Tamar & Yehuda: An Afghan Telenovela

And, yes, I get the whole personal transformation thing. Yehuda goes from being the kind of guy who does all the above to being a stand-up guy willing to selflessly put himself on the line for his little brother. Bravo. Tamar, of course, plays the role of catalyst at the danger of her own life. Double bravo. If Chava was transformed (she wasn’t cursed) into a paragon of human holiness by being willing, even eager, to risk everything in order to create the future – then Tamar is next level.

There’s risk and then there’s risk.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves here.

Let’s start at the beginning.

Judah is hanging out with his drinking buddy Hirah the Adullamite when he sees an attractive local lady and takes her. This whole powerful men who ‘see and take women’ thing is generally not looked on well in Torah; it is one of the precursors of the great Flood (Bereshit 6:2). This lady’s dad’s name was Shua. His name means “call for help.” It is used when the children of Israel cry out from their bondage.

This really isn’t looking good. It doesn’t seem like Yehuda actually bothered to work something mutually beneficial out with his chosen bride’s dad. I mean, even by the standards of the day, this is iffy. The woman is nameless by the way – reflecting just how unimportant she was. That sort of namelessness is also not a great sign.

But it gets worse.

Shua’s daughter has her first kid. What does she name him? Er. It means childless or cut-off. Like, she really didn’t want this kid. You can imagine the scene right?

Unnamed woman in a chador, entirely invisible. She throws back her unseen hair and declares in a very quiet voice (Afghani women aren’t allowed to raise their voices): “I may have borne this child, but I never wanted him!”

Then she conceives and has another kid. This one is named Onan. That means falsehood or turmoil. This relationship really ain’t looking great. There’s a good life lesson here: don’t let a woman you may have forced to be your wife name your kids.

Then along comes the third kid. But the word ‘conceive’ is dropped. She just ‘adds’ him. Odd. Like he’s an extra, and not quite normal in his conception. And then there’s another weird thing. With this last kid, she labors. Okay, that’s normal. But not only does she labor, she labors in a place called ‘deception.’ The name of the place is Chezib – from exactly the same root as Kozbi, the Midianite woman who practices open [insert euphamism here, although I don’t know why I bother given the rest of the story] in the plot to spiritually undermine Israel.

Now if I were writing an Afghan Telenovela that would make an awesome subplot.

The subplot gets thicker when she names the boy… ‘Shelah’. This means complete, at peace or unburdened.

Did Yehuda suddenly get better or is something else up… tune back in for Season 2!

This is a seriously sordid plot. (and, yes, I know Yehuda says Shelah is his and I know the family of Shelah is counted in Bamidbar. But perhaps there is a bit of polite uncertainty?)

Next, Er grows up and Yehuda gets him a wife. Enter Tamar, stage right. Her name means date palm. It’s a sweet name, really. But she’s about to step into a meat grinder. First husband? Torah says he’s a bad guy and G-d kills him. The text says it, right there: “G-d killed him.”

This is not the usual way the story is told. Take Nadav and Avihu. G-d killed them too, but what does the text say: “A fire came out from the Lord and they died.”

That’s like a BBC headline for a Hamas terror attack: “bullets from Hamas gun kill children.”

There is no such favorable media bias extended in this case. G-d just killed him.

Why’d he die. Well, G-d only does it after he marries Tamar. This suggests that his evil had something to do with his treatment of her. You would expect Er to be pretty messed up, given his history. But you just get a hint that G-d is protecting the innocent here. I mean, maybe Tamar whacked him because he deserved it. But G-d takes the hit because she deserves it. Who knows. That’s a whole ‘nother subplot.

Anyway, she gets reassigned to son #2. Onan. Onan is definitely attracted to her, but it turns out he doesn’t want his dead brother Er to somehow get the honor of Onan’s spawn being his own. Steamy, scandalous scene here!

Then G-d removes Onan from the scene.

At this point, Yehuda promises Tamar – “yeah, you’ll get son #3” but he really has no intention of honoring that promise. She’s dangerous. He sends her away for a life of childless widowhood while nice little Shelah grows up and becomes a safely unmarried man. Meanwhile Shelah’s mother dies and Yehuda gets over her.

Tamar, though, won’t be denied. Why she wanted anything to do with her in-laws is beyond me, but she did. She hears her father-in-law is going to go shear sheep in a place literally referencing “self-restraint” (מנע – check out Bamidbar 22:16 with Balaam!) and she puts on a veil and camps out on the road leading to that place. What’s the name of the junction right before “self-restraint”? You guessed it, “open eyes.”

As in, you can’t have self-restraint until you see what’s on offer.

Needless to say, Yehuda is hanging out with his old friend Hirah the Adullamite again and he fails the self-restraint test. She knows he will – he isn’t a great guy. He sees her and assumes she’s a prostitute. As I said, she knows him. But Yehuda has nothing to pay for his desired tryst with the mystery lady. So, Tamar suggests that he provide a sort of promissory note: his staff (mateh), his petil and his signet ring. What’s a petil? I think we can guess. He was a shepherd, the word literally means ‘twisted’ or ‘crooked.’ Shepherds have crooks (you know, those sticks with a hook on the end for managing sheep). So did Pharaohs, as a sign of their role in society.

