Genesis Cycle 6 Vayeshev

Vayeshev

What if someone five hundred years from now found a copy of Breaking Bad? What if (for whatever reason) the whole series had been lost and now found? Would it be all that strange that he might see this as biography? As history? As a rendering of historical characters as true as the setting?

Of course, every scene in Breaking Bad could have happened. Perhaps not in that same order. Perhaps with various differences. But the general facts are not beyond reality, the drugs, the struggle with cancer, the son with cerebral palsy, the push and pull of marriage. 

Now let’s look at Torah. I don’t want to upset anyone by saying that maybe these characters did not exist. In fact, it doesn’t really matter if they did or didn’t as long as we learn from them. How can we do this? First, by understanding this: Just like we write about what we know today (with some focus on drama) the ancient Israelites as well wrote about what they knew then (with some focus on drama). Next by understanding this: Just like we focus on messages today or basic truths, the people then also focused on messages. 

So first, what do we all know today? Well, we know what we think about when we wake up in the morning. Whether we need to tend the sheep or the end-of-year accounting… we need to tend something. We need to deal with our children, step-children, their dreams, our dreams, angels or strangers who we meet in fields or department stores who suddenly say things that can answer our immediate questions, air plane crashes, wolf attacks, the sordid remains of both,  overdoses of the drugs of ego or jealousy or fear or just plain meth. We need to deal with adultery and incest, passion and seduction, abandonment and certainly prison.

Of course, the way we might see some of these details is going to be different given the rift in time. The story of Judah and Tamar exemplifies this. Imagine if in one scene of Breaking Bad our hero grabs his wife and creates a public event in which she must be burned to death…after all she does commit adultery. We would be horrified. The whole scene would be a metaphor for insanity. 

Well, something like this happens in Vayehev. Judah, believing that Tamar, his widowed daughter-in-law, sleeps around, orders her to be burned. The idea that an enraged father might order a public burning of his daughter-in-law is not seen as strange either in Torah or by Talmudic rabbis (1500 years later).  In terms of Torah, there isn’t an explanation or a slight excuse to back-up what we see as the extreme judgment. This is why: According to scholars, the Ancient Israelite experienced something called sacred prostitution. The prostitute in other words wasn’t some tattooed high-heeled dame waiting on the street corner. She could possibly be of the consecrated class and one of the most spiritually powerful influences in their time…an influence that could threaten the power of God. Such an extreme power (in that perspective) would need extreme measures.   Moving on, a prostitute according to the Talmudic rabbis (much later) represented a  sell-out of the soul, a state of spiritual bankruptcy. If we attach ourselves to that state of being it makes sense that we would want to metaphorically eradicate it in some way.  The amazing piece for the Talmudic rabbis is not the burning therefore. It’s how Tamar saves Judah from humiliation. In Kethuboth 67  Rabbi Johannon in fact says that better a man throw himself into a fiery furnace than humiliate his neighbor.

 Looking at Breaking Bad the wife does a lot to stay quiet about her husband’s unscrupulous dealings. This would be huge for the Talmudic rabbis. She would be seen as Tamar-like, noble, and honorable. I know: Hard to imagine. 

This is just a long example of how we can take things to heart and forget that when we’re reading Torah we’re reading something written among people with very different conventions and ways to look at anything around them. Even the Talmudic rabbis…our trusted teachers…had different conventions. Placing ours on the Ancient Israelite is as absurd as if they…or future beings… placed their conventions on us. 

The miracle though is this: Even with the panoply of symbols given historical dichotomies and conflicting conventions and contrary inferences given the same images, the message is strikingly similar whatever the era or the perspective.

In terms of Vayeshev, Newton said it well: For every action there is an equal and opposite reaction. Note he doesn’t attach this action/reaction to a singular person or time. Just as Judah’s plunge into darkness catapults Joseph’s same plunge, they are both as one being, propelled as high as they fall. Just as Tamar rises, the wife of Potifar falls. For every man who is killed there is one who is saved. For every time we free-fall we also free-rise.

The message gained through metaphor cuts through all time and settings, whether television series or sacred scriptures.  Therefore we want to get to the message beyond the dominance of self and present perspectives, a difficult but rewarding thing to do. In the end, the more open we can be concerning metaphor, the higher the message and the higher we therefore can climb.