general consensus of tradition is that the sin must have been Er’s and must have been similar to that of his brother. Hence one Midrash suggests that he did not want Tamar to spoil her beauty by becoming pregnant and therefore his relations with her were designed to prevent pregnancy. This I think tells us much more about the commentators than it does about the text, but the reality is that he does not provide a child for his wife before his sudden death.

Onan’s wickedness however is clear, and it is not the sin that bears his name. It is not the spilling of the seed that was the real problem in God’s eyes, it was the fact that he did not want to give his dead brother a stake in the future, a child who would inherit both the name and the material benefit that would have belonged to Er. He denied his dead brother an heir and he denied his wife the protection that having the child would give her.

What we are told and what we are not told in this text is fascinating. The bible is keen to make sure we know that Judah has left his brothers, that he has built a deep friendship with Hirah an Addullamite (va’yet). It tells us of his Canaanite wife bat Shua and his children with her. It tells us that the action takes place in Chezib – and here is the clue to the whole sorry tale, for the name Chezib comes from the root-verb כזב (kazab), meaning to lie, to disappoint, to fail. As an idiom the word is also used to describe a brook or stream that has dried up – a river that disappoints, rather than one that will provide water. Judah has three sons, and yet the likelihood of his having descendants after them diminishes as the disappointment and the lies build up.

The bible signals that the story is about deceptions and disappointment, and Judah as the fourth son of Jacob and Leah is born into deception and disappointment, even while he will ultimately become the ancestor par excellence, the tribe from whom we will descend.

After the deaths of the two older sons, Judah tells Tamar to “stay a widow in the house of your father until Shelah my son grows up” Assuming the practise of yevamah, this appears to be a reasonable request, though why Tamar is kept in her father’s house rather than that of her in-laws bears further examination. But it seems that he is trying to keep her at a distance, for bible continues that same verse with the words “Lest he also die like his brothers”.

The superstition that a woman who loses more than one husband is somehow responsible is dangerous and a killer of men who come close to her has deep roots. It is a classic example of blaming the victim. Widows were economically and socially vulnerable, classed in bible along with orphans and strangers in the land/refugees. There are many exhortations to protect the widows in biblical texts, but in this story in the first book of Genesis, before Torah had been given and before its challenge to established norms, the superstition drives Judah, and sadly his behaviour means that the idea of the “black widow” has permeated into our awareness too.

Widowed now himself, Judah goes to see his great friend Hirah in Timnah. We do not know how much time has passed but Tamar is able to observe for herself that Shelah has grown up and that he has not been given to her as a husband in order to both provide a child in his brother’s names. Tamar is trapped in a situation that does not allow her to marry within the family of Judah nor to marry anyone else. She must feel desperate.

Judah doesn’t tell Tamar that he is travelling near to where she is. He has left her exiled in her father’s home living as a widow and he seems to have no communication with her, nor any interest in her continued well-being.  Someone unnamed tells her that Judah will be travelling through and Tamar takes her chance.

She removes the widow’s weeds she is wearing and covering herself with her veil she sits “petach Einayim” – which could mean “at the entrance to Einayim” but which also means “at the opening of the eyes”. This is a pivot in the story. There has been up till now lies and deception, the suppressing of the reason that God found Er wicked, the betrayal by Onan of his brother’s rights to the future.   Tamar has been hidden from sight in the household of her father, there is no communication between the two households, she is out of sight and out of mind. But here she is, sitting by the roadway Judah will travel, determined to be noticed, to open Judah’s eyes to the injustice done to her.  Her action is eye opening.

Judah certainly sees her. He notices her. At least, he notices there is a woman there and he makes the assumption that she is a prostitute. And the reason for this? Because her face is covered.  Think about this. He reaches his conclusion that this is a woman available for hire for sexual relief because her face is covered. In today’s world a veiled face is supposed to designate modesty, protecting the beauty of the woman from the crassness of the world – yet here in bible the clear assumption is that the veiled face designates woman only as object. She stops being a person. She doesn’t exist as living breathing yearning thinking woman. She is a prostitute, available for the pleasure of men who pay. There is at least some honesty in this approach – the reality of the woman is unimportant in the world of the biblical text, who she is is irrelevant to the man who buys her. In today’s world of extreme tzniut used to oppress women in some communities, the deception is back. Telling women that their covered state and hiddenness from the public space is a way of increasing their holiness, protecting their modesty etc is a lie to hide the fact that their very self is being controlled by others, to keep them as possessions and as subjects rather than as active and authentic people with their own agency.

