From Tamar to Pelicot

Dear friends, 

The real story of resistance of this period in the Jewish calendar comes not from the Maccabees, but from the Parashah that accompanies the first few days of Hanukkah. The hero is not a warrior fighting an empire for religious freedom, but a woman using the tools of the patriarchal system to outsmart the patriarch. This will begin dark but stick with it to find some holiday light.  

Here are the rules of the game in the second millennia BC when the story takes place:  

Women are considered property owned by their husbands, who can take as many wives as they please, and/or visit prostitutes. Their purpose is presumably to have and raise children. If they don’t, they are considered useless, and they are taught to feel unfulfilled.  

If a husband dies, the next of kin – normally his brother - takes over the marriage and is expected to impregnate the widow.  

If he doesn’t, the widow has no recourse and lives the rest of her days wasting away with no partner, no children, and certainly no sexual activity, while the next of kin can do what he wants and suffers no consequences.  

In that dark position, very little light can crack through the thick walls of misogyny.  

Our story begins with our patriarch Jacob’s son, Yehudah, marrying off his son, Er, to a woman named Tamar. Er swiftly dies, leaving Tamar a widow. Er’s brother, Onan, must now marry Tamar. However, the Torah tells us: “knowing that the offspring would not count as his but as his deceased brother’s, (Onan) let his semen go to waste whenever he joined with his brother’s wife.” This selfish behavior displeases God, and Onan dies as well. Widowed a second time, Tamar is moved into her father-in-law Yehudah’s house to wait for the youngest brother to come of age. He eventually grows up - but won’t marry her. The years go by. 

Finally, Tamar decides to take things into her own hands. She sees that only the patriarch of the family can fix her situation. When her father-in-law Yehudah goes out of town, she follows him, covers herself up, and solicits him as a prostitute. As payment, he offers to send her a baby goat, which she accepts but asks to take his seal, his cord, and his staff as collateral. Concealing herself throughout, Tamar sleeps with Yehudah, and conceives. A few months later, when Yehudah hears that his daughter-in-law, Tamar, is pregnant, he commands that she be taken and burned for having sex out of wedlock.  

“As she was being brought out,” the biblical narrator tells us, “she sent this message to her father-in-law, ‘It’s by the man to whom these belong that I’m pregnant.’ And she added, ‘Examine these: whose seal and cord and staff are these?’”  

When Yehudah receives the message along with his personal items he had given her as a deposit, he recognizes his shame. “She is more  in the right than me,” he says. Tamar is released, and months later goes into labor. 

The birth scene is described with some unique details, which remind us of the birth scene of these babies’ grandfather, Jacob, that we read in the Torah a few weeks ago. Jacob, you’ll recall, while still in the womb, grabs his brother Esau’s foot in an apparent attempt to come out first and win the firstborn son's birthright.  During Tamar's birth the twins exhibit a completely different attitude. Baby Zarach seemed to be coming out first. The midwife even managed to tie a string around his little wrist. But unlike his grandfather, Jacob, Zarach allows his twin, Peretz, to emerge first. The patriarchal urge for competition and domination, which haunted Jacob his entire life, is replaced by one of generosity and trust. 

This new attitude is expressed also through the babies’ names. The firstborn's name, “Peretz” means to break through, and the second, “Zarach” means to rise, like the sun. Together they signify breaking through an unbreakable ceiling into the dawn of a new day.   

Tamar's story is far from a heartwarming story of progress. Tamar suffers and then uses every tool she’s got to survive the careless, powerful men who hold the key to a bearable existence. She succeeds, and every generation since, men and women read her story and see its echoes in their own lives. I’m certain many have gained strength and hope from it. 

Some might say we are still fighting the same societal structures that were in place in biblical times. The objectification of women harrowingly present in this Parashah has morphed, not disappeared. The person who a jury in our fair city unanimously agreed raped a woman (though legally he was “only” liable for sexual abuse) was just elected president. Gisele Pelicot was tortured by men coming from every walk of life. 

Others would say that the long line of courageous, righteous women-- from Tamar to Pelicot--have radically improved the situation of half of humanity who identify as female. The cracks in the facade of the biblical patriarchy have perhaps not yet brought down that iron wall altogether, and who knows if it ever will. But they have certainly widened those cracks to shine so much light for all of us to clearly see straight through the shadowy haze of male domination.  

This Hanukkah let’s celebrate the women who gave us the light of resistance, and support those spreading that light today. 

I hope you can join us at the bar this evening for Shabbat on Tap, where we will discuss the looong history of Jewish resistance, and how it can inform our various struggles today.  

Shabbat shalom,
Rabbi Misha