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Orchard of Delights
in marriage. The Torah then recounts that “he did not know her
[intimately] further” (Genesis 38:27).
Rambam, in his classic Mishneh Torah (in the section entitled
Hilchot Teshuvah [The Laws of Repentance 1]) lists three prerequisites
for true repentance: confession, remorse, and a commitment not to
repeat the same action in the future. Judah undertakes all three steps,
and his repentance becomes the model for all Jewish repentance –
“the actions of the fathers are [indeed] a sign to the children.”
One of Judah’s direct lineal descendants, King David, bears out
this dictum. After King David secretly has relations with Bathsheba
he tries to cover up his behavior by sending her husband to the
frontlines where he is killed. The prophet Nathan visits David and
tells him the tale of a rich man who oppresses a poor man by taking
his only sheep from him. David is outraged and exclaims that the
rich man should be severely punished. The prophet reveals to King
David that the tale was actually a parable: King David is the guilty
rich man. King David also undertakes the three crucial steps to
repentance. Without hesitation, he immediately declares, “I have
sinned” (2 Samuel 12:13). He spends the rest of his life in a constant
state of repentance, as any reader of Psalms can attest, and, of course,
he never does such a thing again.
It is interesting to note that in Hebrew Judah’s confession consists
of two words, while David, who was a direct descendant of Judah
and Tamar, confessed with just one word. Judah’s confession clearly
had a great influence on David, either consciously or subconsciously.
As the first time in the Torah that anyone admitted a mistake and
confessed, Judah’s confession truly becomes an archetypal case of
“the actions of the fathers are a sign to the children.”
Significantly, while the Torah refers to the Jewish people as Hebrews
or the children of Israel, we are now commonly known as Jews. This
appellation in Hebrew comes from the name Judah, for he not only
paved the path to teshuvah for himself and his descendants, but was
also the progenitor of the Davidic monarchy, the legendary ruling
house of the nation of Israel. While technically speaking, the Jewish
people were called Jews because Judah’s descendants made up the
bulk of the Jewish nation after the 7th century BCE (when ten of the
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5
VayeisheV ב ֶׁשֵּיַו
£The Search for TranquilityThe Search for TranquilityThe Search for Tranquility
££
“And Jacob dwelt in the land in which his father had dwelt, in the
Land of Canaan” (Genesis 37:1). Rashi’s comments on this verse
taken from the Midrash are both unsettling and profound: “Jacob
sought to settle in tranquility but the incident of Joseph thrust itself
upon him. The righteous seek to live in tranquility [yet] God says:
“Is it not enough for the righteous what is prepared for them in the
World to Come that they seek to sit in tranquility in this world [as
well]?!”
Abraham’s ten tests, Isaac’s challenges, and Jacob’s seemingly
never-ending ordeals force us to reconsider what we would expect
the life of tzaddikim – righteous and holy individuals – to be like.
One might have thought that as people grow spiritually, climbing to
ever higher levels of purity and holiness, they would either become
immune to life’s tests or God would grant them respite from life’s
ordeals as a reward for their earlier achievements. Yet here we see
that the patriarchs were faced with one trial after another and instead
of these trials becoming easier, in a sense, they became even more
challenging. If we fail to understand this state of affairs properly, we
could be left with a feeling of futility at life’s constant ordeals.
The name Israel, as we discussed in the previous portion, means to
“contend with God and man and prevail” (Genesis 32:29). Although
constant struggle can wear us down, paradoxically, it also provides
us with the opportunity to go beyond merely prevailing to emerging
triumphant. The modern catchphrase “No pain – no gain” was
preceded by the son of Hei Hei’s statement in Pirkei Avot (5:26) two
thousand years ago: “According to the effort is the reward.” Very few
things in life come on silver platters. Yet we need to make a paradigm
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