Life Beyond Darkness: Lessons from Er, Onan, and Tamar

Er and Onan’s story is, perhaps, the darkest in all Tanach. A bold claim especially given the stiff competition. While not a history book, (Rashi, Bereishis 1:1), it chronicles humanity’s story with one moral call. “… choose life” (Devarim 30:19). That choice exists in a pretty dark world, sometimes. Genocide in Egypt. War of the five kings. National civil war – a few times. Mobs aren’t exactly a one off in Sodom.  And then we have all of Eicha and hefty parts of Yirmiyahu. Abuse, death, starvation, true hardship – not things to write off. But, in each of these dark stories there exists the basic belief in life. How does one believe in life? That it has a nature to it that you can’t hold back or control. Rather, it speaks back with its own personality. “The voice of your brother’s blood is crying out to Me from the ground!” (Bereishis 4:10).  It is a force that struggles to see the light with a will to survive, “it is a tree of life” (Mishlei, 3:18). It’s a spirit, so to speak, in everything. Even on our most somber day, we read in Eicha, “But this I call to mind, and therefore I have hope. The steadfast love of Hashem never ceases. His mercies never come to an end. They are new every morning. Great is Your faithfulness (Eicha 3:21-23).” From the Egyptian pit to the riverbanks of Bavel, the Jewish people cry out in hope because of a deep belief in life – Hashem. For Er and Onan, however, there is no such cry, no struggle, and no hope. Their story is about what happens when one rejects life itself. When one refuses to engage the future or embrace the generative responsibility that sustains us. It’s not merely the darkness of their deaths that makes this story so disturbing. It’s the spirit of death that precedes them. Each in their own way they first symbolically refuse life.

While they share common ground against life, each have very different angles.  Their beliefs are also timeless. Today, with the disintegration of family, wanting children doesn’t automatically compel many. Even those who know they want a family have to make a few intellectual moves to justify it.  “After I complete my degree… then my second degree. Well, after I start work. You need to be financially secure.” Sometimes a religious argument is made. “The Rambam says you need to establish a house, after all. (Hilchos De’os 5:11). “It’s even in the Gemara” (Sotah 44a). Granted, if you lived in an agrarian pre-industrial or feudal society, you’d have a point. You might even have a leg to stand on if money was a physical object backed by gold. While the Rambam makes a good point, translated into our postindustrial society, it’s not obvious that’s the right takeaway. Put simply, family and children are no longer the assumed and natural next step. Rather, it’s something to justify and defend. Two arguments are levied against it. Both are represented by Er and Onan.

Er’s name, to awaken, provides an ironic counterpoint to his actions. Rather than awakening to life’s generative possibilities, he fixated on physical beauty. “Why not have children? It’ll make my wife less attractive” (Bereishis Rabbah 85:4). Opening the tension between beauty and having children one can hear Er muse, “Not only do children annihilate my wife’s beauty, they erode what is most beautiful in life. You lose your freedom. How can you focus on yourself? the richness of the inner life. What about losing time for friendships? They stain your carpet and break your corner vase! When will I have time to go to the museum or read a book!?”

Er’s view only makes sense if a few basic assumptions are true. Beauty would have to be external. It would also have to be pretty fragile, too, if it could be shattered by a two-year-old. Not only do they instinctively knock down your block tower but watch out! Babies are also gunning for poor defenseless beauty. On a metaphysical level, this would imply the world brings out of you a sense of awe. Mechanical cause and effect. It doesn’t invite you into what the world naturally contains. Everything holds a divine spark (Zohar 20b). While objects can be externally beautiful, this misses a deeper point. The fundamental structure of reality is, in-of-itself, beautiful. Spiritually infused. Er erred by prioritizing the superficial. Aesthetics over the deeper enduring purpose of life — continuity through the next generation. Life grows, life builds, life is generative. Not static. But is that mistake something someone should die over?

For Er, his rejection of the divinely generative force of life ran deep. It was a refusal to embrace the creative nature of his own soul. From the Shemonah Perakim to Rav Wolbe (Alei Shor, Ch.5) one way to think about the soul is it has layers you experience. Levels you’re aware of and levels that lie underneath your awareness.  Parts that are unconscious. The task of life is to reveal your soul to yourself (Alei Shor, Intro; Ch.5). Er buried the parts of his psyche that drove transformation, and renewal. He suppressed his creative drive, choosing to live the illusion that beauty is a fragile comfort. The irony, as we see in his name, is he was partially awake. He did appreciate the culmination of the creative process. Where he fell was getting stuck in appreciating the product but not the process. This stagnation of growth naturally leads to death. The soul requires growth to remain whole. To reject this leads to spiritual disintegration. Er’s own death was not some arbitrary punishment but the natural consequence of his inner death (Dreshos HaRan, ch. 10) — a failure to participate in the life-affirming forces of creation.

