Family Matters (based on Parshat Vayeshev)

The following is in response to a short essay question on the application to HUC's rabbinical program.
Parshat Vayeshev shows that family isn’t for the weak. The episode between Judah and Tamar at once affirms the value of family and highlights the struggles therein.

Judah has three sons, and he finds for the eldest a Canaanite wife—Tamar. But God kills the eldest son before he’s able to conceive a child. So Judah brings his second son to Tamar, so that he will sleep with her and thereby carry-on the line. But the second son pulls-out and doesn’t finish the job. So God kills him. With two sons down and one to go, Judah sends Tamar away. He promises her that when his youngest son, Shua, has grown up, Tamar and Shua will have a child. Many years pass and Tamar never hears from Judah or Shua.

Some time later, Judah passes a prostitute on the road. He sleeps with her, and leaves as collateral for payment some of his clothing. When he returns to pay the prostitute, she can’t be found. Meanwhile, the audience knows that the prostitute was actually Tamar in disguise. She has fooled Judah into impregnating her. One trimester later, Judah hears that Tamar has been knocked-up by some skirt-chaser. He orders Tamar burned for prostitution. She presents his clothing, which he had left for collateral, and says, “I am pregnant by the man to whom these belong.” Judah is embarrassed and never sleeps with her again. Several months later, Tamar gives birth to twins.

Recall that it was Judah who convinced his brothers to sell Joseph into slavery, and Judah who is ultimately responsible for deceiving their father, Jacob. This story begins “About that time, Judah left his brothers.” Midrash relates that Judah was in fact running away from home to avoid his shame.

But there is nowhere Judah can hide. The biblical narrator reveals Judah at his worst. First he tries to evade his promise to Tamar. Then he sleeps with a prostitute who turns out to be his daughter in law. When he slept with Tamar, Judah’s wife had just died. He doesn’t even finish his period of mourning, he waits only until “he is comforted.” He condemns Tamar for prostitution, when in fact he solicited it. And in the end, he never outwardly admits that he slept with Tamar. He only admits that he shouldn’t have withheld from her his youngest son, Shua. Judah is kind of a jerk.

As Judah deceived Jacob, so does Tamar deceive Judah. This biblical foreshadowing fits with the ancient Rabbis' notion of kav l’kav, that a person’s fate is doled out measure for measure according to their deeds (Visotzky 127). Judah was made to “examine/hakerna” his clothes and “recognize/vayaker” them as his own. The same words are used when Judah shows his father Joseph’s bloodied coat (Plaut 253). Both men fall victim to an article of clothing. And whereas Jacob is made to believe something that is false, Judah is made to recognize something that is true. For deceiving his father, Judah can’t avoid the mirror of his shame.

Tamar, by contrast, is a clever, strong woman, who plays by her own rules at a man’s game. In Who Wrote the Bible, Richard Friedman argues that Tamar’s wit forces us not to rule out the possibility that the biblical author “J” could have been a woman (86).

The story ends with Tamar’s twins fighting over who will emerge first from the womb. Clearly, this is a story about family struggle—brother betraying brother, a father’s turmoil visited on his son, a woman wronged by her in-laws, a father who sleeps with his son’s wife. This sounds like a soap opera, but it reads like real life. The characters are human, scarred, proud. They are blurred by the image of their siblings and tied-up by the fears of their parents. This is the flux between hate and love, the pushing away and the holding tight that binds a family together. Regardless of how they are defined, these sticky relationships are the glue of a family.