How to Be a Mentsh (and Not a Shmuck) by Wex, Michael (summer reading list txt) 📕

and the story of Judah and Tamar in Genesis 38 is mentioned every time. Tamar was Judah’s twice-widowed daughter-in-law. She was married to Judah’s son Er, who died without issue, and then to Er’s brother, Onan, from whose name we get the term onanism; he preferred to spill his seed on the ground rather than inside his wife, lest she bear a son who would be considered the child of his deceased brother. Tamar had waited quite some time for Judah’s third son, Shelah, to grow up, so she could marry him, too, but it still hadn’t happened. Worried lest she die childless, Tamar disguises herself as a prostitute and sleeps with Judah, who promises to give her a kid as payment. She demands a down payment—who wanders around with a goat under his arm?—and he gives her his seal, its cord, and his staff.

When Tamar, who is still betrothed to Shelah, turns out to be pregnant, she is convicted of adultery (her engagement makes her Shelah’s, even before the marriage), and Judah orders her to be burned. As she is about to be consigned to the flames, she says, “I am pregnant by the man to whom these belong…. Please acknowledge the owner of this seal and the cords and the staff” (Gen. 38:25). Judah admits his fault and accepts responsibility for the twins that she bears.

Rashi’s explanation of this episode reflects the standard view of both the biblical and Talmudic passages:

She didn’t want to shame him by saying, “I am pregnant by you,” so instead she said, “the man to whom these belong.” She said to herself, “If he admits it on his own, he admits it; if not, let them burn me, but I will not shame him.” From here they said, “It is better for a person to throw themselves into a fiery furnace.”

Nomads being nomads, Tamar would probably have ended up on a bonfire, but the Talmud’s fiery furnace has considerable resonance in Jewish literature. A popular midrashic story uses the same Hebrew term to describe the furnace into which Nimrod casts the boy Abraham, who has refused to acknowledge him as the sole master of the universe. Abraham, of course, emerges unscathed. When his idiot brother Haran, who doesn’t believe in the real God, decides, “If Abraham can do it, so can I,” he ends up like a marshmallow that has fallen into the campfire.

A more strictly canonical version of the same story is found in the book of Daniel, where Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego (who are known as Hananiah, Mishael, and Azariah in Hebrew) refuse to worship King Nebuchadnezzar’s giant idol and are thrown into a fiery furnace—in Aramaic this time, instead of Hebrew—from which all three emerge unharmed (Dan. 3).

One of the things that the Talmud is saying in invoking this image is that you won’t be thrown into a fiery furnace for whitening your fellow’s face in public. For Abraham and the three Hebrews, truth is more sacred than life itself; they wound up in a fiery furnace for refusing to affirm a lie so huge and so corrupting that they would rather die than pay it the most cursory lip service. But people who shame their fellows in public don’t care what comes out of their mouths, as long as it serves their purposes. For them, the real difference is not between truth and falsehood; it’s between effective and ineffective. If a lie will do as well as the truth, there’s no need to put any premium on the latter; if the best way to get myself a promotion is to blame my mistakes on somebody else—that’s their problem. I’m busy spending my bonus.

The indifference to truth and falsehood, the corruption of meaning that goes along with any attempt to whiten someone’s face in public, will keep you out of the fiery furnace forever. Once you replace God or The Good or The-Divine-That-Lives-Within-Us-All with Nimrod or Nebuchadnezzar or an all-expenses-paid trip for two, there is no need for you to be roasted alive; your sense of principle is already toast. The Talmud is trying to tell us that it is better to burn for truth and decency than rot by bearing public witness to the questionable conviction that someone who has the chutzpah to disagree with you is a cock-sucking, ass-jumping, booger-eating pedophile who gets himself off with a dildo cast from Saddam Hussein’s little willy.

The idea of the fiery furnace explains the apparently irrational conduct of Chiya bar Ashi that we saw near the end of chapter 2. Having shamed his wife, as he thinks, by hiring a prostitute after abstaining from marital sex for years, he attempts to fulfill this injunction literally by jumping into the oven at home; only then does he find out that the prostitute was really his wife, who had disguised herself just as Tamar did. This didn’t make him feel any better.

Jonah Gerondi, a thirteenth-century rabbi whose Gates of Penance still serves as a guide for Orthodox Jews interested in moral improvement, provides a slightly different perspective. Gerondi’s preoccupation with penance is sometimes attributed to a crise de conscience occasioned by his having encouraged Church authorities to burn Maimonides’ Guide for the Perplexed, an act that eventually led to the public burning of the Talmud. Rabbi Jonah eventually recanted his denunciation and did penance for it; as someone who was well known for having committed the sin that he describes here, Gerondi writes with unusual passion:

Behold a touch of murder—whitening the face of another. His face turns white and the redness flees and it resembles murder, and so say our rabbis of blessed memory. Secondly, the anguish of this whitening is more bitter than death, and therefore our rabbis say that a person should throw himself into a fiery furnace rather than whiten the face of his fellow in public. They do not say this about other grave transgressions and they thus compare a