Tamar Comes First
For how shall I go up to my father if the lad is not with me—for fear that I see the evil that would overtake my father?” Genesis 44:34 NASB
See the evil– When you read the story of Joseph, there appears to be a detour in the plot. We recently investigated this detour, noting that the effects of Tamar’s statement before Judah elicits a deeper recognition of his own complicity in his actions toward Joseph. What we discovered is that the story of Tamar is essential to the story of Joseph and his brothers. Zornberg notes:
“A peculiar vulnerability is experienced only through parenthood; a pristine arrogance is punctured when one has children, to whom anything can happen. The full contingency of the human condition is known when one’s children are touched by fate.”[1]
Judah has to experience the fate of his own children before he can fully comprehend the impact of Joseph’s supposed death on his father, Jacob. Judah’s pain over his own sons is the necessary transformative element before he encounters his long-lost brother in Egypt.
But this first step must be followed by a second. When Judah steps forward to speak with the man whom he presumes to be an Egyptian overlord, the Hebrew text contains a clue about the real meaning of this action. “Then Judah approached him, and said, ‘Oh my lord, may your servant please speak a word in my lord’s ears, and do not be angry with your servant; for you are equal to Pharaoh’” (Genesis 44:18). “In speaking of the past, however, and in imagining the future, Judah is doing something new. Sefat Emet expresses the point in a play on the words: va-yiggah eilav—‘Then Judah went up to himself, to his own essence.’”[2]
“Essentially, Judah has transformed this story into his own story. Ultimately, it is not his father’s anguish, or the family’s trouble, that he is describing: it is his own pain of involvement and empathy. Before Joseph’s eyes, he constructs the anger and pathos of his own consciousness . . . He has redescribed himself in a new vocabulary of intimate relationship: a vocabulary that suggests what it is like to see the other seeing, and not to be able to bear seeing what he sees.”[3]
Judah’s saga is ours. Until we experience personal grief, personal tragedy, our sympathies for another’s plight are theoretical imaginations. But once it happens to us, we “see” (feel) what cannot otherwise be seen. Now we know. Now the pain is real. Now we empathize. It was never God’s intention that we be kept clean from the world’s mess. We aren’t very useful clean. Detours are agents of restoration.
You thought the Bible was a chronological history. But now you have discovered that it is an emotional history. It doesn’t follow an order of events. It traces the transformation of feelings.
Topical Index: Tamar, Judah, empathize, Genesis 44:34
[1]Avivah Gottlieb Zornberg, The Beginning of Desire: Reflections on Genesis, p. 326.
Skip, so this is what years of study and examination of not only the scriptures but of a person’s own trauma and experience, in such a way that it reflects to affect in a way that it helps other people. I choose not to comment on the text, for I think you nailed it.. You’re opening lines of how we see without seeing in here without hearing, but when we see and when we hear it is an emotional experience. Only God can help us unravel it comma by living through it. I put my own thoughts to the end of that response. This is where you truly help us. Like iron sharpening iron. If we are to help others we need to help ourselves first. We in a group of unfortunate receivers of Grace, become fortunate enough to understand ourselves. Thank you again. Whether this is debatable or not, this is my own reflection on how this affects myself. I hope it helps others. Shalom to all.
I agree with you, Brett, Skip nailed this one for me, too. You, too, when you said “become fortunate to understand ourselves”. That did not happen for me until I, too, like Judah, was given children: others to which I could relate at a deep, emotional, oxytocin level. When the lives of others LOOK LIKE our lives because we have put them IN FRONT of ourselves, then, and only then, do we get access to ourselves, for self is a continuation of the selves of others: we become ourselves (identity) when others become real to us; when others impact us as if they WERE US, because they ARE us – they hold essential pieces of us for us.
When we dehumanize others – make them ‘less than’ ourselves and put them down, we do the same to ourselves. My own dignity and purpose is found in upholding and restoring others to the dignity of purpose – their lives MATTER, because they matter to ME. In the same way, I think, our worth is measured in how we matter to God, and not in some intrinsic ‘worthiness’. That does not make us ‘worthless’ without His consideration: it just means that purpose is bound up in what is beyond us. I think Judah became a real human at the same rate he learned to allow others to be human (worthy of love), too.
What’s the Hebrew picture for empowerment, getting underneath a person and pushing up?
The paleo-letter “samech” is a support. And Sameach (as in chag sameach) is “joyful”
Yeshua “sympathized with our weaknesses.”
His heart beats just like ours.
He knows us like a book.
He was deeply angered with the money changers
at the temple. He was deeply saddened and “wept”
with Lazarus’ sister Mary. And Isaiah tells us when we
each pass through the door that leads from death to life,
“God rejoices over you.”
Truly, the Bible chronicles the transformation of feelings.
Yes, Skip, you “nailed it”. At one point in the reading, I had the “a-ha” that Judah in this moment of wanting to speak “in Joseph’s ear” is also suddenly identifying with Tamar’s sorrow at Judah’s unfulfilled promises. Could it be in this moment that Tamar’s planted seed begins to blossom in Judah?