All’s Well That Ends Well

There is a modern fad for measurement

encapsulated by the term of metrics,

but there’s one thing you cannot measure,

since it’s unmeasurable, pleasure,

which when you’re metaphysical in bed tricks,

you ask yourself what all the pleasure meant.

In William Shakespeare’s “All’s Well that Ends Well,” Helen was lewder

than Tamar, who was, after both Er and Onan died, with Judah pruder,

perhaps, as Thomas Mann suggests, in order to become a heroine,

by Judah entered like the Reed Sea where Egyptians drowned, led by Pharaoh in,

enabling him to become the ancestor of all the future kings

of Israel like David, whose psalms’ fly still, with angelic wordwings,

ancestral leader of a people who have for millennia yearned

for the land that he once ruled, and as dry bones that have revived, to it returned.

In “Tamar, Helen, and Love’s Ambition,” Jewish Review of Books, Winter 2024, Noah Millman writes:

In Joseph and His Brothers, Thomas Mann describes “a woman . . . seated at the feet of Jacob, the man rich in stories, in the grove of Mamre or near Hebron”…

…. The woman in question is Tamar, whom the Bible barely describes at all, considering the extraordinary and highly unusual role she plays in the family romance of Genesis and the larger story of Israel. Tamar is the mother of Peretz and therefore the ancestor of David and, ultimately, through David, of the messiah. She comes to motherhood, however, not through the normal course of marriage but through an exceptionally brazen act, seducing her father-in-law, Judah, while veiled in a harlot’s disguise. This so alarmed the rabbis that much of their commentary on her behavior is a kind of midrashic cover-up.

Mann’s exceptional achievement in creating his version of Tamar was not merely to unveil what the rabbis re-veiled but to reveal something essential that is hidden in the biblical text itself: the deeper reason for Tamar’s actions. As he writes: “She wanted to interpolate herself—and did so with astonishing determination—into the grand story, into the vast play of events, about which she had learned by way of Jacob’s instruction, and she was not to be left out of it at any price.” Tamar, in other words, was not merely a seducer; she herself was seduced by the prospect of being part of the national story of Israel, a story she learned about at Jacob’s feet.

…. Yet even in her audacity, Mann’s Tamar is motivated ultimately by the desire to be a part of a story that is already written and is bigger than her. This, I think, is what ultimately ties her to Shakespeare’s Helen and her own questing love. Why, after all, does Helen love Bertram so irrepressibly much, if not for any obvious qualities of his own? Harold Bloom comments on the extraordinary degree to which Helen’s love for Bertram is overdetermined by her childhood. Bertram was her playmate. Marrying Bertram is the only way to truly become her adoptive mother’s daughter, restore her family, recover a home. So, too, with Mann’s Tamar. She is a kind of adopted daughter, sitting at Jacob’s feet, and her quest is to graft herself to Jacob’s root, which she already feels to be her own.

That story—of a woman using transgressive means to force her rejecting husband to acknowledge her—has a larger resonance for the Jewish story in the modern era.

…. The traditional perspective on this longing was that Israel, like a proper woman, should wait for her divine husband to redeem her. Zionism, at its heart, was powered by the audacious.