Prostitution, Rings, and Va-Yeshev

I saw my mother-in-law and cousins yesterday for the first time since the pandemic began.

After such a long time and so much more than the ordinary keeping us all separated, I don’t know why I was surprised by the overwhelm of emotion that rose up in me as I walked into this large family gathering on Thanksgiving. I was thinking I’d kind of gotten used to it, and that seeing people again gradually wasn’t having such an impact, but it was all at once…and it did.

I was also starting to think I might not write this week, I was so overwhelmed by so many different thoughts, and I couldn’t find one that stood out above them all.

It started with the conclusion of the trial of Kyle Rittenhouse, which bled into hearing about the abortion law in Texas and an analysis of the Supreme Court vs. the states, which bled into hearing about the irony of women in Mexico (where abortion is miraculously legal) helping Texan women (you can listen to the New Yorker Radio podcast and hear about both—very well done), which bled into Thanksgiving, travel out to New Jersey and the gathering of my extended family.

How do I choose one topic from all that….? My mind was swirling.

But there is Tamar in this week’s Torah reading, a woman who must find a way to take care of herself because her father-in-law Judah—and society—will not. Her husband has died and the way things work is, she is supposed to be given her brother-in-law as a substitute husband so she is not left out in the cold, but Judah keeps stalling, so she takes things into her own hands. She stands by the side of the road dressed as a prostitute when she knows Judah will be passing, sleeps with him and becomes pregnant by him.

Judah is given lots of attention in the rabbinic world for being so honorable as to ultimately recognize that he’s done wrong and take responsibility for his actions and his neglect.

Good for him as an individual, although we can’t give him all the credit because Tamar is very cleaver and puts him in a position where he must “fess up.”

Still/and, Tamar’s situation makes me think of the Texan and Mexican women. Women have always found ways of taking care of themselves and each other when society doesn’t, and their stories can be empowering, but it shouldn’t have to be that way.

It’s like the way the American media feeds us “feel-good” stories about those who turn to crowdfunding to help each other out, as described in this very good Nation article, because, despite the taxes we pay, our government does not take responsibility for the growing poverty in this—the wealthiest country in the world—not to mention the state of our heath care “system,” which isn’t really a system at all and leaves millions with millions to pay in deductibles.

It would be nice if Rittenhouse and other white supremacists took responsibility for their actions, but even nicer if our law enforcement didn’t encourage such action (read the ACLU analysis), and even, even nicer if our legal system were set up in a way to do it for them and the wider society.

So, I guess, surprisingly, I did find something to focus on here, or it found me, as if often the case.

I “lost” a ring at my mother-in-laws while we were there. This is a ring I often “lose”—it’s a thumb ring that I tend to remove separately from my other numerous rings for various reasons.

When I told my daughter about it, she said, “Ah, there must be a lesson in this because you always find it”—or it finds me, I told her, like when I left it at an Airbnb over the summer and the host found it without my awareness that I’d even left it there and she sent it to me without my even asking!

Was the lesson about the impermanence of things? Or was it about circularity and their coming back again and again?

This week, it was Tamar’s story that came back around, with its most ancient story of the “need” for prostitution. This “minor” side-story highlighted itself and overshadowed the main story of Joseph and his dreams and visions, the jealousy of his brothers, his being thrown into a pit and sold off, his ending up in Egypt in Pharaoh’s palace, put in charge of Pharaoh’s affairs, faced with the seduction of Pharaoh’s wife and thrown into the dungeon where he predicts the future for others yet again.

It’s the circularity of our stories, the circularity of our lives, and the way humanity and the world repeats itself again and again until we learn our lessons. (And I did find the ring again, just before we left!)

Maybe we could use someone like Joseph and his visions of the future right now.

Or not.

In the meantime, as we each re-integrate into greater society in our own ways, may we remain aware of the particular lessons we have learned from this pandemic from our particular ways in which we have experienced it, and find new ways of walking in the world—ways that will bring increasing light into the world, just as the increasing light of the candles of Hannukah do symbolically for us.

Wishing you a good Shabbos and a happy Hannukah.