The story of Yehuda and Tamar (Genesis 38) is a perplexing one in many ways. We encounter, in this episode, a patriarch who has fallen from honor among his brothers, two sons that act sinfully and receive immediate punishment, and a righteous daughter in law who is sorely misunderstood. Tamar uses subterfuge to set things straight and attach herself fully to the family of Avraham.
How can we reconcile the unusual circumstances of this story with our understanding of the righteousness of Tamar and the compromised but then recovered righteousness of Yehudah?
One way to view the story is as a long string of events that could be described as a type of hide-and-seek, where Yehudah doesn’t really recognize his daughter, has an encounter with her but doesn’t know it’s her, sends his friend to look for someone who doesn’t exist (the prostitute) and in the end is confronted by someone else (Tamar) who actually was the person for whom he was searching all along (the woman who will be the mother of his children and of the Davidic lineage).
Yehudah’s inability to see the authentic is further driven home when Tamar tells him to “recognize” the identity of the items that she had received as surety from him.The Torah tells us that he recognizes, but it doesn’t give us the subject of his recognition (“Yehudah recognized and said”). Based on this textual anomaly, we can suggest that he recognized more than the objects that belonged to him. Yehudah finally “sees”: Not only does he now recognize that the woman who appeared to be (i.e., wore the clothes of) a prostitute was really Tamar, he also recognizes that Tamar was a spiritual giant (“tzadka mimeni”) and certainly could not have been at fault for the death of his sons, as he might have previously thought.
Once Yehudah is able to “recognize,” the Torah tells us that he came to “know” Tamar – significantly in a situation that is devoid of clothing. (Granted, this is actually the second time that the two had conjugal relations, but the circumstances of the first encounter were such that no true recognition was possible.) To follow the key verbs in the narrative, Yehudah first sees but doesn’t know Tamar, then he searches but cannot find her, and finally he is led to re-cognize, which leads him to ultimately know her and not just her appearance.
At this point, it seems almost impossible not to notice another allusion created by the place where Tamar met Yehudah. There could be no more apt description of what Tamar was trying to orchestrate than Petach Einayim, an “opening of the eyes.” At Petach Einayim, she initiates the process that opens Yehudah’s eyes to her essence as well as to the understanding that “clothes don’t make the (wo)man” but her righteous actions do.
{Harry Glazer of Highland Park, NJ assisted in the preparation of this column}