While Er’s end was death through stagnant beauty, Onan’s was through nihilism.  Onan married through yibbum. The basic idea behind this mitzvah is Onen was to help give birth to the child his brother should have had (Sforno, Devarim 25:6). The Sefer Hachinuch (Mitzvah 598) explains the mechanics. When a husband and wife marry, they join as one being. Despite the death of her husband, Tamar still retained this connection as a part of her inner self. Also, Er’s brother, in a certain respect, also shared with him the same root of their souls. With yibbum, the two would unite the parts of Er and give birth to the child he could have had. One step further, the Arizal sees the soul of a child as a continuation of their parent’s (Sha’ar HaGilgulim).  However, Onan refused. Symbolically, Onan’s name, mourning, showed his inability to move beyond death (Bereshis Rabbah 85:4).

Onan’s choice, rooted in a sort of nihilism, was history’s first recorded case of anti-natalism. That it is morally virtuous to not bring life into this world. This view has gained a lot of traction in the past 15 years. While not exactly common opinion, it seems to be getting there. It usually is garbed in a faux compassion for others and the world. “There’s too many people. Planet earth can’t support this many people. Limit how many kids you have so you don’t destroy the environment. We only have one planet – we need to protect it. Think about our children who will have to inherit our mistakes!” um… you don’t want to have kids to make things easier on your kids?

Jokes aside, on the surface of it, the view seems to take a nuanced approach to suffering. Its conclusion, though, is anything but. It’s a sort of asymmetrical argument setting down the belief existence is always a harm. Point 1: The absence of pain is inherently good, even if no one exists to experience that good. Point 2: the absence of pleasure is not inherently bad unless there is someone to be deprived of it. It’s imperative to prevent suffering but there’s no duty to create happiness. Onan might even argue human bias clouds our good judgment about life’s quality. Since we adapt to suffering and overestimate the benefits of existence, we aren’t seeing straight. This way of seeing the world is perpetual mourning. Ask anyone who’s lost a loved one. Maybe you know about it from your own experience. As wonderful and as fortunate as life has been, losing someone you care about sucks out all the color of life. Thank goodness most of us recover and feel a rebirth, although still heavy hearted. For Onan, that way of seeing the world wasn’t a natural stage of mourning. It was a philosophical conviction. It may have even allowed him to feel like a hero with Tamar. “Sure, I’ll marry her. She already exists in this dreary world. But I’m not going to bring another life into this world that will one day have to feel the pain of loss Tamar herself went through.” The creation of life is morally questionable, given its unavoidable entanglement with harm.

Yes, life certainly is entangled in pain. The Rambam, in one of his more intellectually powerful ideas, puts this into context. Obviously, you suffer. Only Hashem doesn’t. Obviously there’s pain. That’s the natural consequence and the nature of imperfection (Moreh Nevuchim, 3:11-12). The Ramchal spells this out. Not only is pain and suffering the natural state of things. It must be that way in order to earn our own reward (Das Tevunos 40-43). The purpose of evil, the epitome of pain, is to be transformed into good. Only this process achieves harmony. “Hashem gives space for evil, and when He gives space for evil—He gives space for service in order to achieve perfection. The purpose of concealing good is only to reveal it. This gives space to rectify those evils through the power of the revelation of perfection” (41). Onan rejects renewal, revelation, of creating life that transcends his own personal misery. Each of us has a calling to fulfill our purpose which is inherently creative and generative. A part of answering this call does mean we have to confront and accept the existence of evil – pain and loss. But it cannot end there. A second step to transform that pain into perfection is necessary. Put another way, Onan’s refusal to answer the call of his soul is a failure to embrace the pain of life to transform it. All he wants to do is avoid it.

In stark contrast to Er and Onan, Tamar emerges as the embodiment of life’s generative power. Her courage and selflessness represent the heroic DNA of life, continuity and renewal. Unlike Er, she is fully awake. Life is not for comfort. Beauty is not some fragile convenience. It’s something you work for. It’s something you take risks for. Also, it would have been very easy for her to see life the way Onan did. Suffering the loss of one husband is crushing enough. To survive two husbands is something else entirely. Instead, Tamar stands firm in her conviction that life does not give way to death. It’s these two aspects that Tamar physically and spiritually gives birth to. She is the mother of life that “breaks through” (Perez) and “shines forth” (Zerah). Perez represents life’s capacity to break barriers and push through stagnation. It reflects the heroic impulse to fight for life and transformation. Zerah symbolizes the illumination of life that gives us insight and renewal. Together, Perez and Zerah are the indomitable nature of life. It breaks through the darkness of death unstoppable and triumphant allowing for transformation.

From Hashem’s declaration that the world of life is “very good” to the eternity of our living soul, to the physical techias hamasim. Life is a force that pushes through death, despair, and stagnation. Tamar’s story embodies life’s archetypal power to transform. It also illustrates that life springs forth even from places where you least expect it. The big catch is to not fall into the fundamental errors of Er and Onan.  Superficiality and nihilism.