Judah is polite, he speaks to her with courtesy, not knowing who she is at all. The same verb is used as with his relationship with Hirah – vayet eleha – he turns to her. This could be the beginning of a real connection, but it is not because he does not see someone with whom connection can be made. He sees only the possibility of a sexual moment and this is what he asks for. So she begins the negotiation “what would you give me in payment for sex?” He offers her a future payment, a young kid from the flock, and she counters with the request for a pledge that she can keep until such time as the payment is made. It seems that Judah is unused to this type of negotiation. He asks her what such a pledge should be and she requests three deeply personal and unique items that will be recognisable and indisputably his.  Having given them to her, they have intercourse and Tamar conceives at last.

The interlude over, she leaves and removing the veil she puts on her widows weeds once again. Judah keeps his promise, sending the animal as promised with Hirah his friend, and expecting the return of his pledge, but she is gone, and when Hirah asks around where the prostitute who had been sitting there was, the response is that there had been no prostitute. This he relays to Judah, who doesn’t seem to be at all perturbed by the woman’s disappearance with his personal possessions, and seems rather to hope that by ignoring what has happened he will escape any shame. But how can he just leave his pledge, his signet, cords and staff, as if nothing has happened?  These days we might call it identity theft, we would desperately search for our missing items and try our best to make good the loss. Judah’s response “tikach la, pen nihyeh lavuz” is more than laconic, it is negligent and it is fearful of any shame attaching to him and his friend. Why?

Three months later the news reaches Judah that Tamar is pregnant, and the assumption is that she has prostituted herself. No communication has happened between the two as yet and when she is brought to Judah in order to be punished by burning, she still does not immediately identify the father by name. Instead there is a sort of choreography – she is brought to the household of Judah from her father’s house. She does not appear to meet Judah, instead she sends the pledged items he had given her and says “Clarify please whose are these tokens? The signet the cords and the staff?” It is of course a rhetorical question but it is a dangerous one. For a man who had been trying to avoid shame, Judah could have taken and sequestered the items. She would have been burned to death along with her unborn children. But instead he acknowledged them and speaks of the justice and rightness of Tamar’s act – she had simply been trying to fulfil the requirement for a child for his two dead sons, and in doing that to protect her own vulnerable situation too.

Like Rebecca, Tamar has twins. Like her too the birth is eventful – the first child puts out a hand and then withdraws it but not before a scarlet thread has been tied around it, the second child is then born, and the elder one is fully born second. Their names are given, but not it seems by Tamar. The elder child is named Zerach which means brightness or shining. The younger is Perez – meaning to burst forth, to breach. There are many echoes of Rebecca here, the colour red, the description of the older child in terms of his appearance and the younger in terms of his actions.  There is a clear subtext that these children were designed to be born, they are necessary in terms of the biblical narrative. They would not have been born had Judah followed his plan to keep Tamar in purdah to protect his one surviving son from what he saw was her danger – a superstition roundly exploded in the story, for Judah is not endangered by his encounter with Tamar.

The story is tidied up – both dead brothers have a child to take their place in history. Tamar does not need to marry again, her status is established. Judah has come to realise that his behaviour was not as righteous as that of his Canaanite daughter in law and has acknowledged this.  But the questions arising from the story only multiply. Why this story at all? Why put it here in the Joseph narratives? Why did the children need to be born?

One question is partially answered in the genealogical line given in the book of Ruth, the Moabite woman who also took her status as childless widow into her own hands and had a child by a family member of her dead husband in order both to honour his future and to protect her own vulnerable status. We will learn from this genealogy that King David will descend from the line of Perez – that both Tamar the Canaanite woman and Ruth the Moabite woman will pivot history in order to bring about the birth of the messianic line.   But why does King David and why will his messianic descendant need to be born of such deceptive sexual encounters orchestrated by the women? This is a question yet to be satisfactorily answered.

