A shady census
A painful beginning to a powerful future
After avoiding the curses of the sorcerer Bil’am the Israelites crashed into the travesty of ba’al pe’or. Seduced by the women of Moav the Israelite men worshiped the local deity pe’or, which requires drinking beer and eating spinach and then defecating on the altar. The things we do for love.
A plague devoured the perpetrators. When the smoke cleared, they counted: 24,000 men died in a plague at the time. God ordered a census in order to gain clear data on the tribes that suffered the most from the plague, in order that new weaknesses in the military camp could be understood. It turned out that the dead were all from the tribe of Shim’on. Their population went from 59,300 in the first census to 22,200 in the post-plague census.
But that’s not all we learn in the census. The counting of the tribe of Yehudah is told as follows: The sons of Yehudah were Er and Onan. Er and Onan died in the land of Canaan. The children of Yehudah, according to their families, were Shayla and all of the clans that emerged from him, and Peretz and all of the clans that emerged from him… and the male 20-60 population of the tribe of Yehudah was 76,500.”
Why tell us all that? It is a dark shadow in Yehudah’s early life. Recall that after orchestrating the sale of Yosef, he went and lived in some suburb somewhere. He found a wife for himself, and she bore him three sons: Er, Onan, and Shayla. Soon, Yehudah found a wife for his eldest son: Tamar. Er spilled his seed rather than impregnate her and “ruin her beauty.” This was evil in the eyes of God, and God caused him to die.
When Er died, Yehudah told Onan to marry Tamar in order to carry on the line of his elder brother. Onan also refused to impregnate her because he knew that the child would not be considered his. He met the same fate as his brother. What’s going on with this family!?
The story only gets darker and more shameful. Yehudah tells Tamar to wait in her father’s house. Tamar justifiably gets and dresses as a prostitute to gain Yehudah’s sexual attention. It works. He impregnates her. When word gets out that Tamar is pregnant, though she clearly had not been married to Yehudah’s son, Yehudah orders that she be taken out and burned for adultery. Secretly she uses some identifying markers to show Yehudah that he, in fact, is the father, giving him the opportunity to own what had happened or not. In a powerful gesture of honesty and repentance, he owns it. Tamar is not killed and, in fact, bears twins, two of whom are the names of those clans that we just saw in the census.
Why mention this in a census that takes place 5 or 6 generations later? Yehudah the man is long gone. His tribe is ascendant. Why mention these old and shameful stories in their tribal census?
Perhaps the ability to openly admit and acknowledge their shady past is what made Yehudah the man that he was and the tribe they became. That awful period - and the mature, responsible and also embarrassing move at the end - was the foundation of the man and the tribe. You don’t hide from that. Apparently you put it on your banner.
It’s permission to stop hiding, to stop pretending that we became who we became because we made the right choices every time. To stop pretending we don’t have a past about which we genuinely should feel some amount of shame.
This is particularly true for leaders. The Talmud states quite clearly: One appoints a leader over the community only if he has a box full of creeping animals hanging behind him, i.e., he has something inappropriate in his ancestry that preceded him. Why is that? It is so that if he exhibits a haughty attitude toward the community, one can say to him: Turn and look behind you and be reminded of your humble roots. This is why David’s kingdom lasted while Saul’s did not, as David descended from a family with problematic ancestry -, Yehudah and Tamar, for starters.
A friend of mine wrote as follows: A number of years ago I realized something. In our own heads we’re the only ones who fail. Even if we know intellectually that others fail, emotionally we feel alone and pretty messed up because of our failures. Then I thought, what if we could get a picture of the failures of other folks, especially people who have achieved some semblance of what we perceive as success?
This friend then went on to write and distribute his “failure resume”. In his words: “Although, as you will see in my Failure Resume below, exposing my failures has gotten me in rather a lot of trouble in the past I decided that I could only start with myself. While I prefer successes for the enjoyment, I learn more from my failures probably because of the discomfort. These are just a sampling of failures that I have had and as you will notice, I have focused on professional failures vs. personal ones though there are many in that category too.”
And then he puts it there for us to see. Imagine handing that in with your “actual” resume? Perhaps employers should start requiring both. Maybe we should add these to our linkedin pages.
Our less-than-great moments contribute so much to who we are. Our ability to recognize that and to tell the story makes us so much more.