GEN1493 This moment is a turning point in history. Judah is the first person in the Torah to explicitly admit he was wrong. We do not realize it yet, but this seems to be the moment at which he acquired the depth of character necessary for him to become the first real
baal teshuva. We see this years later, when he--the man who proposed selling Joseph as a slave--becomes the man who is willing to spend the rest of his life in slavery so that his brother Benjamin can go free
Genesis 44:33. I have argued elsewhere that it is from here that we learn the principle that a penitent stands higher than even a perfectly righteous individual.
Berakhot 34b. Jonathan Sacks, Covenant & Conversation: Genesis-The Book of Beginnings (Jerusalem: Maggid, 2009) 303 – 314. Judah the penitent becomes the ancestor of Israel’s kings, while Joseph, the righteous, is only a viceroy,
mishneh lemelekh, second to the king. Thus far Judah. But the real hero of the story was Tamar. She had taken an immense risk by becoming pregnant. Indeed she was almost killed for it. She had done so for a noble reason: to ensure that the name of her late husband was perpetuated. But she took no less care to avoid Judah being put to shame. Only he and she knew what had happened. Judah could acknowledge his error without loss of face. It was from this episode that the sages derived the rule …: it is better to risk being thrown into a fiery furnace than shame someone else in public. It is thus no coincidence that Tamar, a heroic non-Jewish woman, became the ancestor of David, Israel’s greatest king. There are striking similarities between Tamar and the other heroic woman in David’s ancestry, the Moabite woman we know as Ruth. The ancient Jewish custom on Shabbat and festivals to cover the
challot (or matza) while holding the glass of wine over which Kiddush is being made is performed so as not to put the
challah to shame while it is being as it were, passed over in favor of the wine. There are religious Jews who will go to great lengths to avoid shaming an inanimate loaf of bread but have no compunction about putting their fellow Jews to shame if they regard them as less religious than they are. That is what happens when we remember the halakha but forget the underlying moral principle behind it. Never put anyone to shame. SACKS 57-8
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