Why is it in the Joseph narrative? With the themes of clothing to hide identity, of deception and betrayal, of promises made and not kept and of the painful loss of children, with mis-communication and with the lack of communication, with fear and shame and hopelessness and exile –  there is much to connect these narratives.  But Tamar herself is not echoed in the Joseph stories, except maybe in parody when the wife of his master desires him and lies that he tried to sleep with her. Tamar stands alone in these narratives, a woman who is married twice to unworthy and wicked men yet who retains her own integrity and keeps her eye on the future. Blamed as a husband killer when we know from bible that God kills the men because of their wickedness, exiled to her father’s house and marginalised from the narrative, she uses her marginal status and plays out the scene whereby she becomes not-woman, a body, a prostitute for hire at the roadside, and moves her descendants into the centre of the narrative.

One of my favourite lines of any film comes in “My big fat Greek Wedding”. It tells the story of a woman of Greek descent trying to find herself and her place in society outside her father’s home and the struggles she endures as she grows. Her father makes a decree about her future and she is despondent. Her mother tells her that indeed she must obey, the father is the head of the house. In their culture, his word is law. But the mother goes on to say, the father is the head but the mother is the neck, and the head points whatever way the neck dictates.  It speaks to me of biblical narrative, when the men make the decisions and hold the power, but with great regularity the women subvert that decision making, and from Sarah, Rebecca, Rachel and Leah onwards they gently manipulate in order to produce the desired outcome. The list of these women in bible is long, yet often they escape our attention as they escape the attention of the men with whom they live. Tamar is a rare exception – by getting herself noticed she will disrupt the course of the narrative and change history.

Vayeshev: the different personalities of Jacob’s sons bring balance to our tradition

Posted on by
Reply

The Book of Genesis tells the stories of a succession of families, but the thread of sibling rivalry goes through them all – from Cain and Abel the sons of Adam and Eve, through to Joseph and his older brothers. And it has to be said that the rivalry between Joseph and his siblings overshadows all the other sibling squabbles in the intensity and passion with which it is played out – the near murder and the series of betrayals. From this sidra until we end the book of Genesis, everything, – including the going down to Egypt by Jacob and his family which will lead into slavery and ultimately the redemption by God – emerges directly from this sibling struggle.

On the one side of the conflict we have Joseph, oldest son of his mother Rachel, beloved and spoiled son of his father, the dreamer of dreams. On the other side we have ten of his eleven brothers, including Judah, the oldest son of his mother Leah, the son who loves his father much more than he himself is loved.   The struggle between Joseph and Judah is not only a personal one, it is ideological, and that ideology is played out in our history.

The language of Joseph’s dreams implies that he will travel far from his family’s home into the wide world outside it and live his life amongst other peoples. Joseph dreams universal dreams, and though only 17 years old he senses that his star is rising, he is destined to make his mark on history, and he is keen to go further into the world, to rise above the parochial concerns of his immediate family.

In contrast to the outward looking Joseph, Judah represents the brother who never even dreams of leaving home, nor of wandering very far from his father’s sight. Tradition tells us that he was a studious man, a conserver of traditions, a man who cared deeply for his family and his inheritance, and was not at all interested in any interchange with the world outside – indeed he actively chose to repulse any attempts to ally his family with other groupings.

So which of these streams, the inward Judah or the outward Joseph, represents authentic Judaism?

The truth is that both are, and that both are needed to form the balance that makes Judaism the firmly grounded yet dynamic and responsive religion that it is. Our calendar contains festivals that are particularistic and festivals that are universalistic, our prayer books contain prayers that are particularistic and prayers that are universalistic. Judaism even recognises the possibility of two messiahs – one from the line of Joseph and one from the line of Judah (the House of David) because it understands and acknowledges both aspects of existence – the need to remain rooted in traditions and texts as well as the burning need to reach outwards and upwards – towards other societies and peoples, towards the stars.

Both aspects of Judaism are authentic and both are needed. Our texts and our historical narrative tell us that again and again. The problem we face is that in our day the polarisation between the two is again very strong: part of the Jewish world is increasingly internal, drawing stronger and stronger boundaries against modernity, and part of the Jewish world is choosing to be porous and open to the point of apparent assimilation. We need each other and we need the different ways to be Jewish, and as Jacob and Judah eventually do – but not yet in this sidra – we need to honour each other’s difference and recognise that we are and always will be family.