Parashat Va-yeishev 17-Dec-11

Genesis 38:26

Judah recognized them, and said, “She is more in the right than I, for have I not failed to give her to Shelah, my son?”…

Rabbi Moshe Lichtenstein, “Judah and Tamar” from Torah MiEtzion

Both Judah and his sons treat Tamar as an object to be used (or abused) for their own benefit and pleasure, refusing to relate to her as a human being worthy of respect and recognition as such, whose needs, emotional and other, must be taken into account…Their egotism can only view other human beings as means for serving their own needs and cannot recognize their value or autonomy.

The client-prostitute relationship is, obviously, the extreme form of using a fellow human being for one’s own needs, each party utilizing the other for its own purposes. The I-Thou personal relationship has been replaced with the I-It attitude towards others…Judah does not understand this, and therefore misunderstands Tamar’s intentions when she demands his personal belongings as collateral. From his business-like perspective, the only reason that someone would insist upon belongings of a highly personal nature is that they are effective means of assuring payment, since there is a very high likelihood that the debtor will indeed return to redeem them. Tamar, though, is interested in these belongings as expressive of personality and as a vehicle for establishing a personal relationship. She doesn’t want money in return for the sexual favor; her desire is for the establishment of a relationship. However, Judah in his current state lacks the awareness and understanding to appreciate this…

However, the harlot is nowhere to be seen, and the people tell his messenger that there never was a prostitute. Understood in a deeper sense, they are absolutely right; Tamar was not attempting to compro­mise or entrap Judah so that she could force him to release or marry her, and therefore acting as a harlot for an evening, only to return to conven­tional life afterwards; from her point of view, the meeting between her and Judah was meant to serve as the beginning of a relationship, and therefore even then it wasn’t harlotry. Indeed, if we look closely at the verses, they never say that Tamar dressed or acted as a harlot, only that in Judah’s eyes she appeared as such.

The dramatic display of Judah’s insignia and other private belong­ings, accompanied by Tamar s impassioned plea that Judah recognize his obligations to others and establish personal I-Thou relationships with them is the climatic point in the clash between the two differ­ing perspectives of Judah and Tamar, and it achieves the desired effect. Judah undergoes a transformation, recognizes the truth of her words, and embraces the relationship.