Flames and Words
Spliced within the story of Joseph – between his sale as a slave (chapter 37) and his arrival in Egypt (chapter 39) – is the story of Judah and the death of his children. Into this dark scenario enters one of the more unexpected heroines of the Torah, Tamar. The text gives us no inclination as to who she is, but from her entry into the narrative, this fascinating and mysterious figure begins to dominate the story.
The chapter opens by telling us that Judah had separated from his brothers, and married a Canaanite woman by whom he had three children. The eldest, Er, married Tamar. The plain implication is that Tamar too was a Canaanite. These were the people among whom Judah was living; and he was unlikely to have forbidden his son from marrying a local woman, given that he had done so himself.1.Rabbinic tradition, though, identified Tamar as a daughter of Shem, and hence not a Canaanite, for they were descended from Shem’s brother Ham.
Er dies young, leaving Tamar a childless widow. Judah instructs his second son, Onan, to marry her, “to do his duty as the husband’s brother and raise up offspring for his brother” (38:8). Realising that a child from the marriage would be regarded as belonging to his dead brother rather than to himself, Onan is careful not to impregnate Tamar. This is a sin, and Onan too dies young. The proper thing would now be for Judah’s third son, Shelah, to marry Tamar, but Judah is reluctant to let this happen, “for he was afraid that Shelah too might die like his brothers” (38:11). Instead, he tells Tamar to wait until Shelah grows up; but this is disingenuous. Judah has no intention of letting Shelah marry her.2.Rashi, commentary to 38:11.
Operating throughout the story is a form of the law that later would became part of Judaism: yibbum, levirate marriage, the rule that a member of the dead husband’s family should marry his childless widow “to perpetuate the dead brother’s name so that it may not be blotted out from Israel” (Deuteronomy 25:6). Indeed, verse 8 explicitly uses the verb y-b-m. However, as Nahmanides points out – and this is crucial to the story – the pre-Mosaic law differed from its Mosaic successor. The law in Deuteronomy restricts the obligation to brothers of the dead husband. The earlier law included other members of the family as well.3.Ramban, commentary to Bereshit 38:8. Some form of this extended familial obligation seems to have survived even after the giving of the Torah: it is presupposed in the story of Ruth (Ruth 4:5, 10). Ramban explains that “The ancient wise men of Israel…established it as a custom [marrying a childless widow who is part of the family] to be practiced among all those who inherit the legacy providing there is no probihition against the marriage.”
As the years pass, Tamar begins to realise that Judah has no intention of giving her his third son. She is now trapped as an aguna, a “chained woman,” unable to marry Shelah because of Judah’s fears, unable to marry anyone else because she is legally bound to her brother-in-law. Her plight concerns more than herself: it also means that she is unable to bear children who will carry on the name and line of her dead husband.
She decides on a bold course of action. Hearing that Judah is going to pass by on his way to the sheep-shearing, she removes her widow’s weeds, puts on a veil, and sits at the crossroads. Judah sees her, does not recognise her, and takes her for a prostitute. They negotiate. Judah offers her a price – a young goat from the flock – but Tamar insists on security, a pledge: his seal and its cord, and his staff. Judah agrees, and they sleep together. The next day he sends a friend with the payment, but she is not to be found, and people tell him that there was no prostitute in the area. Judah shrugs off the episode, saying “Let her keep the pledge, or we shall be a laughing stock.”
Three months later, people begin to notice that Tamar is pregnant. Since Shelah has been kept away from her, it can only mean that she has slept with someone else, and is thus guilty of adultery, a capital crime. Judah orders, “Bring her out so that she may be burnt” (38:24). Only then does the full subtlety of Tamar’s strategy become apparent.
As she was being brought out, she sent word to her father-in-law. “The father of my child is the man to whom these things belong,” she said. “See if you recognise whose they are, this seal, the pattern of the cord, and the staff.” Judah identified them and said, “She is more righteous than I am, because I did not give her to my son Shelah.” (25–26)
With great ingenuity and boldness, Tamar has broken through the bind in which Judah had placed her. She has fulfilled her duty to the dead. But no less significantly, she has spared Judah shame. By sending him a coded message – the pledge – she has ensured that he will know that he himself is the father of the child, but that no one else will. To do this, she took the enormous risk of being put to death for adultery.
Her behaviour became a model. Not surprisingly, the rabbis inferred from her conduct a strong moral rule: “It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than shame his neighbour in public.”4.Bava Metzia 59a.
This acute sensitivity to humiliation displayed by Tamar permeates much of Rabbinic thought:
Whoever shames his neighbour in public, is as if he shed his blood. (Bava Metzia 58b)
One who publicly humiliates another, forfeits his place in the world to come. (Bava Metzia 59a)
Rabbi Tanhuma taught: Know whom you shame, if you shame your neighbour. [You shame God Himself, for it is written], “in the image of God, He made man.” (Bereshit Raba 24:7)
When Rabbi Elazar ben Azariah was about to die, his disciples sat before him and asked, “Our teacher, teach us one [fundamental] thing.” He replied, “My children, what can I teach you? Let every one of you go and be very careful of the dignity of others.” (Derekh Eretz Raba, 3)
The Talmud even includes in the definition of ona’at devarim, “verbal oppression,” the act of reminding a person of a past they may find shameful.
Judaism is a religion of words. God created the natural world with words. We create – and sometimes destroy – the social world with words. That is one reason why Judaism has so strong an ethic of speech. The other reason, surely, is its concern to protect human dignity. Psychological injury may be no less harmful – is often even more so – than physical injury. Hence the rule: never humiliate, never put to shame, never take refuge in the excuse that they were only words, that no physical harm was done.
I will never forget an episode that occurred when I was a rabbinical student in the mid-1970s, while I was attending a conference in Switzerland. A group of us, yeshiva students together with students from a rabbinical seminary, were praying together, in one of the rooms of the chateau where we were staying. A few minutes into the prayers, a new arrival entered: a woman Reform rabbi, wearing tallit and tefillin. She sat down among the men.
The students were shocked, and did not know what to do (among Orthodox Jews, the sexes are separated in prayer, and women do not normally wear tallit and tefillin). Should they ask her to leave? Should they go elsewhere to pray? They clustered around the rabbi leading the group – today a highly respected Rosh Yeshiva in Israel. He looked up, saw the situation, and without hesitation and with great solemnity recited to the students the law derived from Tamar: “It is better that a person throw himself into a fiery furnace than shame his neighbour in public.” He told the students to go back to their seats and carry on praying. God forbid that they should shame the woman. The memory of that moment has stayed with me ever since.
It says something about the Torah and Jewish spirituality that we learn this law from Tamar, a woman at the very edge of Israelite society, who risked her life rather than put her father-in-law to shame. Psychological pain is as serious as physical pain. Loss of dignity is a kind of loss of life. It is perhaps no coincidence that it was this episode – Judah and Tamar – that began a family tree from which ten generations later David, Israel’s greatest king, was born.
Tamar, a childless widow, unable to remarry, was a person without position or power. Was it this that gave her unusual insight into the fact that psychological pain can be as serious as physical pain, that loss of dignity is a kind of loss of life? It says something about the nature of Jewish spirituality that the Torah attributes this moral greatness to her and not to a direct member of the covenantal family – to one of Jacob’s sons – and that the rabbis took her deed as a binding precedent for all of us.
Tamar took her sense of shame and used it to sensitize herself to avoiding shaming others. Can we, dare we, do less?