Vayeshev
How can our own pain be generative?
Reflection by Or HaLev teacher Zac Newman:
"I follow Rabbi Alan Lew’s practice of reading part of the weekly parsha each morning after I meditate. The reading which moved me most this week was the story of Tamar, which appears as something of an interlude in the better-known narrative of the Joseph story.
Tamar is the daughter-in-law of Judah, Joseph’s brother. In the space of a few verses we learn of the death of her first husband, then her second. She spends a year waiting for Judah’s third son, whom she thinks will become her third husband before realizing that this is not to be. She arranges an incognito meeting with Judah and becomes pregnant with his child. Judah sentences Tamar to death when he finds out, and she, with dramatic brilliance, liberates herself.
The events are terrible. And yet from these compounded tragedies are born Peretz and Zerach, the sons of Tamar and Judah, and the second pair of Genesis twins. Our Sages teach that the first twins in the Torah, Jacob and Esau, came from a `fulfilled` pregnancy of nine months, to the loving couple of Rebecca and Isaac, and yet, once they were born, the reality was compromised by Esau’s misdeeds. By contrast, Tamar’s pregnancy, beset by grief and confusion, was symbolically `unfulfilled` at seven months, but her children were righteous. The entire royal line of the house of Israel, including the Moshiach, descends from Peretz and Zerach.
Something may emerge from our struggles which is precious. Maybe at times we can see the ways in which our own pain has been generative. How our missteps and misfortunes have yielded something which is not just bearable and surmountable, but unique, unobtainable by other means. Perhaps it is purposefulness or perspective, robustness, compassion, insight, wisdom. Perhaps it is more specific and concrete. Thus we understand Rabbi Menachem Mendel Schneerson’s teaching for this week, that there is a blessing intrinsic to certain experiences of difficulty which we simply can’t get elsewhere.
The emergence of light from darkness is also the teaching of the winter solstice, which in the northern hemisphere happens this very Shabbat. It is the wisdom of the month of Kislev and the approach to Chanukah. The light does not cancel out the darkness, not for Tamar or for any of us. But nor does the darkness cancel out the light."