In other words, at Tamar’s suggestion, Yehuda gives her his staff, his detachable sheep crook and his signet ring – you know, as a promissory note until he can send her a sheep in payment.

Why does she want this stuff??? The standard answer is that he could identify that he’d slept with her. But what good would that do her? And why’d she do it in the first place? This is crazy. The tension is insane!

Hiram tries to find the ‘prostitute’ – you know, to give her the sheep – but gets nowhere. But whaddya’ know, Tamar soon has a baby bump. What’s Yehuda’s reaction to this unexpected turn of events? He wants her publicly burned. I dunno, but it seems like an overreaction. Couldn’t some regular stoning handle the situation. But, no burning is the call. I get that there comes a time when you want to burn your daughter-in-law, but man.

On the other hand, perhaps the overreaction is related to the mysterious circumstances surrounding the birth of Shelah.

What a great subplot that would be – it flows through the whole story!

Whoever wrote this is a singular genius.

So what does Tamar do in this desperate situation – one she created? She sends the ring, the hook and the staff to Yehuda and says “whoever these belong to is the father of the child.”

Now, step back a moment and ask yourself. What, exactly, was she expecting?

I mean, Yosef’s brothers were the types to conspire to sell their own brother into slavery and then lie to dad about it for years. At the beginning of this story we read that Yehuda went down from his brothers. This implies that he wasn’t even in their class. Does Tamar honestly expect that he’ll shape up and fly straight cause the kid is his? I mean, I get that a lot of women want to fix a man, but this is nuts.

I’d contend that it would be a lot more likely for him to get the two-in-one deal: by burning her alive, he’ll get an abortion and the erasure of any record of his own terrible behavior.

But he doesn’t do it. He says: ‘She is more righteous than I; forasmuch as I gave her not to Shelah my son.’

She has twins.

Happy times.

But what was she thinking? The answer comes from the pledge.

The ring is how Yehuda signed things. Even in those days there was paperwork. It represented his authority. The shepherd’s crook was how he took care of those he was responsible for. It represented his responsibility. By sending these items to Yehuda she was saying: “you gave up your responsibilities and your position of authority when you did me wrong (and when you visited someone you thought was a prostitute).”

But the third item is the real motivator. The staff is called a mateh. It is used to mean ‘branch.’ It is also a word used for a tribe of Israel. She’s telling him that if he persists, he’ll be giving up his legacy as well.

Now the nice way to read this is that Yehuda suddenly realized that if he wanted to be a man of authority and responsibility – and a part of the future of the Children of Israel – then hanging out with Hirah wasn’t a great idea and he ought to treat women a little better. But there is a second way to read this, given the whole Shelah subplot: his true children, the source of his mateh, weren’t going to come from Shelah. They would come from her.

In other words, “you burn me, you got nothin’.”

Yeah, I know every Afghani telenovela has this plot device, but it really works here.

In the end we have a remarkable transformation: Yehuda goes from rascal to leader.

Tamar is more than a catalyst. She is the one who risks everything – even being burned at the stake – to be a mother of the Jewish people. I mean, wow.

The great thing is, the Torah honors her in a remarkable way: through one of the four species we take on Sukkot. Two species represent mutual gifts between the Jewish people and Hashem. The other two represent our mutual desire to be together. Hashem’s desire to be with us is represented by the gold that wraps around the stones that represent our people (gold is used to represent the divine). The word used to describe that gold is never used anywhere else in the Chumash except with the four species and that special wrap.

G-d’s desire to embrace us is fundamentally mysterious.

What represents our desire to be with G-d? Kapot Tamarim. The palms of Tamars. Who had a mysterious, impossible to explain, almost suicidal desire to be a mother of the Jewish people? Who took matters literally into her own hands? Tamar.

Every year, as we take up the lulov – the palm branch that represents her desire to connect with heaven – we are celebrating the actions of Tamar.

We’ve been doing it for thousands of years.

There are some great lessons in this story:

• If you have an Adullamite friend named Hirah, find better friends.
• Try courting women – instead of just scaring the crap out of their fathers.
• Always carry a spare sheep, in case you need to pay for an expensive impulse purchase.

Wait, no, that wasn’t the list. Let’s try this:

• Treat women well.
• Recognize that even a terrible man can be rescued (unless G-d whacks them first).
• And know that even the completely powerless – a woman like Tamar who seems to have no say in anything and whose own father-in-law can order her burned – can change the course of history.

Take those last two and apply them to yourself.

• No matter who you are or what you’ve done, you can be great. Teshuva, repentance, is always there – unless G-d whacks you first. And you’re reading this, so you still got a chance!
• And no matter how powerless you feel, you can change the world.

I gotta tell you, this whole chapter is looking a lot like must see TV.